Taking place on Saturday 26 October from 10am to 4pm at O—Overgaden and hosted by Cally Spooner in collaboration with O—Overgaden’s director Rhea Dall, the symposium includes keynotes and presentations by Marie de Brugerolle (art historian), Pierre Bal Blanc (curator and choreographer) represented by dancer Efthimios Moschopoulos, Hendrik Folkerts (curator and Head of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm), Irena Haiduk (artist), Will Holder (typographer and publisher), Jesper List Thomsen (artist), Christopher Weickenmeier (curator and scholar), and more participants to follow. 

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Deadtime ask the clear question: If contemporary society adheres to a “performance principle”—the 24/7 demand to competitively “perform” (well) at all times—might there be a way to resist this “principle”? Or, in other words, does there exist an unfolding of a visceral “culture” that is not filled with planned activity and incessant fecundity? And how to make space for that which is not storyboarded nor prescribed? That which is erratic, electric and does not have its “performance function” calculated or determined in advance, and hence, by certain institutional and industrial standards, might appear to be “dead”?

The term “dead” here is indebted to Anne Carson’s handling of the temp morts, a so-called “dead time”; a cinematographic “documentary” technique, which appears in a fiction film when the camera is left running on a scene too long, and on actors after they have made their exit, “as if for a while something might be still rustling around there in the empty doorway” (Anne Carson, Decreation, 2010). Error, spontaneity, silence, and slippage spill into the frame; unscheduled, typically overlooked, seemingly “dead” filmic moments arrive, and drain significance from the main event, allowing everyday life to enter and rustle around in the frame.

This symposium-like-gathering will ask where “deadtime” might emerge within a museum or cultural institutions more broadly: in collections, live programs, archives, and exhibitions, or events, via audiences. How might cultural practitioners and cultural institutions open our frame wider to let life—a kind of “true” history—spill in, knowing that, to do so, some of that will, in the Carson sense, appear and act “dead” or feel like “deadtime”. How might this amount to operating outside of the given, “performing” main event; how might this spur the becoming of resistant microhistories?