Community as Retrotopia? The Problem of Belonging in Literature and Video Art

• Applicant: Dr. Agnieszka Hudzik
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429663607

Objective: The comparative study is situated at the interface of literary and cultural anthropology. It examines representations of communities in selected literary texts and video works in the context of categories such as belonging, recognition and solidarity. The aim of the monograph is to confront contemporary socio-philosophical approaches to this topic with artistic visions in order to reconstruct models of collective life and a typology of its forms of representation relevant to today's world.Subject: I focus on representations of three exemplary forms of community: the tribe, the art collective, and the kibbutz/commune. All of these have self-referential and poetological aspects, such as reflections on the community-building role of myth or art, and on the connections between aesthetics and politics in general.My primary field of research comprises current video art projects by Yael Bartana, Zbigniew Libera and the duo Joanna Malinowska and C.T. Jasper. They have been carried out in or in connection to Poland; the country seems to be an inspiring case study on community thinking, especially because of its recent history including the Solidarność movement. What is crucial to the selected works is their common striking intertextuality. They intensively deal with literary texts and motives of community that can be found in prominent pieces of world literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.Research Question: How do both literature and video art – as equal cultural practices – participate in discourse about community? Do they repeat or confirm, or reinforce the dominating narratives in socio-philosophical theory and current public debate? Or do they offer other alternative perspectives for thinking about collective life? Is the concept of retrotopia able to embrace and to explain these narratives and perspectives?Methodology: The starting point of the project is the assumption of intermedial connections and transferability between literature and visual arts. I assume that literary texts and moving (video) images complement each other. Considering the media-specific representational and functional potentials of these two art forms, they can both convey complex and deep insights into artistic collective visions. I would like to explore their differentiated relationships to fixed categories such as social utopia and revolution elaborated on the basis of Zygmunt Bauman's term retrotopia.Interpreting the above mentioned works, I use theoretical approaches by Agamben, Bataille, Blanchot, Esposito, and Nancy, in order to reconstruct the imaginaries of community embodied in contemporary art and literature. It seems to be of high relevance, especially in the context of current debates about open society and mass migration.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants