Abstract Bernd Herzogenrath

Keynote talk

joy is an act of resistance: ©ovid’s metamorphoses – the infectious telephone game

This ‘experimental talk’ consists of two parts: in the first, I am attempting to delineate a ‘cultural logic of infection.,’ based on Deleuze & Guattari’s distinction of ‘filiation’ and ‘infection.’

In a second part, I will present a ‘series’ from my international pandemic arts project ‘©ovid’s metamorphoses,’ linking play and infection (a logic of and … and … and …) to an artistic assemblage: joy is an act of resistance (in both the political and medical sense).

In May 2020, in the midst of the first big lockdown in Germany, I had the idea of conceiving an international arts project. A project related to the idea of infection, but also based on the pun on Covid/Ovid, with the C in parentheses – (c) – so that it resembled the sign for copy(right) – with the larger idea to create ‘positive antibodies,’ so that art could attempt to become a ‘healing force’. … I asked my sound artist friend Lasse-Marc Riek, if he would like to jump on board –and he did: Lasse-Marc was an incredible comrade in actually organizing all this: we ended with 19 sequences (Covid 19), played by 133 international artists.                    

The international participants come from the arts: from literature, music, video art, sound art and photography. They are the actors, but it is their practice that gives shape to the forces: the real agents are the transmission channels. The transmission paths, the infection paths between the hosts, the artists, are more than just a structure, and the mutations that run across them in the process are the real creators; the artists, once infected, do “their thing” – the metamorphoses happen in transmission, and our project makes them audible, visible, tangible.