{"id":41,"date":"2025-08-11T09:54:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T07:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/?page_id=41"},"modified":"2026-02-01T11:54:49","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T10:54:49","slug":"winter-symposium-2026","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/winter-symposium-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Symposium 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Duplicity\/Duplicit\u00e4t: Betwixt intimates and strangers.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Opening Symposium of the collaborative research project<\/strong>
<\/strong>Studies in Remoteness. Sensoria of Absence, Distance and Neglect.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

January 29-31 2026
with optional activities on Feb 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Institut f\u00fcr Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PROGRAMME<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong>

Even as the word \u2018duplicity\u2019 suggests masked deceitfulness, its implication of the two-sided and two-faced provides a means to query the dichotomies (distant and near, intimate and stranger) experienced by those labelled \u201cremote\u201d.

This opening symposium of the collaborative research project\u00a0Studies in Remoteness\u00a0<\/em>explored remoteness as connected with duality, in-between spaces, self-conflicted states, and epistemic ambiguity. We examined remoteness as a way of being situated between apparently different identities, geographies, and epistemologies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duplicity\/Duplicit\u00e4t <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost any place on this planet labelled \u201cremote\u201d by one person is to another an intimate home. Almost any stranger met on the street is, to someone, a most intimate friend. No place or person, then, is ontologically remote. Instead, remoteness emerges as a condition paired with its opposite. Remoteness is duplicit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duplicity often carries connotations of trickery \u2013 as a disguise that renders the reality of a person or situation inaccessible; remote. The term duplicity thus gestures toward performance. Yet, acts of pretend, staging, or performance aren\u2019t merely fa\u00e7ades behind which reality lurks; they also offer ways of conjuring real contexts for social engagement. Antonin Artaud\u2019s Le Th\u00e9\u00e2tre et son Double<\/em>, Friedrich Nietzsche\u2019s Die Geburt der Trag\u00f6die, <\/em>and Hannah Arendt\u2019s The Origins of Totalitarianism <\/em>all tie art and performance to politics by addressing duplicity as a political and creative force that divides and connects, hides and reveals, undermines and sustains \u2013 to transform. Artaud, particularly, makes the radical proposal that perceivable reality is a respondent Doppelg\u00e4nger <\/em>of the theater (rather than the other way around). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As anthropologist David Graeber described, politics is a fundamental social imaginary \u2013 \u201cthat dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them\u201d \u2013 but to participate effectively, one must never acknowledge this fact (2011: 94). Graeber used this assertion to connect politics to artistic practice, further arguing that, \u201cfor the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game \u2013 a kind of scam\u201d (ibid). While the term \u201cscam\u201d typically implies deceit or fraud, this symposium considers the \u201cscam\u201d as a kind of strategic duplicity that enables both art and politics to function \u2013 not in spite of, but through their resistance to absolute transparency. The imagined, the artificial, and the staged become crucial mechanisms by which social and political truths take shape. While \u201cscams\u201d are negatively connotated (perhaps most easily attributed to quacks, charlatans, imposters, grifters, and snake oil salesmen), in this symposium, we look at the so-called \u201cscam\u201d as a duplicity that, precisely by undermining any chance for so-called \u2018transparency\u2019, allows art and politics alike (and in connected ways) to function. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Berlin, this dynamic can be exemplified in Adrian Piper\u2019s 2017 participatory performance The Probable Trust Registry <\/em>at Hamburger Bahnhof, which invited viewers to sign contracts with themselves, committing to ethical principles such as aligning their actions with their assertions. Though the contracts were non-binding, the work adopted the aesthetics of bureaucratic authority \u2013 golden desks, formal presentation, institutional context \u2013 to lend them weight and seriousness. In doing so, the work \u201cpretended\u201d (in German, vorgehabt<\/em>) <\/strong>in the original etymological sense \u2013 to put forward <\/em>or give forth <\/em>(especially of) illegitimate claims \u2013 demonstrating how acts of imagination and presentation have historically blurred into claims of power, identity, and truth. Piper\u2019s performance reveals how duplicity can create the conditions for sincerity. The work thus operated in the tense space between the real and the unreal, using the artifice of officialdom not to deceive, but to make truth socially legible.

<\/em>The city of Berlin\u2019s architecture is shaped by a history of small industry and local craftsmen. Many of the city\u2019s spaces have been transformed into a postindustrial landscape of corporate offices, bars and restaurants, arts organisations, storefronts, and living spaces. The city is physically marked, by consequence, with visible duplicity of the original intent and current use of its architecture. A realm of urban aesthetics has emerged that explores the way this duplicity can be exposed and concealed. This architectural duplicity is expanded into political space via buildings like the Reichstag<\/em> and much problematised Humboldt Forum<\/em>, both of which play with the partial presence and absence of historical materials in the ways they have been reconstructed.

A similar ethics of in\/visibility permeates the performance and presentation approaches within urban service industries, where the labour of vast numbers of workers is labelled as \u201cintangible goods\u201d. The service industry is informed by a complex history of labour deeply engaged with performances of concealment and revealment. Like theatres, for example, restaurants are organized into a \u201cback of house\u201d site of preparation and production which facilitates a \u201cfront of house\u201d space of presentation and consumption. The relationship between these two sites is often central to the restaurant\u2019s approach to the dining experience: A working kitchen exposed to the meandering eyes of restaurant patrons is representationally different than a restaurant that conceals cooks and their labour behind a wall and a swinging door, only to be visible as inferred craft within completed dishes. Duplicity, then, is not simply deceptiveness \u2013 but it renders parts of life and work remote in order to curate economic interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This symposium invited reflections on duplicity as an aesthetic, ethical, constructive, and political practice: how it structures relations of trust and suspicion, performance and belief, transparency and opacity. We welcomed participants who explored the multiple registers of duplicity, and interrogated its role in shaping both everyday life and collective futures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Duplicity\/Duplicit\u00e4t: Betwixt intimates and strangers. Opening Symposium of the collaborative research projectStudies in Remoteness. Sensoria of Absence, Distance and Neglect. January 29-31 2026with optional activities on Feb 1. Institut f\u00fcr Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin PROGRAMME Introduction Even as the word \u2018duplicity\u2019 suggests masked deceitfulness, its implication of the two-sided and two-faced provides a means to … Continue reading Winter Symposium 2026<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5248,"featured_media":174,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-41","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5248"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":202,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41\/revisions\/202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}