The New Symposium
One-Year Online Residencies
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CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE
The New Symposium is organized around three interconnected fields of inquiry. They function neither as themes nor as doctrines to which a practice must conform; each names a recurring set of questions through which its conditions, operations, and consequences can be examined.
Grounding
Grounding asks where a practice stands.
It situates a work within the histories, material systems, institutions, bodies, technologies, economies, and environments that enable and constrain it. It asks what the work inherits and mobilizes; what it renders perceptible; what its methods exclude or leave unexamined; and what responsibilities follow from the position it occupies.
Composition of Mind
Composition of Mind asks what a practice organizes.
It examines how artistic forms compose attention and perception, engage memory and affect, and frame possibilities for imagination, judgment, and relation. Rather than treating mind as an isolated faculty, this field considers cognition as embodied and mediated by materials, bodies, languages, instruments, technologies, environments, institutions, and encounters.
The question is therefore not only what a practice makes, but how it directs attention, invites interpretation, and configures relations among participants.
Emancipatory Practices
Emancipatory Practices ask what a practice makes possible.
They examine whether artistic methods can expose inherited constraints, alter who or what may act within a process, and make other forms of perception, relation, and action materially possible.
Whether a practice is emancipatory remains an open and contested question. Any such claim must be tested through concrete forms, methods, working conditions, institutional arrangements, and relations. Emancipatory value cannot be claimed in advance as an inherent virtue of an artwork or organization.
Together, these fields ask not only what a work proposes but also under what conditions it emerges, how it composes an encounter, which relations it organizes, and which capacities it enables or forecloses.
CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE
THE METHODOLOGICAL CYCLE
WHAT SUSTAINED PARTICIPATION CAN AFFORD
THE POTENTIAL OF POSSIBILITY
DATES
COORDINATORS
GROUPS
APPLICATION FORMS AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The New Symposium program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io