LACE #1: Topographies of Touch

ImPulsTanz Symposium for Dance and Other Contemporary Practices

LACE #1: Topographies of Touch

JULY 21-23, 2023

curated by Deirdre Morris and pavleheidler

with Sylvia Scheidl and Dilek Üstünalan

Lace#1: Topographies of Touch is bringing together experts working at the intersection of art, academia, and activism to examine the challenge of place, the restriction of its specificity, and to explore strategies for successful interpersonal cross-cultural contact-making in the age of gentrification, polarisation, and segregation.

Lace#1 will provide distinctive formats curated and hosted by and for practitioners.

mission statement

Topography, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, brings together the origin words topo– that comes from the Ancient Greek for place, and graphy– commonly associated with writing. Unlike choreography, however, where -graphy has traditionally been associated with writing, in sciences like geography, -graphy is what designates this particular science as descriptive. Topography, then, can be understood as the science of describing, naming, and acknowledging place in its situatedness, its specificity, in its present and its history.

When described, named, and acknowledged, the abstract–situatedness, specificity, present, and history–becomes sensed, felt. It becomes the experience of colour, of tone, and texture; it becomes a source of wisdom, and evidence of knowledge. This activity evidences the importance and value of considering place for any (critical) study to succeed.

Topographies of Touch is imagined as a collection of events, each of which functions as a metaphorical place where touch can be examined in its context-specific capacities. The range of contexts we chose to examine this year encompass a variety of scales: human-to-human, human-to-practice, human-to-institution, and human-to-non-human.

When examined within a variety of contexts in a short period of time by a variety of human and non-human subjects, what about touch will become evident? What about touch, in other words, will we be able to learn only when we accept this simple suggestion: that each of our experience of touch is specific, and that each of our experiences of touch is specific for a reason.