As part of Campus 2024_On the way, Prof Dr Mieke Bal (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) will give a public keynote speech.

The cultural theorist and filmmaker Mieke Bal coined the term “traveling concepts” 20 years ago. In her lecture she will investigate three unstable, always moving components, which she sees as crucial to make art politically effective, thus, thinking and art-making bound up together as a resistance against what is and goeswrong in the world: the affective engagement with the present, the refusal to excise the past from that present, and the displacement or “migratoriness” characteristic of today’s world. She will focus on the cultural skill most needed in the present time where dictatorships, “democratically” elected or not, rule the world, and mass murderers decide who lives and who dies: listening. And not only, but also, to music. In order to enhance the urgency as well as the long duration of the need to listen, she will focus on an intermedial artwork she has recently made, a short film, on the antique figure of Cassandra. Coerced by her employer to sleep with him, which she refused, he cursed her to never be listened to. This antique instance of MeToo brings the past into the present and vice versa. Time and intermediality, then, are two central focus points of concepts that travel, and thereby gain political relevance.