Epilog: Beyond the Limits of Power

Half-heard conversations, mental illnesses, and interrupted musical notes all come together in this session, which will investigate the human fascination with extreme powers and abnormal emotional and mental states. Representations of insanity will be explored in photography, literature, and opera. However, music’s ability to touch people brings us back to the cosmopolitan culture of Cairo in which Said grew up, and where he experienced a sense of “Out of Place.”

18h Keynote

W.J.T. Mitchell Seeing Madness

Introduction Franziska Dick

20h Lecture

Michael Steinberg Edward Said’s Music

20.30h Sound Performance

Burnt Friedman & Saam Schlamminger

Repetition:Takes:Place in Actuality

Repetition: “[…] is actuality, […] is activity, […] is knowledge” (Edward Said). A live dubbing installation, takes of sonic memory, ur-crackling, dynamic identities of amplifiers, samples of the state of being “Out of Place.”

Participants:

Franziska Dick studied at the UdK Berlin and works as an artist also in public space. She collaborated wit international artists such as Tatjana Turanskyj and Claudia Zweifel.

Burnt Friedman is a German musician and producer who works under a variety of project names in the fields of Electronica, Dub, and Jazz. His instruments include ambient noise, analogue synthesizers and organs, percussion, as well as toy piano. Since 2000, Friedman runs his own “nonplace” label. He lives in Berlin.

W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of Critical Inquiry. Among his most recent publications are Seeing madness: insanity, media and visual culture (2012) and Seeing through race (2012).

Saam Schlamminger is musician and performer born in Istanbul and raised in Iran until the age of 12. He specialized in the Persian instruments Zarb and Daf which he alienates electronically. He performed worldwide with artists of different styles, e.g. Susan Deyhim and The Notwist.

Michael Steinberg is Professor of History and Music at Brown University, Rhode Island and serves as a director of the Barenboim-Said Foundation USA. His research interests include the cultural history of music, modern European cultural and intellectual history, and German Jewish history.