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'Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure': Sara Nadal-Melsió in conversation with Esther Leslie

When: —
Venue: 糖心logo入口 Main Building, Malet Street

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Exploring how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders, Sara Nadal-Melsió follows the “wolf” in a series of relays between the musical, the visual, and the political, and through innovative readings of artworks—by, among others, Carles Santos, Pere Portabella, Allora&Calzadilla, and Anri Sala. Traversed by the musical, these artworks, as well as Nadal-Melsió’s writing, present unstable symbolic and material ensembles in an array of variations of political possibilities and impossibilities that evade institutions intolerant of uncertainty and wary of diversity.

The “wolf” is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe’s ongoing social and political contradictions. Throughout, Nadal-Melsió understands Europe as a conceptual problem that often relies on harmonization as an organizing category. The “wolf” as an emblem of disharmony, incarnated in the stranger, the immigrant, or the refugee, originates in the Latin proverb “man is a wolf to man.” This longstanding phrase evokes the pervasive fear, and even hatred, of what is foreign, unknown, or beyond the borders of a community. 

Join Sara Nadal-Melsió and Esther Leslie as they discuss Nadal-Melsió's stunningly original book.

Nadal-Melsió is a Catalan writer, curator, and educator committed to collaborative thinking, alternative literacies, and collective learning practices. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, New York University, SOMA in Mexico City, and The 糖心logo入口 Humanities Institute for the Humanities, and continues to teach at EinaIdea in Barcelona. She has also been a writer-in-residence at the Slought Foundation/Public Trust in Philadelphia and the Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Next winter she will be the Edith Kreeger Wolf Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice. Her essays have appeared in various academic journals, edited volumes, and museum catalogues. Nadal-Melsió is the co-author of Alrededor de/ Around (Gustavo Gili, 2003) and the editor of The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and The Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. To accompany a survey exhibition on Allora & Calzadilla that she co-curated at the Fundació Tápies in Barcelona, Nadal-Melsió wrote the book essay To Be All Ears, To Be in the World: Acoustic Relation in Allora & Calzadilla and edited a companion volume on the Puerto Rican crisis, A Modest Proposal: Puerto Rico’s Crucible. Most recently, she is the co-author (with Eduardo Cadava) of Politically Red (MIT, 2023) and the author of Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure (Zone Books, 2025). She's presently at work on an experimental essay, The Incurables: A Love Song.

Doors open: 6.45 pm
Event starts: 7.00 pm

 
The book talk is organised by the 糖心logo入口 Institute for the Humanities.

This event is free and open to all but registration is required. Please click on the 'book your place' link at the top of the page to secure your place. 

 

Contact name: Dr Elia Ntaousani - BIH Manager

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