Installation “PRECARITY”, by Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker
Dates: 4 – 8 June, 2018
Local: Room B2
The installation “Precarity”, by Professor Mieke Bal (Univ. Amsterdam) and the artist Michelle Williams Gamaker, will be inaugurated within the scope of the International conference “Thresholds in Literature and Arts”.
Based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, this five-screen installation attempts to show several aspects of the precarity which features contemporary society. Nowadays, everything – from health to relationships to labour rights and human rights as well as economic survival – is precarious. This issues are approached through Emma’s vicissitudes. On her path, she is driven to run after a happyness that cannot be achieved and, as a consequence, to sink into despair, financial ruin, mental collapse and death.
Meanwhile, the spectator is surprised by the evidence that all this “is not an individual ill nor a blameable transgression but something towards which she has been pushed all along by her surroundings” (Bal & Gamaker).
Activity organised by Centro de Estudos Clássicos and by the Aesthetics of Memory and Emotions project (MORPHE group).