Project Description
The Heterotopia Project
In recent years, extreme weather conditions and the erratic behaviour of stock markets worldwide have been dramatic reminders of life in the global village. But if such phenomena have shocked us into a heightened awareness of the speed with which complex events unfold over a globalized and networked world, we are perhaps less aware that the very concepts and metaphors on which we draw to make sense of our natural and cultural environment are subject to similarly, if less dramatically, accelerated displacements. The borders and frontiers established by an earlier age to regulate and channel the flow of information, the production of knowledge and meaning, have grown increasingly porous as new concepts proliferate and spread quickly beyond their context of origin. One such concept is "heterotopia", a medical term which, since it was borrowed by the philosopher Michel Foucault in the mid-1960s and applied successively in two very different contexts, has migrated rapidly across disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences, arts, and humanities where it has taken on a wide range of meanings and connotations. While Foucault´s first use of the term in 1966 describes a kind of impossible taxonomy, by definition unlocatable and unrepresentable as a space or site outside language, his second use a year later refers to real places which, though set apart in various ways and different from the other spaces of the human environment, are yet present in all cultures in a wide variety of forms. The result is an inherently ambiguous and unstable concept of remarkable resonance. The Heterotopia Project is a research group formed at the University of Western Ontario in 2003-04 with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC). The Principal Investigator on the SSHRC grant is Anthony Purdy (French and Comparative Literature) and the Co-Investigators are Bridget Elliott and Susan Schuppli (Department of Visual Arts). Colleagues from other departments and universities collaborate on an informal basis. A number of graduate students have been directly involved in the project — Demian Petryshyn, Adam Stead and Michael Windover (Visual Arts); Dana Broadbent (Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism); Bertrand Bourgeois and Diana Buglea (French) — and this group will change and grow. Our program of research comprises two distinct but related projects: The objective of the first project is to provide an account of the migration of the term "heterotopia" within the scientific world from 1966 to the present. This entails not only an analysis of the full range of meanings that heterotopia takes on in the course of its peregrinations, but also a mapping out of the process of migration itself in response to the question: how does a concept travel in the world of contemporary scholarship? The objective of the second project is to identify, describe, and work with a range of literary and artistic practices that have been labelled heterotopian by practitioners, critics, and theorists, or that can, in the collective judgment of the research team, be usefully deemed heterotopian. In this sense, our second project begins where the first ends: we pass from the discourse on heterotopia to heterotopia as a discursive or artistic practice. Because the object of study is intrinsically interdisciplinary and is variously constructed as an element of scientific discourse and as a cultural practice, we have put together a team of researchers capable of working within a variety of disciplines and with a number of different media. This variety is reflected not only in the range of discourses and media studied but also in our chosen strategies of dissemination and display, which include not only the traditional circuits of academic publication (books, conferences, journal articles) but also a curated exhibition with catalogue, a special issue of the arts magazine BlackFlash, and this website. Our aim throughout is to foster dialogue between scholars and artists and to engage the artistic and scientific communities as broadly and as creatively as possible.Project Coordinators
Anthony Purdy
Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario and a member of the graduate programs in Visual Arts and the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism. Current research focuses on questions of space-time; memory; migration of concepts; museum, collection and archive; heterotopia. http://www.uwo.ca/french/profs/tpurdy.htmBridget Elliott
Professor of Art History at the University of Western Ontario. Research ranges across the field of western modernism from the 19th to 21st centuries with particular interests in aesthetics of excess (decadence, art nouveau, art deco, and the neo-baroque); intersections of ´high´ art and ´popular´ culture; relationships between art and literature, art and film; museums, collecting, archives and other heterotopic practices in the art world; gendering of artistic production and theory. http://www.uwo.ca/visarts/meet_elliot.htmlSusan Schuppli
Associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario. An artist and curator, currently teaching New Media. http://publish.uwo.ca/~schuppliWebsite Designer: Demian Petryshyn
Demian Petryshyn is an MFA candidate at the University of Western Ontario. His artistic practice is focused on investigating his milieu of contemporary popular culture using conceptual and performance based strategies. http://www.vanracer.com/Archivist: Adam Stead
Adam Stead is a MA candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario. His research focuses on intersections of art and liturgy in Northern Europe in the later Middle Ages and on questions of historiography within the discipline of art history.Website Assistant: Hye-Joong Kim
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