Session 3 – Continuous Present 1

Anna Marie Fisker
Gertrude Stein – An Enigmatic Author of Memory, Word and Image

“Past is never past, it is always there” said Gertrude Stein, who was a prolific modernist writer and a fixture within the Parisian avant-garde scene, challenging literary and artistic perceptions alike. Stein is revered for her experiments with literary form; she employed techniques such as stream of consciousness, word ‘portraits’ and repetition.
Surrounded by impressionist and post-impressionist artworks, such techniques became infused within her prose. In Gertrude Stein’s words and rhythms – Stein’s writing is akin to painting a cubistic picture – Stein demonstrated how memory can function pedagogically. A connection that aligns to W.G. Sebald who used writings as a method to allow the reader to think about memories and history, inviting the past into the present. Both Sebald and Stein used the written words to capture memory in works that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate.
Gertrude Stein’s originality as a thinker, a radical founder of a poetic going beyond classical modernism along with her interdisciplinary reception and approach to words and images, continue to inspire today. In many ways Stein is an empiricist, who explores the multiplicities of possibilities in any given moment, rather than getting mixed up in the conundrum of what is or not the case. My paper explores and critically analyzes these issues and consider the role of interdisciplinarity in Stein’s projects, i.e. the role art and literature played in Stein’s works in the areas of memory, word and image.

Anna Marie Fisker, Architect maa, PhD, is Professor at Department of Civil Engineering at Aalborg University, Denmark. She currently holds the position as director of Center for Food Science, Design & Experience. Her research focuses on issues of architectural theory and history, design, food, aesthetics and literature with a protracted curriculum in teaching in these subjects. Anna Marie Fisker has been curator at several Art and Architectural Biennale projects in Venice. She has a large curriculum of external financed research projects related to design, architecture, food and literature at Aalborg University, and she has been lead-partner in several EU partnerships working with these issues. Anna Marie Fisker is the author of more than 100 scientific articles.

Jelena Todorovic
Worlds of Eternal Present: the Hidden Patterns of Baroque Thought in Sebald’s Literature

Although the main topic of the conference is directed to the influence of Sebald’s interdisciplinary and highly hybrid work on contemporary artistic production, I would aim to present the other aspect of interdisciplinarity present in his work. It is the aspect the that looks backwards in time, and opens the different dimension for perceiving Sebald`s work. I would like to show how Sebald’s literature reflected the pronounced hybridity and polyvalence of an age as complex and calamitous as his own – the time of the Baroque. 
These concepts of multi-disciplinarity and hybridity were first epitomised in the Baroque age and stood prominently in the work of many artist, including the oeuvre of one great, albeit invisible character of Sebald’s Rings of Saturn – Sir Thomas Browne. As usual to Sebald’s writing, Thomas Browne was present indirectly, through his writings (The Urn Burrial and Religio Medici) but even more through a prevailing sense of time that enveloped the entire book – the concept of eternal present. “The eternity has no distinction of tenses” wrote Thomas Browne, the notion that was to define Sebald’s perception of time where everything that was, lasts forever, where past eternally outlines our present. It was in the Baroque that such sense of the past “as an open category” was first introduced, a concept that would stand as one of the central concepts of Sebald’s literature. 

Prof. dr. Jelena Todorović. I received my BA in the History of Art at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. And my MA (1998) and PhD (2004) at University College London. Since 2005, I have been teaching early modern art history at the University of the Arts in Belgrade where I presently work as a Full Professor. For the past 12 years (since 2006) I have been a Keeper of the State Art Collection in Belgrade the work for which I received European Union Award for cultural heritage in 2018 (Europa Nostra). I had published extensively the subjects of early modern festival culture, concepts of space and time in the Baroque age, as well as on the connections between the Baroque culture and contemporary literature. My latest book treats that particular subject `The Hidden Legacies of Baroque Culture in contemporary literature / the realms of Eternal Present` CSP, 2017.