How can art serve as a tool for more-than-human world-building? How to create big-enough-portraits, tell big-enough-stories, without lapsing into megalomania? When searching for practical responses to such questions, a curious term coined by Bruno Latour may prove helpful. He contrasted the oligopticon with the absolutist perspective of the panopticon, the infamous surveillance mechanism analyzed by Michel Foucault. Oligoptica are “sites that do exactly the opposite of panoptica: they see far too little to feed either the megalomania of the inspector or the paranoia of the inspected, but what they do see, they see it well.”
Sébastien Hendrickx will reflect on the issue of perspective, a theme central to his artistic research ‘Words worlding worlds’. He will introduce his cosmogram-drawing practice and share insights into his upcoming theatre performance ‘Palace of Justice’.
Image: 'Portrait of PAF' (2023) © Sébastien Hendrickx
