Neuropathology of Belgrade: Visual Diaries From the Apocalypse Age (Weird Studies symposium, UC Davis, 2022)

Weird Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium was organized by Rob Hether, Zach Scovel, and Poonam Vaya in French & Francophone Studies, and took place on April 23rd and 30th at UC Davis:

The Anthropocene is an epoch of accelerating weirdness. Catastrophic events brought about by human action (and inaction) persist in revealing unexpected entanglements, bringing into view pasts, presents, and futures that are weirder than anything we had imagined. Planet-changing forces threaten present and future existences. Recent discoveries and rapid technological changes are transforming how we envision ourselves in relation to the environment, bringing into relief extraordinary interconnections between humans and nonhumans, blurring the boundaries between self and other, subject and object. These revelations are accompanied by the growing sense of alienation and enchantment associated with the weird. The weird is the unearthly on Earth.1 It is something that confronts us in a way that defies all of our categories, rendering them mundane and useless. The weird opens us up to new criteria for what is possible, for what is real. “It is constituted by the presence ‘of that which does not belong,’2 and as such, is concerned with boundary crossings and blurrings, interruption and change. In the Anthropocene, the weird involves (un)earthly belonging.”3

This one day symposium will reflect on that which is weird. We take as our starting point an embrace of the weird – as defined above but also as in wyrd, urðr, étrange, as in the fated, the emergent, the strange – with the belief that unexpected entanglements and bizarre juxtapositions are not to be dismissed, but are to be engaged. “We are caught up today in a riptide of historical change. We find ourselves disoriented, unable to determine which way is up at a time when it seems every stable and reliable understanding has liquified and oozes now around our feet, swirling into bizarre new configurations. What better time than now to think about the turn, the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn, the introspective turn … because the weird is precisely what we need now in our toolkit of adaptive strategies.”4

With that in mind we invite presentations and/or performances and/or exhibitions that engage with notions of the weird/wyrd. This is a broad category that invites us to dig into the rich soil of the intellectual weirdosphere. This excavation is well under way in spaces beyond academia. With this symposium we wish to invite some of that weirding into our academic selves. And so we welcome bizarre ideas, unsubstantiated claims, theories that might just go a bridge too far, critical, narrative, and creative juxtapositions that spring forth from the liminal, or ideas that you’d like to explore that perhaps just aren’t going to be able to make it into your thesis or dissertation, owing to the limits of the genre. Possible subjects amongst the categories of the weird/wyrd that we believe merit critical, academic analysis include, but are in no way limited to:

Strange science fictions and fantasies. Esotericism, tarot, and the black mud tide of the occult (as Freud put it). Mycelial networks and cryptoeconomics. Victorian spiritualism. Psycho/Ecodelia. Complex systems theories that intersect with the humanities. The monstrous, in practice and in theory. The bizarre. The haunted, the haunting. Alien encounters. Somnambulant transmissions. The zones where the unearthly stalks the Earth. Hysterical, obscene, grotesque, outside of everything that has always just been ordinary.

1 Turnbull, Jonathan. “Weird.” Environmental Humanities, 13 (1), 2021, 275-280. 2 Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2016. 3 Turnbull.
4 “Exploring Ecodelia.” Future Fossils with Michael Garfield. November 3, 2021.

My presentation focused on visual artistic diaries and made during the COVID-19 first pandemic wave in 2020, with a special focus on the work of Ivana Aranđelović “Neuropatologija Beograda (Neuropathology of Belgrade)” which we had a chance to exhibit last year. From the abstract:

2020 was more than a weird year. In Serbia, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a set of events ranging from absolute denial (“the most comic virus in the history of humankind, which exists only on Facebook”), across expected lockdown, to a set of “relaxed” measurements after a series of alarming protests during summer. A mix of distrust in the government and the media, “I know it all” attitude, prescientific propaganda, contradictory measurements, and lack of real solidarity created a fertile ground for a social reality that feels like a bizarre mix of absurdist comedy and post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Artist Ivana Aranđelović responded creatively to this crazy world, which started looking weirder than her fantasy and mythology inspired artist diaries and drawings done earlier in career. Her characteristic human-headed sheep, hell dogs, and x-ray figures which draw inspiration from medieval miniatures tuned to beaten, police, and vandal bodies, face mask guides, and isolation rituals. Neuropathology of Belgrade was the first artist book which chronicles the social and political life of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, focusing especially on the large July citizen protests, the Crisis Headquarters (Krizni štab), and everyday life. Taking a pre-existing book, an old Belorussian neuropathology guide from 1978, Ivana erased, draw upon, colored, and sewed over the medical illustrations, creating surreal and absurd new images of the pandemic. It is my goal to go through some of these images, provide background information, laugh a bit, and reflect on a period two years ago which still influences our daily lives.