CfP: Duplicity/Duplicität. Betwixt intimates and strangers. International Symposium in Berlin

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Due date for session proposals: 1st December, 2025
Due date for non-presenting participant registration: 9th January, 2026. 

This opening symposium of the collaborative research project Studies in Remoteness. Sensoria of Absence, Distance and Neglect explores the two-sided, the between spaces, the self-conflicted, and the epistemic ambiguity and multiplicity that emerge from these. Engaging with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems, we will examine what it means to be situated (perhaps conflictedly) between radically different identities, geographies, and epistemologies.

About practicalities:

Event Structure
The symposium begins with a welcome evening on the 29th, and is then divided into two themes over two full days (30th-31st). Sessions will include presentations, readings, discussions, and creative workshops that draw from cultural studies, performance histories, and artistic research practices. Participants are invited to lead thematic sessions, but do not have to do so to participate. Within the context of Berlin, the symposium will further inquire the ways that duplicity informs observation by investigating the cityscape as an intricate weave of depths and surfaces, concealments and revealments.

If you wish to lead a thematic session (research and/or artistic presentation, reading session, hands-on or discussion session) – please submit an application (up to two pages) with a session abstract and facilitator bio by December 1^st, 2025.

If you wish to simply participate – please send us a letter of intent, and a bit of information about yourself, by January 9^th, 2026. Earlier applications are encouraged, as the symposium is first-come-first-served. Students may receive ECTS credit (further information available by request). 

Students: You are welcome to apply to lead a session (flexible format, 10 minutes – 1 hour in length) or simply participate. ECTS points are available through the Nordic Summer University (1 point for participation, 2 points for participation & presentation). Please check with your home university about their acceptance of Nordic Summer University ECTS. More information here: https://www.nsuweb.org/support_pages/faq/

Cost
To participate, participants need to pay a €30.00 membership fee to the Nordic Summer University; for participants with institutional support, the amount is €55.00. In certain cases (esp. for students), this fee may be waived or reduced. Housing and food are self-organized, and the organizers have reasonably priced recommendations for registrants.

How to Apply
Applications can be sent to to one (preferably both) of the following email addresses:
lindsey.drury[at]fu-berlin.de
helenahildur[at]gmail.com

More about the topic of the symposium:

Introduction 
As a three-year collaborative research project, Studies in Remoteness aims to contribute foundational theoretical and historical work toward initiating a new field of interdisciplinary research in critical remoteness studies. Theorizing modernity by turning to its so-called outskirts, the project inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have blossomed along the frontiers of colonial empires and sedimented among the margins of modern infrastructures of “global connectivity”. Toward that end, the project brings together a network of scholars, artists, and activists to engage in community-based research practices and organizes a series of six symposia across the Baltic rim between 2026-2028. Within the next three years, Studies in Remoteness intends to set a space where genuine questions can emerge and be investigated over time. Twice annual symposia allow participating researchers, artists, students, and community organizers to gather and engage in transformative practices of co-creation.

Duplicity/Duplicität 
Almost any place on this planet labelled “remote” by one person is to another an intimate home. Almost any stranger met on the street is, to someone, a most intimate friend. In this first symposium of Studies in Remoteness, we thus investigate the in-betweenness, conflictedness, and epistemic ambiguity particular to the duplicity that characterises remoteness. Within wider discourses on multiplicity, duplicity’s two-sided and two-faced structure introduces duality (distant and near, intimate and stranger) even as the word ‘duplicity’ also suggests masked deceitfulness. 
Duplicity often carries connotations of trickery – as a disguise that renders the reality of a person or situation inaccessible; remote. The term duplicity thus gestures toward performance. Yet, acts of pretend, staging, or performance aren’t merely façades behind which reality lurks; they also offer ways of conjuring real contexts for social engagement. Antonin Artaud’s Le Théâtre et son Double, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie, and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism all tie art and performance to politics by addressing duplicity as a political and creative force that divides and connects, hides and reveals, undermines and sustains – to transform. Artaud, particularly, makes the radical proposal that perceivable reality is a respondent Doppelgänger of the theater (rather than the other way around). 
This symposium invites reflections on duplicity as an aesthetic, ethical, constructive, and political practice: how it structures relations of trust and suspicion, performance and belief, transparency and opacity. We welcome participants who wish to explore the multiple registers of duplicity, and interrogate its role in shaping both everyday life and collective futures. We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.

Day One. Inquiring Art, Politics, and Performance in Berlin 
How does duplicity inform, arise from, or interact with the politicization of art in Berlin? What is concealed (made remote) and revealed (made available) in the process? 

As anthropologist David Graeber described, politics is a fundamental social imaginary – “that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them” – but to participate effectively, one must never acknowledge this fact (2011: 94). Graeber used this assertion to connect politics to artistic practice, further arguing that, “for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game – a kind of scam” (ibid). While the term “scam” typically implies deceit or fraud, this symposium considers the “scam” as a kind of strategic duplicity that enables both art and politics to function – not in spite of, but through their resistance to absolute transparency. The imagined, the artificial, and the staged become crucial mechanisms by which social and political truths take shape. While “scams” are negatively connotated (perhaps most easily attributed to quacks, charlatans, imposters, grifters, and snake oil salesmen), in this symposium, we look at the so-called “scam” as a duplicity that, precisely by undermining any chance for so-called ‘transparency’, allows art and politics alike (and in connected ways) to function. 
In Berlin, this dynamic can be exemplified in Adrian Piper’s 2017 participatory performance The Probable Trust Registry at Hamburger Bahnhof, which invited viewers to sign contracts with themselves, committing to ethical principles such as aligning their actions with their assertions. Though the contracts were non-binding, the work adopted the aesthetics of bureaucratic authority – golden desks, formal presentation, institutional context – to lend them weight and seriousness. In doing so, the work “pretended” (in German, vorgehabt) in the original etymological sense – to put forward or give forth (especially of) illegitimate claims – demonstrating how acts of imagination and presentation have historically blurred into claims of power, identity, and truth. Piper’s performance reveals how duplicity can create the conditions for sincerity. The work thus operated in the tense space between the real and the unreal, using the artifice of officialdom not to deceive, but to make truth socially legible.

Day Two. Intangible Goods/Invisible Architectures: Performing Deindustrialisation
How does duplicity inform the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants – architecturally, aesthetically, as well as in work and everyday practices? What is made remote, and what is made available in economic transactions, public infrastructures, and the wider built environment? How can we research peoples’ experiences of this, and the impacts upon their lives?

The city of Berlin’s architecture is shaped by a history of small industry and local craftsmen. Many of the city’s spaces have been transformed into a postindustrial landscape of corporate offices, bars and restaurants, arts organisations, storefronts, and living spaces. The city is physically marked, by consequence, with visible duplicity of the original intent and current use of its architecture. A realm of urban aesthetics has emerged that explores the way this duplicity can be exposed and concealed. This architectural duplicity is expanded into political space via buildings like the Reichstag and much problematised Humboldt Forum, both of which play with the partial presence and absence of historical materials in the ways they have been reconstructed. 
A similar ethics of in/visibility permeates the performance and presentation approaches within urban service industries, where the labour of vast numbers of workers is labelled as “intangible goods”. The service industry is informed by a complex history of labour deeply engaged with performances of concealment and revealment. Like theatres, for example, restaurants are organized into a “back of house” site of preparation and production which facilitates a “front of house” space of presentation and consumption. The relationship between these two sites is often central to the restaurant’s approach to the dining experience: A working kitchen exposed to the meandering eyes of restaurant patrons is representationally different than a restaurant that conceals cooks and their labour behind a wall and a swinging door, only to be visible as inferred craft within completed dishes. Duplicity, then, is not simply deceptiveness – but it renders parts of life and work remote in order to curate economic interactions.

Image credits: (Top) Photo © Salad Hilowle, from the exhibition Homeplace; courtesy Cecilia Hillström gallery (Stockholm) (Bottom) Artwork by Pia Arke