The Invisible Seminar
Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, at UiB, Bergen, 2018

The publication is the outcome of a series of seminars organized by Brandon LaBelle and that aimed to develop critical and creative perspectives on invisible practices. The included essays and works investigate the operations of visibility by highlighting the unseen, the camouflaged, the immaterial and the erased as particular aesthetic strategies, and reflect on the possible outcomes of such strategies on the socio-political realm.

Might invisibility enable strategies to negotiate the obligations and powers of appearance? In what ways may invisible practices challenge the normative constructs of rational thought, based on notions of illuminated truth, as well as contribute to forms of withdrawal from systems of representation? In short, invisibility is positioned as a discursive and creative tactic.

The Invisible Seminar was initially launched in 2012 at the Bergen Art Academy and ran until 2017, generating a range of international collaborations and shared inquiries. By interrogating the ways in which visualization, appearance, and the powers of looking work to make or contain subjects, invisibility emerges as a highly generative base. As opposed to notions of enlightenment and clarity, invisibility connects us to the unseen and the unnamed, the disappeared and the ghostly, the oppressed and the secretive. Through invisible practices and positions, these become important counter-figures by which to unsettle dominant orders and knowledges. Invisibility untethers our perceptions and sensibilities from the ground of rational thought, and provides support for acts of undercover life, languages of delirium, and alternative epistemologies, leading to an intensification of aesthetic imagination and social becoming.

The Invisible Seminar as a publication elaborates key issues raised in the Seminars through essays and works by participants, and aims to stake out the conceptual and socio-political concerns and potentials of invisible practices.

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