ODD THEORY

ODD THEORY has been since the beginning an attempt to understand as well as to reconfigure, with the delicate means afforded by a small-scale initiative, the Romanian imaginary. It functioned as a learning and sharing tool, and in the current configuration succeeded in its initial bet of bringing together a community of curious and courageous people. The small following overlapped ODD’s general following, but also managed to stand out as a work group of hybrid practitioners, one that is slowly developing common tools and initiatives.

In working with a collective imaginary, regardless of the scale of that collective, one has to face the challenge of the poor political imagination characterizing the contemporary world. Romania is, in that respect, eternally blocked in binaries which do not serve its citizens. The misery of catching up conflates with extremely narrow local politics, producing a public sphere in which important issues marking the world are never properly discussed. In that respect, ODD THEORY makes a point in choosing speakers who can deliver presentations and workshops on subjects that remain poorly known and understood on the local scene, topics which overlap and create a series of mind-opening mirrorings.

ODD THEORY is curated by Cristina Bogdan.

ODD THEORY #5

Open source as a test case of a post-humanist commons

Florian Cramer, Underbelly

27/07/2017 19:30

Șelari 13, Bucharest, Romania

Where did the utopia of copyleft commons turn into a dystopia of feeding new economy capitalism? A talk by Florian Cramer, followed by a discussion and an open shop set up by Underbelly, a mobile and on-line store that is more about exchange, support and curatorship than about sales.

ODD THEORY #4

Obfuscation aesthetics in contemporary fiction

Germán Sierra

15/06/2017 19:30

Șelari 13, Bucharest, Romania

Obfuscation aesthetics experiment with the possibility of Dionysian networks. They produce discourses that are neither theoretical nor practical, but contingently performative. Obfuscational aesthetics are a chaosmotic response to the priblic (private/public) space not just by infecting the multifarious postdigital discourses, but by, at the same time, unconditionally accelerating their consequences, and preventing to know if any of those discourses—the artistic, the political, the technical, the scientific, the personal…—was not already infected.

ODD THEORY #3

Postdance

Mårten Spångberg, Alina Popa

21/05/2017 17:00

Șelari 13, Bucharest, Romania

What are the postdance contemporary practices and how are they distributed between the white cube and the black box, or even outside of these spaces? Where is the dance in a dance piece where no one is dancing? What are the aesthetic, conceptual and political stakes of a dance that seeks to affirm itself only as dance? How to enter the museum within the terms of a practice based on its impending disappearance and on a strong collaborative tradition?

ODD THEORY #2

Peripheral Feminisms

Giulia Damiani

16/09/2015 16:00 - 17/09/2015 20:00

CNDB / Mărășești 80-82, Bucharest, Romania

This session will consider peripheral forms of feminism through Giulia’s research on the artist collective Le Nemesiache from Napoli, a nearly obliterated group which determined the cultural progress of the city between the 70s and 80s.

ODD THEORY #1

Installational Territories

Angels Miralda

05/08/2015 16:00 - 08/08/2015 20:00

Modulab / Viitorului 153, Bucharest, Romania

Angels Miralda, currently an enrolled Ph.D. student at the Royal College of Ar London will conduct a 3-day session on the topic of contemporary installation. She will outline a problem with the usage of the word “installation” that begins to show the vague history and problematics of the word, then develop the political implications of the notion.