IAPL2012-CB-0531-052.. - The International Association for ...

WELCOME TO IAPL 2012
(formulated as taking place in 1914). Here Germans, whose long colonial history in
Estonia, are juxtaposed with militaristic Russian Czarists forcing Estonians either to
take on subservient peasant roles or to hide from and seek refuge from both Germans
and Russians who together occupy the Estonian Baltic seaside. Whether the story of
the young Oda von Siering and her diaries is fiction or truth is explored by Estonian-
Canadian historian Jüri Kivimäe in a discussion following the film in the multipurpose
Solaris Center (situated just in front of the grand Estonian Opera House). This
archaeology of the future—reading the past in order to think what could or should
not be—explores how this film (similar to Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon) rethinks the
role of marginal German groups of prior times in relation to cultural, political, if not
characterological, perspectives.
This year, at IAPL 2012, the crossing of a world-famous philosopher, a renowned
composer, and a prize-winning novelist will constitute the cairns of this six-day
adventure. Jacques Rancière will revisit past futures, modern temporalities, and
modernist paradigms. Erkki-Sven Tüür, the celebrated Estonian composer, will juxtapose
both memory and music. Sofi Oksanen will participate in a cultural imaginary in which
potentially clashing traditions will meet across the Baltic divide between Finnish and
Estonian identities.
The special Round Table on Thursday afternoon at the wonderful architectural successes
of the KUMU (designed by the Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavouri and reminiscent of
Steven Holl’s Kiasma Museum in Helsinki) devoted to the Estonian artist Tõnis Vint
will help participants understand different aesthetic generations during the Soviet and
post-Soviet eras through his artistic production. The prominent Estonian composer
Veljo Tormis will be celebrated in a Saturday Close Encounter in which his large-scale
choral compositions along with his monumental song cycles are the subject of detailed
commentary and presentation by musicologists and music critics with responses by the
septuagenarian musician. The other two Saturday Close Encounters will be devoted
to the work of Jacques Ranciere (who will respond to papers on his writings) and the
philosophical-itinerological interrogations of Alphonso Lingis (plenary speaker at last
year’s conference in Taiwan and celebrated philosophical writer and translator whose
roots are traced to the Baltic country of Lithuania).
Two exciting Round Tables will bookend the conference: Jaak Tomberg (Estonian
Literary Museum in Tartu) will ask about the role of science fiction as a way to think the
future from the present, and Rein Raud (former Rector and current Research Scholar
at Tallinn University) will meditate the multiple roles of information overflow, control,
and branding as cultural effects of contemporary society and their impact on the life
of the university, its researchers, and its students–particularly in the humanities today.
Some of these points were part of Professor Raud’s statement at the Podium Discussion
in Taiwan last year. And they will be reformulated by four contemporary scholars in the
Podium Discussion this year on the topical issue: “After the Crisis in the Humanities.”
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