“Existence is elsewhere”: A workshop on surreal(ist) narrative crossings

Desert Kapi Piti Country by Andrew Tjupurrula Highfold

Dr. Despina Alexandra Constantinides
February 2023

Sprung in Paris during the interwar period, the movement of surrealism lay at the heart of multiple crossings. The direct descendant of the Dada movement, but with a different political agenda, informed by psychiatry and psychoanalysis, though focusing on the creative power of the unconscious, dreams, and insanity, fascinated with fortuitous encounters of words, but offering specific instructions for the production of art, surrealism will allow the participants of this workshop to explore matters of representation, inspiration, production of art and meaning. The aforementioned components of the surrealist movement will be presented through various forms of art, as a way of ushering participants into surreality, the ultimate official goal of the surrealists, where opposites coalesce, defying logic.

The proposed workshop is structured upon a two-fold objective, that is, introducing participants to surrealist artistic practices, and guiding them through a number of in-class tasks focusing on narrative production. Dream narratives, automatic writing, double-images, the art of the insane will be employed as means to delve into the narrative crossroads that surrealism explored.

When: Wednesday 1 March 2023
What time: 18:00-20:30
Language: English
Where: Room H (New Philosophy Building, Ground Floor/next to Amphitheater B). This is an in person event.

To register please email Mr. Michalis Tziachris at tziachri@enl.auth.gr.
If you are unable to attend please email in time to cancel your registration.
Participants will receive a Certificate of Attendance!

Bio

Dr. Despina Alexandra Constantinides holds a PhD from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, on the crossings of psychoanalysis, surrealism, semiotics, and psychiatry in the work of Jacques Lacan and Salvador Dali in the 1930s. She is an Adjunct Lecturer in Aristotle University, and has taught various undergraduate and postgraduate courses on literature and research methodology at the same university, as well as in the Hellenic Open University. As a Fulbright Scholar, she attended courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2014, where she was also invited to teach in the “Bridging Cultures” summer seminar one year later. She is currently appointed as a teacher of English in the 2^nd Model Junior High School of Thessaloniki, Greece, and is actively involved in the teacher training programme of the School of English, AUTh. She serves as a board member of the Hellenic Semiotic Society, and the Fulbright Scholars of Northern Greece Association, and is also a member of the steering committee of the Fulbright Education Network – Greece, and a member of the eLang Network of the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe.