The Refusal: A Symposium In the Arctic

Slought, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Helsinki are pleased to present "The Refusal," a symposium in the arctic from February 8-11, 2015. This interdisciplinary conversation about resistance and retreat will take place at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in the remote winter setting of Kilpisjärvi, Finland.

From Sophocles' Antigone, to Herman Melville's Bartelby, the Scrivener and beyond, radical acts of refusal have long been of fascination to artists and social activists. Today, what does it mean to refuse the hyper-connectivity of our globalized world and the ever-increasing sophistication of our political, economic, and technological systems? What would it mean for us to radically question and remove ourselves from the systems of complexity which govern our lives? Is passivity, inwardness and introspection a viable strategy, or a romantic delusion?

Supplementing this focus on the possible modes of refusal which might permeate Finnish life and artistic cultures is a focus on mathematics, and the question, what is the nature of the mathematician's refusal? One strand of this refusal involves the pure mathematician's abstraction away from the empirical. Another strand involves the mathmetician's intransigence in the face of the desire to provide a grounding for their practice. Finally, there is the question of how and why the mathematicians Alexandre Grothendieck and Grisha Perelman have withdrawn from the mathematical community, even to the point of refusing to pursue their own mathematics.

The geographic marginality and isolation of Kilpisjärvi will also serve as a launching point for these (impossible?) conversations and the symposium itself, which will feature lectures and conversations by a diverse array of mathematicians, artists, art historians, curators and philosophers. "The Refusal" will begin with various engagements with the arctic landscape, inspired by the work of participating artist Antti Laitinen. These activities will be followed by a series of talks and conversations that situate the question of refusal within different cultural and theoretical contexts, exploring the topic as it pertains to mathematics, visual culture, urbanism, ecology, and architectural practice. Due to the remote location of the symposium, the proceedings will be recorded and subsequently made available online.