The first thematic area focuses on concrete manifestations of transition—motifs, themes, narrative structures and trajectories—as conceived by the arts throughout their histories. On a meta-level, it also raises questions concerning the figuration of artistic authorship and mediality. The notion of figures of the threshold addresses a broad inventory of liminal forms: from personifications of death to hybrid figures poised at the boundary between life and death or between the animate and inanimate—ghosts, vampires, homunculi, cyborgs, automatons, robots. In the figure of the hermaphrodite, and more generally in formations of androgyneity and disruptions of binarity, gender identity appears as an imagined condition. Scenarios and narratives of transition concern literary, visual, and musical topoi of transformation—such as awakening, apparition, animation, or deceptive perception. The author of the artwork emerges as a figure situated at the threshold of textual genesis, orchestration, and action. Archive and performance investigates, on a meta-level, the media through which the arts are preserved and reactivated. Life Sciences and Death Studies examine the role of the (cultural and natural) sciences in defining the boundaries between life and death.

Image credit: William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015, still, Barbara Goodman Gallery.