FAMU Guest Talks: Martin Netočný

Name: FAMU Guest Talks: Martin Netočný
Start: 2026-03-25T17:00:00+01:00
Location: Smetanovo nábřeží 2, 11000 Prace, Czech Republic

Schedule

Wed, 25 Mar, 2026 at 05:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Smetanovo nábřeží 2, 11000 Prace, Czech Republic | Prague, PR

Artistic Reception of Dust and Paths Toward Emancipatory Politics
This lecture focuses on dust as a phenomenon whose artistic reception carries emancipatory potential. In its first part, the talk frames dust emissions as an unwanted yet structurally significant by-product of modern material culture, examining the relationship between their ontological and epistemological instability. Drawing on symbolic anthropology (Douglas 1966), dust is initially conceptualized as chaos that opposes order while simultaneously grounding it. It is then approached through a social constructivist framework (Kristeva 1982) as a meaning-dependent and contextually shaped category, and finally — from the perspective of ontological constructivism (Latour 1993) — as a category whose variability stems from its very existential nature. From positions of social and ontological constructivist relativism, the lecture derives principles of negative and positive emancipation that may be initiated by the reception of artworks employing dust particles as a visual motif. In the second part, these negative principles of emancipation serve as a framework for reading selected conceptual works — their negative character being derived from the notion of "ontological quarantine" (Franke 2015), which historically reduced the interpretation of dust particles in this type of art to a mere re-presentation of indeterminacy. The third part turns to the positively emancipatory possibilities and limits of contemporary art that deliberately exceeds Franke's quarantine framework by shifting from the epistemological re-presentation of dust toward the broader ontological conditions of its gallery presence. In the concluding fourth part, the cognition of these conditions is linked to the imaginative "leap" (Mersch 2020) and positioned as a counterargument to certain theses emerging from Latour and Weibel's curatorial-political project Making Things Public (2005).
Martin Netočný is a curator at the City Gallery Prague (GHMP) and an artist. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), where his research focuses on the influence of Latourian thought on artistic practice and imaginative experience. His works have been presented in more than ten group exhibitions and several solo shows. He is also co-author of a photographic series published in the volume Osvěta, kultura, zábava: Kulturní domy v Československu (2024). He contributes regularly to ART ANTIQUES magazine and the platform Artalk.cz.