The symposium Object Abuse: Who’s looking at Who? –  Took place on the 23rd March 2012 at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London.

The event considered a less-explored reading of objects and things, questioning our relation with them and exploring the potential of other forms of address.

Does a new intention need to be employed to interrogate our role in relations with objects? – That in object abuse there lies the question of who or what is abused.

Could co-presence allow another position, redressing our intentions and interactions? – Who’s looking at who?

Might the animistic gaze reveal objects to be more than tools or resources? –  Or are we blinded by our fetishes?*

Provocations – three speakers; Dr Fiona Candlin, Prof. Dale Russell & Gabriel Gbadamosi each presented ten-minute provocations in response to this question.

Discussions – an Open Space process was employed to engage the assembled audience and speakers to set up a dynamic structure of discussions. A diverse range of discussions took place across five rooms over that day.

*’They (the Moderns) do have a fetish, the strangest one of all: they deny to the objects they fabricate the autonomy they have given them. They pretend they are not surpassed, outstripped by events. They want to keep their mastery, and they find its source within the human subject, the origin of action’.

Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

The Object Abuse symposium was made possible by Transmission, a project convened by Dr Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Dr Sharon Kivland, with the support of the ADRC, Sheffield Hallam University, and HARC (Humanities and Arts Research Committee), Royal Holloway, University of London, with thanks to Ahuvia Kahane and the Centre for Creative Collaboration.