

Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond, Oktober 31st, 2014.
If one notes the amount of staggering performed or stammered by characters in Waiting for Godot, it can be quite surprising. In fact, few plays contain characters that spend as much time stumbling or tottering about the stage. It is almost as if they are sailors in the midst of a violent squall, but this is not the case.
There is a lot of “queering something” these days, although Queer Theory is certainly not yet part of the major scientific or philosophical discourse. I will argue that dizziness is not just another concept, which needs queering, but that dizziness is fundamentally linked to queerness.
Vertigo in the City brings together an eclectic mix of scholars, clinicians, practitioners and artists to share perspectives on vertigo. The multidisciplinary conversations explore how sensations of dizziness and disorientation are diagnosed, analysed, evoked, induced, critiqued and represented, with a particular focus on the built environment.
The process of slipping into dizzying freefall, of sliding into uncertainty, becoming stuck, losing one’s way, giving up are as much actions as occurrences, both active and passive. Dizziness is a midway state at the point where everything and nothing seems possible, where certainty and uncertainty are in superposition, marked by an increasing loss of control.
This working symposium aims to discuss ways of localizing, recognizing, approaching, and countering dizziness on different scales and disciplines – from the somatic to the built environment to interspecies and post-colonial contexts.