Lecture | Research Seminar
All these images will disappear: notes on skateboarding
- Date
- Monday 9 May 2022
- Time
- Address
- Pieter de la Court
- Room
- S.A49
All these images will disappear: notes on skateboarding
Skateboarding is a mystery. It looks a whole lot like a skilful practice, a tool for social good, a discipline of failure. Yet as soon as we try to define and capture it, skateboarding morphs into an otherwise.
This talk offers a glimpse into the secret microcosms that we call skateboarding. We’ll explore why skate sessions can be forms of radical empathy. We’ll dive into the site-specific nuances and relational meanings of skateboarding in Seoul. We’ll look at glitchy images of bodies in motion. And we’ll listen to stories by skaters on mental health and controlled fear.
Above all, this talk is an invitation to ask ourselves: What if we suspend our ideas as to what skateboarding is? What else could it be?
About Sander Hölsgens
Sander Hölsgens (PhD, UCL) is an anthropologist and skateboarder teaching at Leiden University and University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. His writing on skateboarding has appeared in Skateism, Jenkem, and Vice. In 2021, Sander published his first monograph, “Skateboarding in Seoul: A Sensory Ethnography”. He is a co-founder of Pushing Boarders.
