State of insecurity: Government of the precarious

2020-11-12T00:59:02+01:00Tags: , , |

From the review by Ana Vujanović: The political theorist Isabell Lorey has appeared as one of the most striking European voices in the recent debate on precarity and precarization in neoliberalism. Her theoretical discourse draws from the referential frameworks of political and biopolitical theory, feminism, gender and postcolonial studies, as well as of recent social and political movements, such as Euromayday, Occupy and 15-M. This invigorating and politically sharp intersection has created a potent critical platform for analyzing representative democracy, biopolitical governmentality, immunization, and precarization, which belong to Lorey's main concerns. Isabell Lorey is particularly concerned with the neoliberal “state of insecurity” and how it relates to the process of precarization. In fact, although the book is entitled State of Insecurity, it could also be considered a sequel of Lorey’s long-term research on precarity, a sequel that focuses on how precarization is immersed in neoliberal government of and by insecurity. The line that opens the book reads: “If we fail to understand precarization, then we understand neither the politics nor the economy of the present."

Artist at work, Proximity of art and capitalism

2020-11-12T22:02:04+01:00Tags: , , , |

The main affirmation of artistic practice must today happen through thinking about the conditions and the status of the artist's work. Only then can it be revealed that what is a part of the speculations of capital is not art itself, but mostly artistic life. Artist at Work examines the recent changes in the labour of an artist and addresses them from the perspective of performance. It draws its conclusions mainly from the argument that art no longer needs to re-affirm itself as a socially relevant and useful activity because this would lock it within immanent capitalist (and populist) production of value. Instead, art has to rediscover its material basis and 'occupy' exactly those abstractions which enable the preservation of the capitalist system and reproduction of capital. The book would like to remind art – which has constantly thermalized and practiced politics during the last decades – that it has forgotten its power to connect the abilities of the abstract (thinking) with the actual abstractions (value, capital, productivity, money, commodity, time, etc.)

Magacin: Jedan model za samoorganizovani kulturni centar / Magacin: A model for selforganised cultural center

2020-11-12T01:04:31+01:00Tags: , , , |

Publikacija je, kao rezultat zajedničkog rada, predstavila model samoorganizacije nezavisnog kulturnog centra Magacin u Beogradu. Taj model, zasnovan na principima zajedničkog raspolaganja resursima, jednakosti i pravednosti, odgovornosti prema drugima, saradnji i dostupnosti, finansijskoj transparentnosti, kao osnvni mehanizam ima otvoreni kalendar. Njime se omogućava potpuno transparentno upravljanje prostornim resursima, ali i stvaranje zajednice koja zajednički upravlja prostorom i odlučuje o svim aspektima njegovog rada i razvoja.

Creative or common city? Civic or civil society?

2020-11-12T01:04:59+01:00Tags: , , |

At the end of February 2017, Pascal Gielen gave this lecture on the relationship between art, politics and the civil space in the creative city, as part of a programme which ran alongside CCA's exhibition Forms of Action (28 Jan - 12 Mar 2017) on socially engaged art practices. The lecture is based on a pilot research project Gielen undertook for the European Cultural Foundation in 2016, and also looks at how activists and creative workers respond to this policy by organising themselves in alternative ways.

Commonism. A new aesthetics of the real

2020-11-12T01:05:50+01:00Tags: , , , |

The book explores the ideological thoughts under the notion of the commons and asks how this shapes the reality of our living together. Pays attention to the aesthetic dimension of communism as an ideology: what artistic strategies and what aesthetics do commoners adopt? After half a century of neoliberalism, a new radical, practice-based ideology is making its way from the margins: commonism, with an o in the middle. It is based on the values of sharing, common (intellectual) ownership and new social co-operations. Commoners assert that social relationships can replace money (contract) relationships. They advocate solidarity and they trust in peer-to-peer relationships to develop new ways of production. Commonism maps those new ideological thoughts. How do they work and, especially, what is their aesthetics? How do they shape the reality of our living together? Is there another, more just future imaginable through the commons? What strategies and what aesthetics do commoners adopt? This book explores this new political belief system, alternating between theoretical analysis, wild artistic speculation, inspiring art examples, almost empirical observations and critical reflection.

Performing the common city: On the crossroads of arts, politics and public life

2020-11-12T01:06:24+01:00Tags: , , , |

Pascal Gielen, art theoretician from Belgium, writes about the contemporary city, its shift from the space for the bourgeois class to the current trend of privatisation of public spaces and the role of arts in these processes. His analysis is based on theories and practices of Haussmann, Michel de Certeau, Chantal Mouffe, Saskia Sassen and others, while going through different conceptions of the city  as the common space: from Haussmann's urban structure in 18th century to Florida's creative city to the common city.

Umetnik/ca u (ne)radu

2020-11-12T01:07:35+01:00Tags: , , |

Istraživačko-umetnički projekat Umetnik/ca u (ne)radu (održan u Novom Sadu između 2010. i 2012.godine) obuhvatao je seriju javnih razgovora, izložbi i publikacija, fokusiranih na istraživanje umetničkih i društvenih praksi koje kritički reflektuju savremeni pojam rada – uslove u kojima se rad ostvaruje, nove društvene potrebe i odnose koje rad proizvodi. Takođe, cilj je bio elaboriranje relativno neistraženog polja istorije umetnosti koje obuhvata prakse koje predstavljaju ekstrem na liniji ovog istraživanja – odluke umetnika/ca da napuste bavljenje umetnošću i produkciju umetničkih dela, propagirajući koncept nerada i „besposličarenja“ (idleness, slacking).

O umjetnosti i socijalizmu

2020-11-12T01:08:06+01:00Tags: , |

William Morris bio je britanski umetnik, arhitekta, dizajner, dekorater, štampar, pesnik, prozni pisac, zanatlija, prevodilac, predavač, politički organizator i socijalista. Za njega je E.P. Thompson napisao da je bio „ prvi kreativni umjetnik visokog kalibra u čitavoj povijesti koji je svjesno i bez trunke kompromisa stao uz revolucionarnu radničku klasu”.  Morris je, prihvativši marksizam, uvideo da su beda i ružnoća sveta koje je toliko mrzeo neodvojive od društvenog i ekonomskog sistema u kojem nastaju, a da je regeneracija umetnosti (i života) fundamentalno političko, a ne isključivo ni prvenstveno umetničko pitanje.

Becoming Common: Precarization as political constituting

2020-11-12T01:09:39+01:00Tags: , , |

"The discourse on precarization that has emerged in the past decade, primarily in Europe, rests on an extremely complex understanding of social insecurity and its productivity. The various strands of this discourse have been brought together again and again in the context of the European precarious movement organised under EuroMayDay....What is unusual about this social movement is not only the way in which under its auspices new forms of political struggle are tested and new perspectives of precarizatin developed; rather - and it is striking in relation to other social movements - it is how it has queered a seemingly disparate fields of the cultural and political again and again. In the past decade, conversations concerning both the (partly subversive) knowledge of the precarious and a search for commons (in order to constitute the political), has conspicuously taken place more in art institution than in social, political, or even academic contexts."

“Being in Common” Theorizing Artistic Collaboration

2018-10-16T19:50:27+01:00Tags: , |

Inspired by in-depth interviews with members of the international Brussels dance community and the work of some of the authors associated with autonomous Marxism (P. Virno, A. Negri, G. Agamben), the practice of collaboration within contemporary dance is elucidated from a theoretical point of view. Like other forms of creative or immaterial labour, artistic collaborations mobilize various generic competences and invoke in an often implicit way a cultural common or series of conventions.

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