FABIANE BORGES & CAMILA MELLO

March 23rd, 2011
18.00 – 20.00

Goldsmiths College
Room: NAB 3.26 (New Academic Building, across the back field, 3rd floor)
New Cross Gate, London
http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/

Occupied Prestes Maia Building, são paulo in which 468 families live. For more info see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwLtLk0Qfw0

In recent years, collective practices in Brazil have generated theoretical-practical-political-subjective platforms from different perspectives. In these contexts, actors critically undertake to produce and share experiences and content. Processes of social movements, of urban space, ritual performance, immersive happenings and multimedia are discussed. Screenings and images with live commentary are followed by discussions about the concepts that sustain such practices. Recently, artist-producers in the fields of art, media and technology, have been developing research and publications about these processes. This research seeks to revive the contemporary scene for the construction of new formats of meetings, events, festivals and the production of new processes.

Fabiane Borges is a psychologist, undertaking a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at PUC-SP. She has been involved in the production of events about art, politics and technology in Brazil since 2000 and has published three books last year that deal with the subject, available at: http://catahistorias.wordpress.com http://integracaosemposse.zip.net

http://tuliotavares.wordpress.com/acmstc/

Camila Mello works with multi-media and since 2005 has been a member of MERGULHO, a collective platform that explores the possibility of restoring subjective realities into shareable experiences: corpoliquido.wordpress.com. In 2010, MERGULHO and Rodrigo Lourenço, of DESVENDA Contemporary Art Fair, organized the project SEU – Urban Experimental Week, an on going experimental art process about experience in public space, as a foment of collective work and interchange between artists and community: portoalegreseu.worpress.com . In 2010, she worked with Ali Khodr, BASE art association, a collaborative space in Paris, on the notion of encounter, relation and the archetype of the artist as a worker: artbaseasso.wordpress.com [under construction]

tags: multimedia, ritual, performance, public space, art-technology (underground)

Tuesday March 2nd, 2010
18.00 – 20.00
Goldsmiths, University of London
Ben Pimlott Building, Ground Floor Lecture Theatre
New Cross, London
http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/

Co-hosted by Department of Art, Sociology Method Lab, and Micropolitics Research Group

Franco Bifo Berardi is a philosopher, cultural theorist and political and media activist. Berardi was a key figure in Italy’s first free radio station (Radio Alice) and the magazine A/traverso which he founded in 1975. Like many others involved with the Autonomia movement in Italy in the 1970s, Berardi fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980s he contributed to Semiotexte (NY), Chimeree (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). In the 1990s he published Mtuazione e Ciberpunk (Genoa, 1993), Cobernauti (Rome, 1994) and Felix (Rome, 2001).

Dmitry Vilensky & Alexei Penzin from
Chto delat/What is to be done?
Lecture: Tuesday December 1st at 6.00pm
Small Hall / Cinema (to the side of Loafers)
Richard Hoggart Building
Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW

Make art/knowledge politically: The case of platform Chto Delat or self-organization as method

The main idea of self-organized structures is to keep under their control the full tasks of the creation, production and distribution of the art and critical knowledge. They realize its activity in the form of “Art Soviets” that are able to politicize cultural production through a process of collective subjectivization. The main goal of this structure is to cultivate political awareness, raise class consciousness of the oppressed, and provoke a democratic, emancipatory activity in the spheres of labor, politics and aesthetics based on research and conceptualization of post-socialist world.

The discussion will be about anti-capitalist practices and collective emancipation in Post-Soviet political and cultural situation, radical poverty, publishing a newspaper in precarious conditions, debate concerning the common, how to combine “entrism” and exodus, non-alienated relations, the public as co-creator, social impact of micro-political interventions, local optic, search for the solidarity, and how art and theory do not just reflect or interpret the world, but takes risk to change it.

Chto delat/What is to be done? was founded in 2003 in Petersburg by a group of artists, critics, philosophers and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Since then, Chto delat has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to engaged culture, with a special focus on the relationship between a repoliticization of Russian intellectual culture and its broader international context. Their last major exhibition was seen as part of the Istanbul Biennale.

Alexei Penzin is researcher at Institute of Philosophy (Moscow) and member of the group “Chto Delat / What is to be done?”. Penzin is contributing author to journals on philosophy and the humanities, published in Russia and internationally. His major fields of interest are critically re-evaluated philosophical anthropology, contemporary interpretations of Marxist thought, interconnections of art and political praxis.

Dmitry Vilensky – artist and researcher, recent publication – at magazine Afterall, Third Text, Print Project and many other.

http://www.chtodelat.org/
Organised by Marxism in Culture and the Micropolitics Research Group, Goldsmiths. Supported by the Open University.

Tuesday October 13th
PUBLIC LECTURE by Colectivo Situaciones (Buenos Aires)
17.00 – 19.00
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths College

Wednesday October 14th
PUBLIC SEMINAR with A/Traversad*s por la Cultura (Madrid),
Colectivo Situaciones (Buenos Aires), Euromayday Hamburg,
S.a.L.E. Docks (Venice), Fels (Berlin),
Universidad Nomada (Barcelona), _ and many others.
14.00 – 19.00
RHB room 342 (in red brick main building), Goldsmiths College

Studies in Transversality is a series of encounters between researchers, cultural workers, and organisers who are concerned with the contexts and consequences of their practices beyond their respective fields of specialisation, and who wish to open new lines of subjectivation. This session is the first of the year and brings together the practices of Colectivo Situaciones (Argentina), and a number of groups who are researching and organising around questions of creative labour, knowledge production and contemporary social movements in the UK and Europe today. Working through the notion of militant research, the session aims to examine the separations between university based academic research, cultural workers, and activists, the reason why these separations exist, and to share the working methods of these groups.

About Militant Research
Militant research is a concept-tool that works on the premise that all interpretation of the world is linked to some kind of action. Related to practices of co-research and institutional analysis, militant research proposes that all new knowledge production affects and modifies the bodies and subjectivities of those who have participated. Rather than use research as a tool to categorise and separate knowledge from practice, militant research operates transversally, becoming part of the process that organises relationships between bodies, knowledge, social practices and fields of action.

See Marta Malo de Molina’s two recent articles on militant research at:
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en#redir
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0707/malo/en

Colectivo Situaciones is a collective based in Buenos Aires. Emerging from Argentina’s radical student milieu in the mid 1990s, they have developed a long track record of intervention in Argentine social movements, including work with the unemployed workers’ movement of Solano, HIJOS, the organization of the children of the disappeared during the dictatorship and Creciendo Juntos, an alternative school run by militant teachers. Their books and pamphlets are dialogues with social movements, activists and many other groups, and explore the question of power, tactics of struggle, and how to think about revolution today. In addition to their publishing work, they are also working in a collectively run, alternative school. In a note printed on the back of many of their books, they describe their work as follows:

…we intend to offer an internal reading of struggles, a phenomenology and a genealogy, not an “objective” description. It is only in this way that thought assumes a creative, affirmative function, and stops being a mere reproduction of the present. And only in this fidelity with the immanence of thought is it a real, dynamic contribution.

For published texts in Spanish and English, see:
www.situaciones.org
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en
http://info.interactivist.net/node/5490
http://www.constituentimagination.net
An English translation of ‘Disquiet in the Impasse’ by Colectivo Situaciones is available here

About Micropolitics Research Group
The Micropolitics Research Group investigates the forces and procedures that entangle artistic production and the flexible subjectivities of its producers into the fabric of late capitalism. Based primarily in London, the group carries out analysis of issues ranging from the production of subjectivity in creative work, diplomacy, institutional analysis, radical pedagogy and concrete situations of free labour, ‘carrot work’, and creative industry.

Directions:
Goldsmiths College, University of London,
Lewisham Way,
New Cross
SE14 6NW
New Cross or New Cross Gate RAIL, or buses: 21, 53, 453, 171, 172, 36, 436
Directions and Campus Map: http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/
http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/campus-map.pdf

This event is supported by: London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange, Goldsmiths Department of Art Research Support Award, and Goldsmiths College Research and Knowledge Transfer Award

Monday June 2nd 2009
7-9pm
LARC
62 Fieldgate St., Whitechapel, E1 1ES London
(http://www.londonarc.org/)

This session, hosted by members of the Carrot Workers Collective will begin with some fables and anecdotes from the world of interning in Europe’s Cultural sector. In bringing together these accounts, we aim to begin an analysis of the circuits of anger, resignation and moral compensation that often characterise the experience of free labour. The session aims to not only find ways of understanding these predicaments, but also to identify the ways in which these circuits can be interrupted, and might operate otherwise.

We ask that people attending read the following texts/ excerpts before Monday (if possible!)

Reading:
Angela McRobbie, ‘The Los Angelisation of London: Three short-waves of
young people’s micro-economies of culture and creativity in the UK’
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0207/mcrobbie/en

And have a look at the following websites:
http://www.wageforwork.com/wage.html (Working Artists and the Greater
Economy, New York)

and…

Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisation, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Feb 07),
special issue on ‘Immaterial and Affective Labour: Explored’ edited by:
Emma Dowling, Rodrigo Nunes and Ben Trott. See:
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1index.htm

Look forward to seeing you there!

Micropolitics Research Group
Carrot Workers Collective

Lead by Lucia Farinati and Richard Crow

In mapping out different meanings on the notion of “listening” and playing a series of audio fragments including inaugural speeches, rants, nonsense, disembodied voices, and ‘silence’ -  this session aims to bring into earshot the act of listening in itself: a tension, an intention and an attention. 
 
The main questions that we would like to raise and discuss are:
How is listening related to a collective becoming and/or group formations? And what is the space we are creating through the “living voice”? And what is its political dimension?
 
A possible departure point (as a kind of provocation) will be Jean-Luc Nancy’s conclusion that:
“The subject of the listening or the subject who is listening (but also the one who is “ subject to listening” in the sense that one can be “subject to” unease, an ailment, or a crisis) is not a phenomenological subject. This means that he is not a philosophical subject, and, finally, he is perhaps no subject at all, except as the place of resonance, of its infinite tension and rebound, the amplitude of sonorous deployment and the slightness of its simultaneous redeployment-by which a voice is modulated in which the singular of a cry, a call, or a song vibrates by retreating from it (a “voice”: we have to understand what sounds from a human throat without being language, which emerges from an animal gullet or from any kind of instrument, even from the wind in the branches: the rustling toward which we strain or lend an ear).” Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, 2007. New York: Fordham University Press, pgs 21-22

In preparation for the session, we would like to circulate the following texts (for full texts see temp text links on the blog)
Jean-Luc Nancy, (trans by Charlotte Mandell), Listening, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007 pgs 21-22
Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2006, pgs 104-124
http://micropolitics.wordpress.com/temp-text-links/

Lead by Peter Conlin

From Peter:

To introduce the topic by way of personal motivations: In many ways I came to art, like so many, as a way out of a deeply utilitarian society, that denounced anything not economically viable or part of conventional social order as worthless. But predictably, I soon became frustrated with many true believers in aesthetics who were oblivious to institutional contexts and social conditions that made their art practices possible. By refusing easy-going reconciliations, I entered into the seemingly perpetual tensions between culture and administration. So what was beyond the divide of ‘art for art-sake’ and ‘business is business’ other than denial or a vast array of dubious rapprochements (institutional critique art, theorists of ‘creative’ management and UK creative economy policy consultants)?

I shifted emphasis from art-making to looking at how culture functions in organisations—which was really a way into a nexus of practices, communities, aesthetics and economics; and in so doing posed these questions in a new way: can we organise without managing? What does it mean when something is run like a business? I began to sort through the similarities and differences between self-organisation (both in sense of ‘autonomous spaces’ and the formation of subjectivities) and so called post-bureaucratic organization. What is the language to describe collective initiative beyond enterprise?
If organisational forms are solutions, why not shift back to the problem?

Three short excerpts of texts for this session:
Jim McGuigan, ‘Rethinking Cultural Policy’, 2004.
Raymond Williams, ‘Culture’, 1981.
Stephan Dillemuth, Anthony Davies and Jakob Jakobsen, “There is no alternative: THE FUTURE IS SELF-ORGANISED”, 2005

Please see Temp Text Links above for PDFs
http://micropolitics.wordpress.com/temp-text-links/

21 Redwald Road
E5 0JG, London
See Map

6.30-9pm : session
9-11pm : dinner

How do we position ourselves within the groups we work with, and what do we expect from different forms of collective work? how do we think group processes, and conceive of them in relation to social and political dimensions as well as psychic and individual becoming? where do our desires lie with groups? We believe that to develop a culture around the micropolitics of group ecologies is a particularly urgent step facing the managerial turn of contemporary power relations. We would like to reflect upon and look beyond the slightly tired formats of the “liberal debate” or the “teacher-student” situations implicit in so many group setups. We would like to think together about our experiences and ideas regarding collective becomings – both from the psycho-subjective point of view and with regards to the ways in which we organize our group processes (particularly in political and cultural contexts).

In preparation for the session, during which we may experiment with some alternative discursive formats, we would like to suggest the following short texts, which have been translated informally for the purpose of our meeting (for full texts, see “temp texts links” page on this blog):

Gilbert Simondon, Individual and social time; Interiority groups and exteriority groups, in: L’individuation collective at les fondements du transindividuel, Ed Millon, Paris, 2005, p.293-295
David Vercauteren (with Thierry Muller and Olivier Crabbè), Micropolitiques des Groupes; Pour une écologie des pratiques collectives, HB Editions, 2007, pp.39-44
In French online at:

KNIGHTS TEMPLAR Pub
(former Union Bank of London)
95 Chancery Lane
http://www.pubs.com/pub_details.cfm?ID=307

How did we come to put so much faith and trust in bankers and other managers of finance capital, think of the future in terms of speculation and investment, and ultimately see economic growth as synonymous with our own best interests? How have these become hegemonic common sense and what is the role of emotions in this process: faith, trust, hope, anxiety and fear?

The session will be lead by Kirsten Forkert, Janna Graham and Francesco Salvini. We will be reading from the following texts:

JF Pixley ‘Beyond Twin Deficits: Emotions of the Future in the Organization of Money’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Oct 1999
Nikolas Rose, ‘Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood’, Cambridge, 1998
Christian Marazzi. Measure and Value (excerpts)
Foucault, M. Hermeneutics of the Subject. Palgrave Macmillan. 2001 p.463-473.

You can find links to the texts (except the Foucault which we will read in the evening together) on our ‘Temporary Text Links’ on our blog (above), or on:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0254/is_4_58/ai_58496774/pg_7
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fc_measure.htm
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/kirstenforkert/micropoliticsreadings/RoseGoverningTheEnterprisingIndividual.pdf