Public
Assemblies
for
Alternative
Art
Economies
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I. Berlin assemblies. a series of public spaces activated as assemblies for radical art
II. . . . III. . .
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Urban space is appropriated as political public sphere in the recent "movements of the squares" in european cities (Spain, Greece, Italy, U.K., U.S.), as spontaneous collective response on the economic measures and the politics of social demolition in europe. In these public gatherings a specific form of democratic assembly, based on consensus, is put forward.
What is an art practice in the context of the transformed conditions of art’s labour? In what ways the new precarious conditions of the artist can create possibilities of thinking of alternative art economies?
Artists city gatherings acquire value within power art structures and are not politically neutral. Artists gatherings accumulate collective symbolic capital which is used for gentrification and class colonization of large city areas.
Real estate business and art economy converge in the gentrification of the european city. Urban voids and ruins as art gathering spaces are the new “factory of value”.
In what ways and with what cultural tactics, active presence of artists (inside and outside the art scenes) in the city can resist the remapping of the european city by mass-scaled cultural events and ‘smooth’ gentrification strategies?
What is an architecture and program for artists' assemblies? What projects and imaginaries can be put forward? How can diverse voices be organized in space? What is the arrangement of the bodies? What things and signs are present? What are specific tactics towards self-instituting? How can the collective be thought as emancipatory potential beyond consensus? What is an assembly in place of an institution?
This is a call to imagine, do, archive architectures of assemblies.
A series of specific [sharing-time-together] public spaces in Berlin [local cafes] and other cities are proposed as physical network to try out staging and theorizing forms of assemblies.
Gentrification in Berlin creates homogenized social spaces in the inner city and pushes residents who can not afford to pay rent in the periphery, in the former GDR social housing districts. In these new urban ghettos of the periphery, but also in gated-communities of the center or segregated neighborhoods, private space is sealed up from a hostile exterior public space. Local cafes can be thought of as islands of a particular construction of public sphere. These places are proposed to be (re)actualized as political public sphere, where issues of concern (art, labout and economics) can be brought and discussed outside of the private spaces of art, family. This is an attempt to reactualize a habermesian public sphere, although in different terms.
Berlin assemblies are realized with some common concerns around works, proposals, actions that:
build solidarities with actors beyond art
imagine the production of different [virtual and real] publics
are engaged in the political not as representation but as intervention in operational art/ cultural frames
imagine and attempt alternative micro-economies for writing/ distributing/ financing works
put forward forms of self-instituting, co-writing and channels of participation
develop new support schemes for artists inside and outside institutions
reconsider possibilities for radical art, versions of exodus and general strike
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at Kafe at Kaizer, Brunnenstrasse 125 thursday July 14, 2011 at 7.
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a series of places: they are particular cafes one sees in the new urban gettos of the periphery of Berlin, or in segregated neighbourhoods. cafes in Kosmos neighbourhood, in Marzahn – Hellesdorf, but also in Wedding and Neukolln and some places in Mitte. In these local cafes a sort of old habermasian public sphere is being (re)actualized: where issues of concern (economic, political) can be brought and discussed out of the private spaces of art, family, friends. outside the cafe is the desert of in-between spaces through which one reaches a sealed-off private house. |
the speeches are on the subject of the fate of Art (Grandville). The speeches are on the subject of the fate of Art (Ingres). The speeches are on the subject of the relationship between institutional and poetic violence.
(Broodthaers, Open Letter, November 29, 1968, addressed “Chers amis.”
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