Oι παραστάσεις του είναι ειδικά σχεδιασμένες για κάθε τόπο και μερικές φορές περιλαμβάνουν τοπικούς μουσικούς, με αποτέλεσμα κάθε φορά να δημιουργείται επί τόπου μια νέα ταινία- live cinema performance.

Μουσικά ο Vincent Moon μέσα από το “Collection Petites Planètes” μας καλεί σε ένα ηχητικό ταξίδι από τελετουργίες έκστασης στα προάστια του Ανόι έως σαμανιστικές τελετές στην καρδιά του δάσους του Αμαζονίου, από πειραματικό θόρυβο στη Σιγκαπούρη έως τελετουργίες των Σούφι στην Τσετσενία. Η Telmon και ο Moon αναπτύσσουν μια ηχητική έρευνα για την ιερή και θεραπευτική μουσική, αφήνοντας πίσω οποιεσδήποτε ιδέες για ξεχωριστά μουσικά “είδη” με σκοπό να εστιάσουμε βαθύτερα στα κοινά στοιχεία τόσο διαφορετικών ήχων.

Ο Vincent Moon είναι ανεξάρτητος κινηματογραφιστής και εξερευνητής του ήχου. Δημιουργεί ταινίες τα τελευταία είκοσι χρόνια ταξιδεύοντας σε όλο κόσμο αναζητώντας ήχους από μια rock συναυλία σε ένα γήπεδο έως σπάνιες σαμανικές τελετουργίες, από ηλεκτρονικούς πειραματισμούς μέχρι το τραγούδι χωρίς μουσικά όργανα σε ένα χωριό. Αυτό το καιρό εξερευνεί νέους δεσμούς ανάμεσα σε αρχαίες και νέες μορφές τελετών.

Παρασκευή 2 Ιουνίου 2023
ώρα 23.30
Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο Θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ – Ρ. Παλαμήδη 2 , Ψυρρή

Διοργάνωση:
ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ
http://voidnetwork.gr

TotritOsimio
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090243050675

ιστοσελίδα > www.vincentmoon.com

μουσική > www.petitesplanetes.bandcamp.com

Petites Planètes > www.petitesplanetes.earth/fr

Live Cinéma > www.vimeo.com/576375797

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες > http://www.muraillesmusic.com/…/vincent-moon-live-cinema

“Live Cinéma” by Vincent Moon is a performance – and a research into new forms of ceremonies where the French artist improvises live on stage with edited images, music and his films projected on a cinema screen.
Each performance is a unique combination of film and music, based on the recordings of his own “Collection Petites Planètes”, partly in collaboration with author and explorer Priscilla Telmon.
All performances are specially designed for each location and sometimes include local musicians, resulting in a new film being created on the spot each time.

Musically, Vincent Moon invite us to a sound travvelling from trance rituals in the suburbs of Hanoï to shamanist ceremonies in the heart of the Amazon forest, from experimental noise in Singapore to Sufi rituals in Chechnya. Telmon and Moon develop a sonic research on sacred and healing music, leaving behind any ideas of ‘genres’ to focus on the common elements of such diverse sounds.

VINCENT MOON is an independent filmaker and sound explorer from France. He has been making films in the past twenty years, travelling around the world in quest of sounds, from stadium rock music to rare shamanic rituals, from experimentations in electronics to accapella village songs. He is now expoliring links between ancient and new forms of ceremonies.

The post Vincent Moon’s Live Cinéma – Fr.2/6/2023 Free Theatre Embros appeared first on Void Network.

IN 1909, A poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow travelers, sending his car into a ditch and completely destroying the vehicle. Here’s how Marinetti described the encounter:

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming toward me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch! … I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air …

You can already tell from this account that Marinetti was a bit of an eccentric. He was a poet, after all. And while he positions the cyclists as the issue, it’s likely that Marinetti wasn’t the safest driver. The lines that lead up to this retelling of the crash recount just how fast they were going in their car, “hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron.” (In case you’re wondering, yes, there was drinking that night.)

But this account of a poet’s chaotic, life-threatening drive isn’t just some strange remnant from his personal files. The crash—to him a symbol of how the old ways (bicycles) must give way to the new ones (his car)—is what propelled Marinetti to put into writing a theory of progress that he’d been ruminating on for years. The words above are actually the beginning of The Futurist Manifesto, a document that Marinetti published in 1909 with the help of a small handful of fellow Italian artists who had dubbed themselves Futurists. What follows the car crash story is a list of 11 declarations—the tenets of Futurism.

Today, when we talk about futurism, we’re not usually talking about sculpture, painting, or poetry. Futurists today are scenario builders, people with advanced degrees in strategic foresight, science fiction writers, consultants to businesses. Futurists focus largely on technology, and the field today is inextricably linked to technologists working on everything from artificial intelligence to Crispr. And today’s Futurists almost never link their work to the existence of Marinetti, and the Italian movement that came before them. This is in part because Marinetti was an artist, and the Italian Futurists worked in paint and bronze and clay, rather than future forecasts. And there is no direct link between Marinetti’s group and the strategic foresight consultants working today. But the link is also one that today’s futurists would prefer to avoid in part because of another element of the artists behind the Futurist Manifesto of 1909: Marinetti and his cohort embraced and championed fascism. There are lessons to be learned for today’s technologists and futurists in Marinetti’s manifesto, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Let’s first take a look at the words often used to describe the Italian Futurist movement: invention, modernity, speed, industry, disruption, brash, energetic, combative. Italian Futurists were obsessed with cars and airplanes; they emphasized youth over experience; they believed that the only way to live was by pushing forward and never looking back. The first tenet in the manifesto reads, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”

Does any of this sound familiar? Disruption? Moving fast (and perhaps breaking things)? The rejection of history? Today’s most vocal voices in tech might not communicate their values with the same aplomb as the Italian poets, but they’re often saying the same kinds of things. Here’s a quote from Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of Waymo, about the value of history: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” Here’s a quote from the 1909 manifesto: “Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?” Where Marinetti declares “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!” today’s technology moguls say “the future is now.” Where the Italian Futurists were hypnotized by cars and planes, today’s technologists are drooling over rocket ships and space travel. Where Marinetti believed that women were too effeminate to bring about the kind of speedy progress he desired, former Google employee James Damore writes about how the gender gap in tech exists because men and women “biologically differ”.

Not only was Marinetti instrumental in the Futurist movement, he was also one of the artists who pushed the idea of artists as a brand. “Marinetti’s public braggadocio—and his manipulation of and engagement with the mass media—changed the way artists conceived of their relationship to the art world and popular culture,” writes Jon Mann at Artsy. Marinetti believed in the power of the manifesto, and in the idea that artists should be personas, and that they should push their narrative into the world. If Marinetti could have lived to see Elon Musk launch a red Tesla to space, he would likely have been beside himself with joy.

But Musk and his colleagues should heed the warning that the Italian Futurist movement provides. This love of disruption and progress at all costs led Marinetti and his fellow artists to construct what some call a “a church of speed and violence.” They embraced fascism, pushed aside the idea of morality, and argued that innovation must never, for any reason, be hindered. Marinetti and his movement cheered, for example, when Italy invaded Northern Africa. “Italian bombardment of Tripoli from biplanes and dirigibles was the first air bombardment in the history of the world, and thus a major technological innovation,” writes Eugene Ostashevsky. Today, some technologists praise drone warfare with similar language. “Though they painted themselves as scions of a new age, the Fascists and Futurists were really ultraconservatives ideologically,” writes Gabriel T. Rubin. Again, sound familiar? In their never-ending quest for progress at any cost, today’s companies are flirting with fascism themselves.

Amazon has been providing facial recognition software to police in the US. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, and Motorola Solutions all have contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE and are profiting off the current wave of deportations and internment camps. American scientists and technology companies are helping China track minority groups. China is also hoping Google will help it suppress any kind of information about their treatment of those minority groups. Brian Merchant at Gizmodo recently wrote about all the ways big tech companies are contributing to the current climate crisis. This is before we get into the ways that YouTube is contributing to the spread of conspiracy theories, white nationalism, and fascism.

Today’s technologists love to eschew history for the same reason the Italian Futurists did, but if they ignore the lessons contained in that movement, they’re bound to repeat it. And I’ll leave it to you to guess who said this, Marinetti or Musk: “Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the Stars!”

________

written by Rose Eveleth, an Ideas contributor at WIRED, creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

source: WIRED

The post When Futurism Led to Fascism—and Why It Could Happen Again appeared first on Void Network.

To understand the K Foundation, it’s necessary to acquire some historical knowledge. For those not in the know, Drummond and Cauty have been active in the music business for many years. Drummond moved from playing guitar with the Liverpool punk band Big In Japan, to setting up the independent Zoo Records, then on into management and A&R work for major labels. Among many other crimes against humanity, he is responsible for inflicting The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen upon an unsuspecting public. Cauty is chiefly a musician. The first fruit of their collaboration was the single All You Need Is Love, released in March 1987. Drummond and Cauty promoted this attack on the media’s coverage of AIDS with a graffiti campaign in which the slogan Shag Shag Shag was daubed over advertising hoardings.

Having made a mark as avant-hip satirists, the JAMS or Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (as the duo dubbed themselves at the time), consolidated their cult following with the release of an album entitled 1987 – What The Fuck’s Going On? The platter received rave reviews in the music press, although the record was soon suppressed by lawyers acting for ABBA who objected to the heavy sampling of their hit single Dancing Queen. Drummond and Cauty milked the legal proceedings for press coverage, then released a new version of the LP with all samples removed and detailed instructions on how to recreate the original sound.

Further records followed under a bewildering variety of names, including Disco 2000 and the KLF. The duo had their first number 1 in 1988 with Doctorin’ The Tardis which was credited to The Timelords. It was at this point that Drummond and Cauty began earning the money that currently finances the K Foundation. Stunt was followed by stunt and these pranks acted as adverts for a series of hit records. In April 1992, Drummond and Cauty dumped a dead sheep on the steps of the hotel where the Brit Awards ceremony was being held and then went on to be named Best British Group. The following month, the KLF placed a full page advert on the back of the NME announcing that they would not be releasing any new material in the foreseeable future and that their entire back catalogue was deleted.

A year later, the existence of the K Foundation was revealed in the first of a series of one page press advertisements. Having established an identity for the K Foundation, the campaign went into higher gear with the advice that ‘TIME IS RUNNING IN… SWITCH TO K TIME NOW‘. Then came an advert for a record that wasn’t available. All three of these ads invited the public to send an SAE to a post office box for further information. To date, none of the people I know who wrote to this address have received a reply. Possibly the organisation has been swamped with requests for information because ads have appeared in the NME, Guardian, Independent On Sunday and Sunday Times.

The campaign took a new turn with the fourth ad in the series, which consisted of the slogan ‘ABANDON ALL ART NOW‘ in letters nearly three inches high. After this came the announcement of the K Foundation Award, a forty thousand pound prize to be given to the artist who’d produced the worst body of work in the previous twelve months. The four nominees were identical to those chosen for the prestigious Turner Prize, which awards a mere twenty thousand pounds to its winner. The next ad in the campaign carried the headline ‘LET THE PEOPLE CHOOSE’ and a voting form, so that the public could have its say on who was the worst artist in the world.

Needless to say, Rachel Whiteread won both the Turner Prize and the K Foundation Award. Earlier in the year, Whiteread had obtained permission from Tower Hamlets council in East London to erect a temporary ‘sculpture’, in the form of a life-size concrete cast of a terraced house. It was the media coverage Whiteread’s supporters drummed up against the looming demolition of this eye-sore that brought her to widespread public attention. If, as is sometimes asserted by cultural reactionaries, the task of the artist is to give representation to the unconscious, Whiteread has succeeded admirably in her chosen vocation. Houses are traditionally considered a symbol of the unconscious, by filling a terraced house with concrete and then removing the brickwork shell, Whiteread showed herself to be intellectually, creatively and emotionally blocked — something that is evident in all her ‘work’.

In the promotional verbiage that surrounded this ‘work’, rather prosaically entitled ‘HOUSE’, Whiteread talked about the ‘sculpture’ being typical of the Victorian domestic architecture found all over London. Her desire to ‘universalise’ the meaning of this particular terrace, resulted in the original building being stripped of it’s history and the deep political implications of that history. One of the major sponsors of Whiteread’s activities was Tarmac, who were daily throwing people out of their homes so that big business could bulldoze unwanted motorways through Britain. Whiteread had nothing to say about the politics of housing until it was suggested that the money wasted on her ‘sculpture’ could have been better spent building homes, at which point she shamelessly began claiming that ‘HOUSE’ was somehow a protest against homelessness!

In the Times on 23rd November 1993, Richard Cork was given half a page to berate ‘Britain’s perennially begrudging attitude to the avant-garde’ on Turner Prize day. Among other things, Cork defended Rachel Whiteread’s reactionary work HOUSE as ‘an austere yet melancholy monument’. Neither Whiteread nor Picasso, who Cork also ‘defends’ in his piece, are actually members of the avant-garde. As Peter Burger points out in his book THEORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE, avant-gardism entails a critique of the institution of art — whereas Whiteread and Picasso enjoy an unproblematic relationship with the art world.

After Drummond and Cauty announced they’d burn forty thousand pounds worth of low denomination bank notes if Whiteread refused to accept them as prize money, this ‘artist’ took the K Foundation’s cash ‘under protest’, claiming she was forced to do so to avoid the dosh being wasted. Whiteread either has a very low estimation of the public’s intelligence or else she is just plain thick. Money is only a symbolic representation of wealth; burning it doesn’t alter the sum total of resources in the world. Indeed, millions of bank notes are burnt every year because they have become worn through use. Drummond spent a good part of Turner Prize day talking to Whiteread on the ‘phone and he concluded from these conversations that ‘she isn’t very bright’.

Drummond and Cauty dealt explicitly with the symbolic nature of money in a series of ‘works’ they created to compliment the K Foundation Award. The Melody Maker of 4th November 1993 reported that they’d produced a series of ‘art works’ which consisted of money nailed to pieces of wood, and that these were to be sold for half the value of the cash they contained. The following press statement was also quoted: ‘Over the years the face value will be eroded by inflation. While the artistic value (due to the works’ position in the amended History of Art) will rise and rise. The precise point at which the artistic value will overtake the face value is unknown. De-construct the work now and you double your money. Hang it on a wall and watch the face value erode, the market value fluctuate, and the artistic value soar. The choice is yours.’

In November 1993, the avant-garde wasn’t to be seen at the Turner Prize gathering, it was to be found among that select band of individuals who’d organised the K Foundation’s attack on the smug complacency of the arts establishment. Thanks to the adverts Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty placed around the WITHOUT WALLS tv coverage of the Turner Prize ceremony, ‘dignitaries’ such as Lord Polumbo were revealed as buffoons. While Polumbo ranted about the dunces who attack cultural innovations, his rhetoric showed him to be a complete idiot — several people immediately pointed out that he was unable to correctly name Van Goth’s art dealer brother. Likewise, Polumbo claimed that there are no monuments erected to critics and presented himself as a champion of progressive culture, while ignoring the fact that it was critics who picked the winner of the prize he was awarding.

It is the K Foundation, rather than Whiteread, who represent a vital and innovative strand within contemporary culture. Their work is simultaneously a critique and a celebration of ‘consumer capitalism’. Above all, what’s enjoyable is the gusto with which they attack the self-righteous bureaucrats who pretend to be the guardians of our culture. From the beginning, what struck me about their campaign was the way in which it drew on the same underground and avant-garde sources that had inspired many of the KLF’s finest moments. While Drummond and Cauty have moved away from the pop industry, there is a deep sense of continuity between their earlier music based work and the recent multi-media campaign.

One of the few influences on the KLF that music journalists have been able to pin down is that of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus novels. The historical material on which these books are based is part of a millenarial current that runs through western culture from the very beginning of the Christian era to the present day. These tendencies are given a more secular veneer in both communist and fascist doctrines. On the left, they are expressed in terms of ‘the end of history’. The Nazi obsession with establishing ‘a thousand year Reich’, is a different formulation of very similar concerns. Likewise, the K Foundation’s infatuation with time and its transformation is rooted in the same soil, although the branch to which Drummond and Cauty belong is that of mystical anarchism.

Springing from the same source, but to date not fully recognised as an influence on the KLF and K Foundation, is the twentieth-century tradition of avant-gardism. Movements such as the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists are well known for the pranks they pulled on the cultural establishment. F. T. Marinetti paid for his First Futurist Manifesto to appear as an advertisement in Le Figaro of 20 February 1909. In this text, Marinetti spoke of his desire to ‘destroy the museums, libraries and academies of every kind’. In other words, like the K Foundation campaign, Marinetti’s Futurist advert was an attack on institutionalised art.

Drummond and Cauty have been described on numerous occasions as Situationists, but to label them as such is rather misleading. Situationism is simply one of many movements that make up the twentieth-century avant-garde tradition. The K Foundation are undoubtedly an outgrowth of this tradition but their work is not explicitly Situationist. Indeed, it has much more in common with the Neoist, Plagiarist and Art Strike movements of the nineteen-eighties than with the avant-garde of the fifties and sixties.

Obviously, the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) shared an interest in plagiarism with the eighties avant-garde. Over the past decade, columnists in avant-garde magazines such as Photo Static and Vital have spent a great deal of time ranting about why xerox machines and sampling technology make all existing copyright laws redundant. Likewise, during the eighties, a series of Festivals of Plagiarism were held in Europe and North America so that those concerned with these issues could meet and promote their cause. Drummond and Cauty drew on the heated discussion taking place everywhere from unofficial galleries to small circulation magazines and transformed it into something capable of setting the pop charts alight.

Another concern of the eighties avant-garde was with the use of multiple names as a means of raising questions about the nature of identity. By 1986, fifty different avant-garde magazine editors were calling their publications Smile, which of course caused a great deal of confusion. Even more people were using the name Karen Eliot — so that countless pictures, articles and songs, were produced by an artist who didn’t actually exist! In a similar fashion, Drummond and Cauty’s use of a variety of names for their musical projects made the listener question traditional notions of authorship.

From 1985 onwards, propaganda began circulating amongst the avant-garde for an Art Strike, during which cultural workers would stop producing and selling any product. Drummond and Cauty’s 1992 decision not to release any more records echoes these demands and provides another example of how they’ve taken ideas developed on ‘the margins’ of contemporary culture and used them to great effect within the pop ‘mainstream’.

Returning to the K Foundation adverts, we can see that they make perfect sense when viewed in the light of the avant-garde tradition that runs from Futurism at the beginning of this century through to groups such as the Neoists and the London Psychogeographical Association in the eighties and nineties. The ultimate meaning of the K Foundation’s slogan ‘ABANDON ALL ART NOW’ is remarkably similar to that of ‘DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE’, a formulation much used by the Art Strikers. As I’ve already said, the avant-garde has always been concerned with criticising institutionalised art.

As one would expect, much of the press reacted with utter incomprehension to the K Foundation’s brilliantly conceived campaign. Charles Nevin, writing in the Independent On Sunday, described the advertisements as ‘screamingly obscure’. Susannah Herbert and Victoria Combe, reporting for the Daily Telegraph, spoke of the K Foundation being ‘incapable of reckoning the year correctly‘. Robert Sandall, in the Sunday Times, suggested that the campaign ‘served no obvious purpose other than to fritter away about £70,000’.

Several articles have stressed the fact that Drummond and Cauty have no recorded product available. This is not actually true, since much of the KLF output is readily available as American, German and Japanese imports. Likewise, the supposedly suppressed 1987 LP can be obtained easily enough in its original form as a bootleg. However, even if there was actually no product available at the retail end of the trade, the ads could still generate income for Drummond and Cauty because publishing remains the most lucrative area of the music business for major acts. Apart from anything else, the K Foundation campaign has exposed the pundits who’ve suggested the ads are economically unviable as being completely ignorant of how the entertainment industry operates and what constitutes effective advertising.

Meanwhile, a Guardian article by-lined to John Ezard, called the K Foundation Award a ‘hoax’. This description is utterly misconceived. From a financial perspective, the K Foundation Award is considerably more substantial than the Turner Prize. Rather than questioning the validity of Drummond and Cauty’s activities, anyone with a modicum of intelligence will see the intervention as a means of deflating the value of prizes awarded by bureaucratic institutions for what a bunch of suits imagine to be individual creative excellence! The K Foundation campaign functions on numerous levels but the so called quality press appears incapable of comprehending this.

And so, Drummond and Cauty are succeeding in another of their stated aims, which is to ‘divide and kreate’. The pundits who found the K Foundation campaign ‘confusing’ clearly belong among the ranks of reactionaries. Those who see the campaign as a remarkable manifestation of the contemporary avant-garde, will no doubt join the growing band of individuals who wish to build a new culture, so that they can live in a world of ever-growing ecstasy. As for future K Foundation plans, Drummond and Cauty are keeping them under wraps. When I ran into Drummond a couple of months ago, he simply told me, ‘I do what I have to do’. Something will come up and we’ll know soon enough that the K Foundation are involved in fanning the flames of creative liberation.

_____________________________

An amalgamation of an article for G-Spot and material from a lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, this mix of the material was first published in Rapid Eye #3. edited by Simon Dwyer (Creation Press, London 1995).

Stewart Home

The post Pop Stars, Sonic Weapons, Chaos: KLF attack against culture appeared first on Void Network.

It is already some weeks of quarantine. When the isolation hits you, it’s painful. I want to feel that all those restrictions are in their beginning, I am trying to become a physical endurance expert but I epically fail. Day after day, I realise that no one is around to care and I’m trying to figure the limit of this state, to imagine how it will be when things will get back to normal, while the news convinces me that nothing will get back to normal. I keep recalling a nightmare I had two years ago, a huge tsunami, which without seeing it I could feel it, shaking me, I could hear it, arriving, and when finally it will arrive, everything would be destroyed and I will end up alone talking with a bunch of strangers, trying to figure out with them how life will be from now on. Is this how life will be from now on? It is difficult to know of what it is best to do, when you know that some are suffering more than you, when some are already in the battle against the virus in hospitals, in clinics, people that go through this without a place to be, without anyone to take care of them. Whoever is fighting alone better stay online, even if the connection is poor. Try to make very short term planning and allow yourself to stay in a routine and receive cordially in the spirit of well manners the empathic “how do you feel”, “I am thinking of you” or the desperate “I miss you” in any kind of means of communication.

At some point, after England, the Netherlands announced herd immunity and in Greece strict quarantine measures were imposed on major cities, islands and slowly to rural areas, I tried to go to the studio to pick up some materials so I could create an improvised studio in my house, but until I had enough drive to send a text message to receive permission to go out- it takes one second- I ended up a couch potato. Time seems to be either passing too fast or too slowly. Every morning I try to get back to some kind of practice, but it is impossible to happen in the house, with breadcrumbs on the table. Then there is this thing about wearing a mask. I saw a few people wearing masks, or people feel that they need to keep the proper distance, and then there is a creation of a funny choreography to figure out what those limits of distance may be. You don’t know and cannot control the exact coordinates of another person’s movement before you actually encounter them. When one is going fast towards you, do you rush to predict and continue moving as you like or do you wait until they are already too close to you and you just need to turn your back to them? If you need to stay very long at a particular spot – for example checking groceries at the supermarket – do you expect the other to keep the distance or do you need to always hurry up with your instant decision making, especially when they are all made in public. When I am in the streets, the pavements are small, so I end up giving my pavement space to a possible passerby. There is no one walking too close to me but I noticed that I am insisting on doing so. The streets are different, the confines of the space limit my moves, and the choreography here becomes more syncopated, slight moves of keeping distance create accidents. Yesterday I fell down while trying to protect my speed of walking towards a man popping out from a corner. There are a few people on the streets but only to go to work but I don’t see them because I sleep 12 to 14hrs regularly. Right away I felt that there is no program, no plan and no future. At some point I lost my voice and I felt really drained and scared that the virus came to me, but then I didn’t have a temperature, and I didn’t have the “cough”, and every day I would wake up with grown anxiety. Although I don’t have a temperature I keep feeling so exhausted and I crave for a bit of rest but of course I’m noticing that as I’m scanning myself I can go in these wild kinds of waves of being quite okay with isolation and later I don’t like it at all. But, if I was living with a partner I think it would be a very different situation. I heard that in China, the divorce rate went up dramatically. Couples really started to irritate each other. So, I know that my kind of loneliness, on that front, comes from a different need, and It’s not that I miss being with someone but how to start creating an actual ease to be on my own and not feel anxious to fill any gap. I feel lucky that I am in this house and that I have my personal forms of life, but, I guess what I miss the most is the sense of forms of common life. At the same time I feel like I’m getting ready for a better relationship, with myself and with somebody else. I sometimes think that this has a positive effect cause we all needed a radical kind of deus ex machina. We were getting frenetic without reason. Everything seemed unreasonably intense. That is really unhealthy. The priorities now need to change, and we really need to reconsider what we want to accomplish as a society. Health, education and housing need to become free for all. Work needs to stop being what determines our lives. The elderly are in need of actual social relationships. We have built our whole social imagination based on a revolutionary youth and our well-being. Relationships are tough, they make you vulnerable, they are not easy but no one teaches us how to work on them but to just have them.

There is again so much commentary, so many opinions and this constant hyper state of over communication, the amount of emails, reports, posts going around about the virus and it turns out to be similar to any other topic of interest. It would be so nice to use this time to calm down instead of filling this fear of uncertainty with absolutely repetitive and meaningless bla bla… I find it really odd that this bla bla becomes a general behaviour. I mean it’s an interesting moment to observe that this global phenomenon does create different ways of working through it. It’s so interesting how this takes place, you know, in Hong Kong for instance they went into this already weeks ago, they are so well coordinated. I think they’re looking at us westerners like we’re completely crazy, in denial, careless, like walking death wishes. It is unbearable how difficult it is for people to stop with commerce. There are strict measures in Greece and even though the streets are kind of empty people hang out in random places and they talk to each other through their balconies. It is interesting to see how this is going to play out as the cases are going to rise. You also have groups of people starting this spontaneous clapping and honking of horns and this whooping thank you to health workers, and for some of us who are alone, it gives us a sense of touch and a sense of “we” that happens, and we are all drastically entering a moment of a history that we are all part of, everyone with their unique capacities come closer out of this simple gesture.

We are all sick!

This is not the first time we are faced with a global experience. For centuries we have been facing the violence of capitalism, its destructive program upon various ecosystems and the societies of this planet. It is not the first time we are facing the horrors of the nation-state’s desperate organisation of control and order. And it is not the first time that we experience social dead ends. We were getting out from this pain when we invented ways to turn pain into courage, into imagination and when we transformed fear into action; the silence into voice and self-determination. In which way could we possibly allow the virus to become our friend? The virus is treated from all the nation-states as another parasite that we need to kill, though our convictions are the enemy and how we have been cultivating a separate body and mind. As long as we have been learning to understand everything through binaries we do the same now: applying an internal mechanism of control to our bodies that will be permanently treated as sick and as a threat to ourselves and others. “We are all immigrants”, a slogan written all over Athens in 2015. But now it feels that we cannot claim that “we are all sick!”. What are we waiting for? Mortality is not ethics, it is not an ideology, there is no logic to mortality, how can we live without wanting to conqueror death? We cannot defeat  death but we can create counter intuitive ways to respond to change, vulnerability and weakness. If we recall how our bodies were before the virus started spreading they were overworked, exhausted, not so much healthier than now.  Lots of allergies, autoimmune diseases, stress, panic attacks were some of the effects of the constant pressure to be productive and efficient, along with prioritising well-being and economic security. All of those demands were also the sacrifice of any social relation that wasn’t for the benefit of both ourselves and our role in society, our work and status. Our lives were in constant split between personal desires and social duties and in constant neediness from our bodies to be on both sides in their full capacities no matter what.

How will those bodies be after the quarantine is over? Probably with the same symptoms but with an extra pressure that comes with the complete mistrust of the public sphere and its capacity to heal us. A retreat of the body from the mind while in quarantine and when there is at the same time a constant threat, deaths announced, people talking about this constantly, creates a parallel reality of the virus taking over while desire and duty can only rule while the body sustains. This double reality erupts our kairos. the very notion of the modality of time, and its unpredictability. In this moment of emergency whoever has a home will recruit new ways to survive. Narcissism, self-doubt, over-enthusiasm will come and go in waves and they will bring with them bodily symptoms of breathing and skin sensitivities, appetite disorders, lack of sleep, loss of memory. There is a new subjectivity created during the quarantine but there is also a new understanding of a time determined only by predictability. Kairos is gone; and when that concept of time is gone the sense of the public sphere also starts to fade away. It is up to us now to treat ourselves against the loss of kairos. We could invent new understandings of recovery that can effectively heal ourselves and prepare others for the aftermath of all of these. We can make our treatment heal the public space by recalling it: recalling touch, accident, our first encounter with friends. We can bring together various medicinal methods and knowledge of different traditions and take back our bodies and kairos. Our immunity to the unpredictable time (kairos)  will be the one that can treat the streets, the corners, the empty spaces of our cities, and it will touch the buildings making them meaningful again. 

Death will not become another spectacle

Solidarity is the first word that comes to mind when things are in crisis, but the imperative of any reproductive labor is the effect that it brings in the present moment through practice and engagement with one-another, like art is the joy of not knowing, of no control, allowing accidents and incredibly fabulous failures to happen. All of our struggles to heal the pain and the violence caused by authoritarian and patriarchal systems happened through gathering together. But how do you build solidarity when you can’t come in contact with other people? This moment of self-policing can’t force upon us a new split between us and our bodies. What my body would like to do now is not what my mind says to my body to do and what I am forced to obey. It is not what the virus teaches me. Do I listen to the virus or the state regulations? If the virus is a friend it will teach me how body and mind can be transformed by accepting each other without hierarchy and this solidarity is to build solidarity with the virus itself, the foreign entity, the unknown, the one that it can’t be controlled, a guest who comes in without any warning and guarantee. Our bodies are hosts and based on the current events, global capitalism turns in his totalitarian phase: all the nation-states entered the phase of the global-fascist model of “dual state”. According to Ernst Fraenkel’s portrayal of Nazi Germany as a “dual state” there is a “normative state”, composed of lengthy constituted authorities and the traditional civil service, jostled for power with “prerogative state” formed by the party’s parallel organisations. The governance’s “normative segment” of a fascist regime continues to apply the law according to due process and officials in that sector were recruited and promoted according to bureaucratic norms of competence and seniority. In the “prerogative sector”, by contrast, no rules applied except the whim of the ruler, the gratification of party militants, and the supposed “destiny” of the Volk (people), the nazza, or other “chosen people”. But today, while the global economy has become the destiny of the planet and its inhabitants, and we daily experience the split of Europe and the globe between the North and South, between the rulers and the slaves; we are also, during the epidemic, witnessing nation-states regulating laws to control the epidemic while supporting the split for their own people by exclusion by who is allowed for example to economic help, to health care, and who has access to tests. While the global elites fly with private jets out of the infected cities to remote places, and the tv triggers us with fear and panic and the “untouched” rich and famous who did the test, had the virus and they are medicated in some luxurious hospital somewhere safe; global capitalism has turned into totalitarian capitalism. The “normative states” of the globe are closing their borders, they are constituted authorities and keep the automatic pilot with the civil services providing to the people the impression that they continue to maintain some basic rights. On the other side  the newly established “prerogative states”: the corporations, the elites and the ruling class of the globe (leaders and CEO’s of mega tech industries, scientists and programmers) are regulating laws in the name of the one and most important priority: Capitalism, profit, money and power above all. This transformation will affect us all but most profoundly will change our ontological understanding of our own bodies.

But how do you reclaim something that is unsafe? I am in isolation for twenty days and I am not able to touch, kiss, hug anyone, all my actions are enclosed in privacy. I exist but if there is no other person to claim my existence I need to turn my body into a private entity, all my functions become private and all the public that is scattered in the streets and the corners of the metropolis, the junky, the homeless, the immigrant becomes an issue for the state to interfere, while the law is protecting the ones who are in privacy. Everything that is public is even more criminalised. The biopolitics in its actual sense turns its violence to the bodies that are not recognised by the nation-state; and now in this category of sovereignty adds on the sick. The body handed accountability is only the one that has given legal recognition: the legal body is a part of the community that defines it, so better find a group to define and categorise your “body” with a particular identity. The legal body is an individual, an organisation, or an entity that has given legal recognition, a compilation of laws known as “ body of laws” and for the “normative segment” this identity needs to be clear and not threatening to the flow of the economy. The productive, work-machine, the resilient subject, the survivalist. Us against ourselves. All of our interactions are feedback loops, and whoever was used to it already through online services now all of us need to get used to it and make ourselves specific insofar that we can survive. This call for survival makes me nauseous. This endless resilience has formed another sense of body. And if I am sick that changes the very sovereignty to my own body. Do I claim that I am sick or do I keep having the rights of my own body?

How can you claim the means of production when the means of production are dangerous? While more regulations of isolation are placed on the working class, the poor, the immigrant, the elderly and as any other reorganisation of work, is dictated to secure a healthier, and more productive labor force and repels the surge for working-class organisation. In this case right now, we are also faced with a paradigm shift, the physical space of work has been infected. As slowly most of the work moves to the house, the working-class is domesticated. What kind of class struggle can happen in the home? There is a need for soft subversions in the domestic private sphere and to welcome a new class struggle that happens in the kitchen. This is the moment of a combined productive and reproductive labor struggle and its name will be “body struggle”. Working performance happens in the house, in the private sphere, relationships are going online, and emotions are going with the flow; while the virus is spreading, the virus is not covid-19 but totalitarian capitalism.

The enemy becomes the social sphere: Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the founding scholars of the “totalitarian” model, coined the term “islands of separation” to describe elements of civil society that survive within a totalitarian dictatorship. The only islands I see surviving are the bureaucracy, the police, the tax offices, the banks, and the state and finally our own singular bodies, which are not anymore safe to hold any public interactions. Everything social becomes private, while suffering takes place capitalism protects the tax-payer, the businesses, the nuclear family, the borders and the rich. In the midst of all of these friends, relatives die and no one will ever know in which way this occurred. We know that there are many deaths but it is devastating to see the numbers on a statistical scale and the globe becoming red on a screen. Those bodies are beings, they are not numbers. Whatever consensus we all had to protect one another from the epidemic doesn’t give us the right to look at bodies as numbers. We need to turn off the computers, turn off the screens and invent other ways to connect and communicate. Death will not become another spectacle.

Georgia Sagri, Athens, 2020

Georgia Sagri is an interdisciplinary artist. Currently, she continues her ongoing research practice ”IASI” based on issues of reproductive labor, care, self-care and recovery with the support of three non-for profit institutions: Mimosa House, London; TAVROS, Athens; De Appel, Amsterdam. She is the initiator of the semi-public/semi-private space Ύλη[matter]HYLE (hyle.gr). She is the Tenure professor of Performance Art at the School of Fine Arts in Athens.

• Feature image: Georgia Sagri, Breathing (5-1-5), 2020, performance, 30’, 5th March 2020, Mimosa House, London.

all photos by Lucy Parakhina / © Georgia Gagri

The post Death will not become another spectacle – Georgia Sagri appeared first on Void Network.

______________________

Καλησπέρα. Είναι χαρά μας που σας έχουμε και πάλι κοντά μας τόσο σύντομα μετά την τελευταία ατομική εμφάνισή σας στη χώρα μας. Καταρχήν θα ήθελα να ρωτήσω πώς νοιώθετε τόσα χρόνια στη σκηνή και ειδικότερα με το Van Der Graff Generator concept. Κατά πόσο αισθάνεστε πως ο κόσμος μας έχει αλλάξει και με ποιους τρόπους, μετά την τελευταία εμφάνισή σας μαζί τους στην Ελλάδα, στο θέατρο του Λυκαβηττού; 

Είμαι πολύ χαρούμενος που επιστρέφω, φυσικά. Στον δικό μας μικρόκοσμο αυτό που έχει αλλάξει φυσικά είναι πως υπήρξαμε από το 2007 ένα τρίο και αυτή θα είναι η πρώτη φορά που θα παίξουμε με αυτή τη μορφή στην Ελλάδα. Τώρα ως προς τον κόσμο γενικότερα, νομίζω πως θα μπορούσαμε να πούμε πως είναι πολύ πιο τρομακτικός στις μέρες μας…

Τι ρόλο θα παίξει το Van Der Graff project στο πλαίσιο της οντολογίας της πιο μακρόπνοης καλλιτεχνικής σας δουλειάς; Γιατί πιστεύω πως πρόκειται για κάτι παραπάνω από μια συνηθισμένη ροκ μπάντα!

Τα τελευταία χρόνια είχαν πολύ ενδιαφέρον, καθώς ασχολούμαστε με live υλικό των Van Der Graff και ηχογραφησεις – και μετά εγώ επέστρεφα στις ατομικές εμφανίσεις. Πρόκειται για πολύ διαφορετικούς κόσμους. Θα μπορούσα να πω πως πολύ από το υλικό της μπάντας, παλαιότερο και νέο, είναι ιδιαίτερα δύσκολο. 

Ποια είναι η αγαπημένη σας δουλειά από το Van Der Graff Generator; Πόσο πολύ η Πλαισίωση που παράγει η νέα τεχνολογία και ειδικά οι ψηφιακές τεχνολογίες που αυτή περιλαμβάνει διαδρουν με τη μουσική σας;

Στ’αλήθεια δεν έχω κάποιο αγαπημένο. Απλά επικεντρώνομαι στο να παίζω το κομμάτι που κάνουμε κάθε φορά. Η χρήση κάποιων σύγχρονων τεχνολογιών είναι πολύ χρήσιμη, για παράδειγμα προκειμένου να μεταφέρουμε ηχογραφημένα κομμάτια. Επίσης τα σύγχρονα fx και τα εργαλεία είναι πολύ καλά! 

Σε ποιο βαθμό έχουν επηρεαστεί οι χαρακτήρες και η δραματική ατμόσφαιρα των τραγουδιών σας από την ουσιαστική αίσθηση της υπαρξιακής μοναξιάς;

Σε κάποιες περιπτώσεις συμβαίνει αυτό, αλλά δεν βρίσκονται όλοι οι χαρακτήρες σε αυτήν την κατάσταση. Ιδιαιτέρως σε αρκετά από τα πιο καινούρια τραγούδια όπου προσπαθώ να αποδώσω την αίσθηση του να είσαι, εχμ, κάπως vintage… Σίγουρα δεν είναι το ίδιο με τη νιότη. 

Σε μια κουβέντα που είχαμε πρόσφατα είχατε αναφέρει πως σας ανησυχούσε το brexit και οι επιπτώσεις του στις συνεργασίες και τα καλλιτεχνικά δρώμενα ανάμεσα στην Ευρώπη και το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο. Κατά πόσο πιστεύετε πως το brexit είναι μια πραγματικότητα, ότι αυτοί οι φόβοι έχουν επαληθευτεί; 

Είμαι ακόμη πιο απαισιόδοξος ως προς αυτό που θα έχουμε να αντιμετωπίσουμε ως χώρα σε σχέση με το brexit. Νομίζω πως έχουμε να κάνουμε με την πιο θεαματική και κακοζυγισμένη αυτοχειρία. 

Η ζωή, ο θάνατος και ο Έρως πηγαινοέρχονται στη μουσική σας. Πώς έγιναν αυτές οι κομβικές εκφάνσεις της ύπαρξης με την πιο δραματική τους έννοια βασικά συστατικά της δουλειάς σας;.

Ειλικρινά πιστεύω πως αυτά αποτελούν το κίνητρο πίσω από τις περισσότερες καλλιτεχνικές προσπάθειες. Είναι τα μυστήρια που μας απασχολούν όλους. 

Θα θέλατε να μας περιγράψετε τις σχέσεις και τις καλλιτεχνικές συνεργασίες που έχετε με τα υπόλοιπα μέλη του Van Der Graff σήμερα;

Παραμένουμε καλοί φίλοι, φυσικά. Και είμαστε δεμένοι σ’αυτήν την καλλιτεχνική περιπέτεια την οποία συνεχίζουμε ως μια πρόκληση μεταξύ μας αλλά και για τον καθένα χωριστά. Όπως λέω συχνά, πρόκειται για σοβαρή πλάκα!

Η Μνήμη και ο Χρόνος επίσης φαίνονται να έχουν μεγάλη σημασία στην καλλιτεχνική σας εμπειρία. Θα ήταν πολύ ενδιαφέρον για τους αναγνώστες μας να μάθουν από εσάς πώς ενσωματώνετε αυτές τις έννοιες στη δουλειά σας. 

Θα προτιμούσα να αφήσω τα τραγούδια να μιλήσουν αντί για μένα. Πολλά τραγούδια αναφέρονται σε αυτό το ζήτημα και το αντιμετωπίζουν με διαφορετικούς τρόπους. 

Ποια είναι τα μελλοντικά σχέδιά σας μετά από αυτές τις εμφανίσεις; Δουλεύετε πάνω σε κάτι για το οποίο θα μπορούσατε να μας αποκαλύψετε περισσότερες λεπτομέρειες;

Όχι, για να είμαι ειλικρινής είναι ήδη αρκετά μεγάλη η πρόκληση των επικείμενων 3 εμφανίσεων και των τραγουδιών που θα παίξουμε. Και πιστεύω πως όλοι θα χρειαστούμε λίγη ξεκούραση μετά από αυτό. Υποθέτω πως η επόμενη δουλειά μου θα είναι ατομική αλλά αυτή τη στιγμή δεν έχω κάποια συγκεκριμένη ιδέα για το τι θα γίνει. 

Με ποιους τρόπους πιστεύετε πως η μουσική και οι υπόλοιπες οπτικοακουστικές δουλειές θα μετασχηματιστούν μέσα στην επόμενη δεκαετία; Ο ρόλος του καλλιτέχνη ως μοναδικής φωνής μέσα στην πολιτισμική “άγρια φύση” αλλάζει δραματικά μέρα με τη  μέρα. Η ενσωμάτωση τεχνολογικών στοιχείων που πλαισιώνουν την καλλιτεχνική δουλειά μεταλλάσσει την ψυχή του και την ύπαρξή του με διάφορους τρόπους. Ποιές είναι οι σκέψεις σας πάνω σε αυτό το ζήτημα;

Με μουσικούς όρους, συγκεκριμένα, πιστεύω πως οι μουσικοί και οι στιχουργοί θα δυσκολευτούν πολύ γιατί τουλάχιστον σε οικονομικό επίπεδο, η δουλειά τους μοιάζει να μην εκτιμάται πια. 

Τι ρόλο έπαιξε και τι σηματοδοτεί για την καλλιτεχνική σας ζωή η δημοσίευση πριν από πενήντα χρόνια του γόνιμου έργου “The Least We Can Do Is Wave To each Other”; Πείτε μας για τα συναισθήματά σας αλλά και για τον τίτλο. 

Υποθέτω πως χωρίς αυτό δεν θα ήμασταν σήμερα εδώ και πως έθεσε τον καμβά για τις επόμενες δουλειές. Όμως γράφτηκε πριν από πολύ, πολύ καιρό… 

Τι σημαίνει να είναι κανείς καλλιτέχνης, και μάλιστα για τόσο πολύ καιρο; Πώς συγκρίνεται η εμπειρία της εμφάνισης με αυτήν της ηχογράφησης; 

Στη σκηνή είσαι ή τουλάχιστον πρέπει να είσαι παρών στη στιγμή και αν κάνεις λάθη μπορείς να βγάλεις κάτι από αυτά και να συνεχίσεις. Στο στούντιο διαμορφώνεις την κάθε στιγμή. Φυσικά όμως και τα δύο πρέπει να τα προσεγγίζεις με απόλυτη προσήλωση. 

Τι να περιμένει το κοινό σας αυτή τη φορά από την εμφάνισή σας στην Ελλάδα;

Μια μίξη από παλιά και νέα τραγούδια. Κάποιες συναρπαστικές εκτελέσεις, ελπίζω. Και πολύ κέφι!

Τι είναι αυτό που είναι τόσο απλό και συνάμα τόσο αινιγματικό στην Αγάπη;

Όπως λένε, η αγάπη κάνει τον κόσμο να γυρίζει. 

Ευχαριστώ πολύ. Τις καλύτερες ευχές μας για την επικείμενη εμφάνισή σας. 

Ήταν χαρά μου. Ευχαριστώ.

_____________

Γιάννης Ραουζαίος / Κενό Δίκτυο

πηγή: Zoomout.gr

The post Συνέντευξη του Peter Hammill στον Γιάννη Ραουζαίο appeared first on Void Network.

“Trojan Horses” appeared at the height of the Reagan years in the U.S., a highly charged political period that saw a heavy backlash against progressive and feminist ideas in the so-called culture wars waged by the Right. Lippard reported from the trenches, not only providing context and arguments, but also offering contemporary examples of activist art and cultural resistance. My interest here lies less in retelling those stories—for that one doesn’t need to look any further than the essay itself—than in focusing on Lippard’s central argument. Yet it should be mentioned that one aspect of the examples is particularly striking now: the sheer number of engaged practices fusing art and activism in a decade most commonly understood in art historical terms as a postmodern, object-based, commodity-oriented and even apolitical decade—and often either derided or commended for those very features. However, as Lippard’s survey and other sources point out, there is also another history, a counter-history. Moreover, the 1980s now appear to have witnessed a much larger movement of artistic activism than, say, the 1990s and its often heralded return to the social and political in art, not to mention our present decade . . .

Lippard’s argument is not merely historical, though, but also offers something resembling ontology, or even “hauntology,” and it does so from the outset, from its very title and its invocation of an example that is not so much historical as it is mythological: the Trojan Horse. Like the Trojan Horse, activist art enters hallowed halls where it does not properly belong by way of a disguise—by being an alluring aesthetic object, it pushes into the institution of art, both concretely and metaphorically. But unlike the Trojan Horse, activist art is not instrumental in the violent overthrow of a regime, but works rather by subverting the very idea of an aesthetic object. Obviously, in (art) activist circles and beyond, the debate continues as to whether this subversion is merely a masquerade—a purely strategic universalism that pretends to be “art” in order to gain access—or whether we are dealing with a Janus-faced identity: at once activist and aesthetic. And then there is the possibility of activist art masquerading as a Janus!

Crucial to the idea of the Trojan Horse is the possibility of movement from the outside of a stronghold to the inside by means of artistic production. Indeed, for Lippard, the foremost characteristic of activist art is that it moves between art institutions and local, political communities and contexts—sometimes engaging so significantly in the latter that visibility in the former becomes secondary, irrelevant, even obsolete. Activist art, then, is not a genre, not an ism, but is rather an engagement in social issues and social change through a great variety of methods and mediums. It is pragmatic rather than idiomatic. Therefore, the question of whether or not it is art, and whether artistic production is a useful platform for political change, does not come up. Politics is seen in terms of how one acts in the situation one is in—a question of how one engages. Rather than maintaining a dichotomy between art and activism or between aesthetics and politics, another strategic, albeit tentative distinction is established between political art and activist art, between social concerns and commentary on the one hand, and community involvement and organizing on the other.

These two approaches are united by the concept of power: the power of art and the power of the people. As Lippard duly notes, no one can achieve change alone—not even famous artists. Change can only be realized as part of a movement, hence the focus on community building and consciousness-raising found in much art activism. But artists also have access to power through their framing and reframing of the visible and seemingly invisible, through subversion of rather than subservience to dominant discourses of visibility and representation. Furthermore, according to Lippard, artists have among producers a uniquely high degree of control over their production, if not their post-production and distribution. While there certainly are employers in the art world, in its wider context of cultural production, and in the knowledge economy, an initial control over the means of artistic production is taken for granted; and to whatever degree, and, crucially, to whom, this control is then relinquished—be it to institutions, collectors, collaborators, or communities—this comprises a political decision paralleling those that govern the initial production of images themselves. In other words, the struggle today is not only over the production of images and ideas, but also over their dissemination and distribution, a struggle that cannot be endured alone, but always with, as well as against others: embedded and expanded.

× introduction written by Simon Sheikh

Read the essay at the Void Network library:

Lucy Lippard:

Trojan horses activist art and power pdf

The post Trojan Horses- Activist art and power by Lucy Lippard- a historic essay positively revisited appeared first on Void Network.

Among the groundswell of books investigating the link between aesthetics and politics, Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader is particularly ambitious. Published in 2007 as a companion volume to the historical survey exhibition Forms of Resistance at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland, the book features a wide-ranging collection of texts and manifestos, divided into four sections corresponding to four major watersheds in contemporary social and political history: the Paris Commune of 1871, the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the social uprisings of 1968 and the 1989 revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc.

Editors Will Bradley and Charles Esche have completed the anthology by inviting six contemporary critics (Geeta Kapur, Lucy Lippard, John Milner, Gerald Raunig, Marina Vishmidt, and Tirdad Zolghadr) to provide both a historical context and an interpretation for some of the readings. However, the interpretative framework remains light enough that the core of the project resides in the selection of historical documents produced by the artists and activists themselves.

Image: Poster by Emory Douglas

Thus, a critical appraisal of Art and Social Change can only start from matters of inclusion and exclusion. Even though Bradley and Esche do not make their criteria explicit, it is fair to say that the anthology has been compiled following a genealogical approach. Rather than searching for a mythical origin and its historic continuity, a genealogy sets out to ‘maintain passing events in their proper dispersion’, as Foucault explained after Nietzsche. The genealogist focuses on the numberless beginnings,

the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals, the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us.¹

By cutting through discontinuities and heterogeneous layers to isolate ‘different points of emergence’ in history, the genealogical approach avoids any identitarian closure, leaving the reader free to invent a trajectory through the material – and crucially, to decide upon its value in the present. However, Bradley’s introduction does argue that the selection retraces geographically ‘what might be termed the “globalisation of modernism”‘:

The conception of art primarily at issue here is a modern, Western one that has been disseminated around the planet as the social, economic, and political conditions and institutions that support it have been replicated.²

This is only partly true, as the editors downplay or ignore the socially engaged art of Southern European countries such as Italy, Spain, and Greece, the decolonisation movements of the 1960s, and the entire Asian and Australian continents where the globalisation of modernism has been under way for several decades. About a half of the selected authors are from the Americas, most notably the United States, and, in a much smaller measure, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba. On the other side of the Atlantic, the book pays due homage to the European avant gardes with a specific focus on France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Poland, and a handful of artists from Eastern and Northern Europe (Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, Denmark, and Sweden). Closing gestures toward Asia and the Middle East serve primarily as a reminder of territories still unexplored.

But if we accept that this is mostly a ‘modern, Western’ selection, it is nevertheless worth highlighting some thematic blind spots. Striking by its omission, for example, is the powerful mural painting movement that began around Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros in Mexico and went on to inspire the socially engaged artists of the United States in the 1930s. This kind of gap is perfectly comprehensible if we read the anthology as a genealogy of post-’68 practices, turned decisively away from any mass address or modernising program, emphasising instead the autonomy and singularity of each experience. But if that is the case, then it would have been useful to include texts by the subcultures and creative fringes of social movements such as the Indiani Metropolitani of the Italian 1977, the activist side of punk, and all the experiments in guerrilla communication and culture jamming that stem from the No Future generation.

The scope of the book is broad enough to reveal surprising patterns and potential alliances among experiences that took place several decades apart and under quite different political circumstances. We shall now unpack a few of them by way of a conversation that will also include some of the missing references highlighted above.

Image: Leaflet publicising the Situationist International Anthology, 1981

Marco Deseriis: The book starts from a highly symbolic historic conjuncture, the Paris Commune of 1871. At the time, the bourgeois separation between art and social praxis was a fait accompli. The industrial revolution had just dealt a fatal blow to craftsmanship – an activity in which manual and intellectual skills, the pursuit of the aesthetic and the useful were still integrated. Once production was rationalised, artworks began to be identified only by their belonging to the aesthetic sphere. The theory of l’art pour l’art reflected this status quo: the removal of art from practical life and the tendency of artworks to lose their social function. With the Commune, however, the bourgeois autonomy of art came under scrutiny. Gustave Coubert’s call to artists to take over museums and art collections in the course of the uprising, and William Morris’ socialist conception of art ‘as a necessity of human life which society has no right to withdraw from any one of the citizens’, tell us that by the end of the 19th century artists had begun to reclaim a social function for art, in alliance with the workers’ movement.³

Brian Holmes: The anthology reflects on its own departure point by including the Situationists’ ‘Theses on the Commune’ from 1962. For them it was a gigantic festival marked by leaderless spontaneity, clearing the ground for a kind of ‘unitary urbanism’ by destroying the monuments of domination. Yet they also saw Courbet as a deluded idealist who toppled the Vendôme Column while ignoring the nearby Bank of France, ripe for looting. What really counted for the Situationists were the material results and the live aesthetic experiences of the Commune – an attitude passed on to the direct-action movements of 1990s.

There could have been another departure point, however: the 1848 revolutions, a fully-fledged cycle of struggles stretching all over Europe. In France, 1848 marked the first time urbanised workers recognised themselves as a class subject to unemployment, homelessness and starvation, and the first time they forced themselves onto the public stage of representative democracy. It’s the archetypal contemporary conflict, experienced by factions of the entitled classes as a crisis of legitimacy that drove them into new political solidarities and utopian aesthetic experiments. It’s clear why the editors of the anthology didn’t want to sift through the flood of romantic idealism produced by that brief outburst of bourgeois experimentation. Yet here is a problem I see throughout the post-’68 left: a refusal to deal with the full complexity of social relations, and with the ambiguous or even disfigured forms they inevitably leave behind.

MD: Right, the social composition of the revolutionary wave of 1848 was very diverse and stratified. It included the urban petty bourgeoisie agitating for liberal reforms and national independence, as well as dispossessed farmers and factory workers. The thinker of the time who tried to integrate these social contradictions in a powerful aesthetic and political vision is Charles Fourier. Even if the phalanstères were designed to host the rich and the poor, and to restore social harmony without questioning the basis of capitalist accumulation, still they inspired many utopian communitarian experiments to come. Fourier conceived of labour as a pleasurable, playful activity to be modelled after human attitudes and desires. This made his theories quite appealing to the Surrealists and the Situationists, and in general to all social movements which place a high value on the productive power of imagination.

Images: Destruction of Colonne Vendôme, Paris, 1871

Fourier’s vision, which is unfortunately left out of this anthology, could be seen as an early instance of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism. Mostly developed by intellectuals, bohemians and exiles of the bourgeoisie, this critique targets the alienation and oppression derived from the Fordist organisation of labour and industrial specialisation of functions. It has been historically accompanied by the working class critique of the inequalities which stem from the unbounded accumulation of wealth characteristic of capitalism. But since this ‘social critique’ of inequalities does not necessarily imply a critique of alienation and oppression, and vice versa, Boltanski and Chiapello note that, depending on historical circumstances, these two types of critique may find themselves in association or in collision.⁴

The social critique is represented in the anthology by two separate strands. The first runs from the Commune to Berlin Dada, the Surrealists, and after WWII, the Situationists International (SI) and the San Francisco Diggers. These groups all share the belief that art can be fully realised only by being abolished as an autonomous sphere – a task that for them is inextricably tied to the abolition of capitalism. The second strand is represented by the Bauhaus and De Stijl, which try to overcome the dichotomy between manual and intellectual work, functionalism and pleasure, by introducing new design principles into industrial production. In one respect, Russian constructivism can be associated with this second modernist strand in that it also tries to merge art and industrial production; yet on an ideological level it is closer to Dada and the Situationists in its fierce rejection of any style or aesthetics which is not subjected to the transient, historic needs of the working class.

BH: All that is well said, but to locate social critique in movements that sought either to turn art into everyday life or to fuse art and industrial design is to underscore what’s been left out of this genealogy. Variations on socialist realism were spread around the world by the 1936 Popular Front against fascism, then reinvented in surprising ways by Third World liberation movements, often via surrealism. But they are barely represented here, so it’s hard to grasp the affinities between the Black Panther graphics of Emory Douglas in the US, the murals of the Brigadas Ramona Parra in Chile, and the posters of the Atelier Populaire in France. The missing link is revolutionary Cuba and the Tricontinental movement, which produced an influential series of posters advocating global revolution. The inclusion of the 1972 ‘Call to the Artists of Latin America’ gives an inkling of the leftist politics, but not of its visual traditions. Well, the editors found the genealogies of direct action and self-organisation more compelling, and so do I. Still, there have been fantastic political experiments with the popular languages of street art, which bear much closer relation to the workers’ movement and its social critique. Contemporary groups spring to mind, like Ne Pas Plier in France, or the Grupo de Arte Callejero and the Taller Popular de Serigrafia in Argentina, not to mention ongoing muralist movements in cities like Los Angeles.

MD: Yes, the murals and the political posters you mention (to which I would add the anarchist posters of the Spanish Civil War) are only marginally represented here. The reader seems to privilege expressive forms such as performances, manifestos, and calls to action. Of course, activist murals and posters can also incite action, but the visual representation of resistance is always at risk of being instrumentalised by political vanguards, or of being turned into folk art after its ties to a living social struggle have been severed.

In this respect, Debord’s analysis of the spectacle may still be relevant. The reader features another situationist text, explaining that the expulsion of 28 members was due to their refusal to renounce their artistic careers – a position deemed incompatible with the SI.⁵ This highlights a contradiction that keeps haunting activist art. If social movements have always expressed their imagining activity in one form or another, the culture industry puts these representations at risk of being commodified. As you noted in ‘The Flexible Personality’, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that it was by neutralising social critique through economic concessions and by subsuming artistic critique that capitalism was able to enter its late phase.⁶

BH: The anarcho-libertarian vein of the ’68 movements was selectively mined for whatever could fit into the emerging hegemony of neoliberalism. This cultural integration is the glue that holds together a disjointed system. Boltanski and Chiapello were able to document the process by a statistical analysis of ’68-era terms being used in managerial literature. But they see no value in artistic critique. They lament the decline of the workers’ movement and they idealise the welfare period without questioning the welfare-warfare state, but they offer no resources for the characteristic struggles of the present.

By the late 1990s it was clear that whole new dimensions of alienation were setting in, not only on the receiving end of surveillance and monitoring, but at every level of professional and freelance practice. Individuals were constantly enjoined to be more productive, more appetitive, more intensively plugged into the digital prosumer system. All that was unimaginable without new developments in what I call the semiotic economy, referring both to the frenetic consumption of signs and images and to the continuous creation of credit money on the financial markets – two inseparable phenomena. Since the dead ends of this ‘new economy’ were already visible, I thought that artists should both critique the contemporary forms of alienation and find ways to revolt against them, in solidarity and collaboration with more directly oppressed and exploited people.

Image: San Francisco Diggers distributing free food, 1966

MD: The counter-culture was not only selectively mined to reorganise workflows around teamwork and flexibility, but also to harness its ethics of openness, sharing and decentralisation in the service of primitive accumulation in the IT sector. Fred Turner has shown how the encounter of San Francisco flower power with the technological culture of the Silicon Valley gave birth to what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have labelled as the Californian Ideology, the ‘anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism’, which provided the ‘spirit’ of the late 1990s dotcom boom.⁷

In this respect Art and Social Change tells only the first part of the story. No doubt, the Diggers’ ‘post-competitive game’ to build Free Cities across America, and their hilarious plan of action to persuade corporate employees to abandon the workplace – summarised in the slogan ‘Give Up Jobs. Be With People. Defend Against Property’ – offers a powerful blend of social and artistic critique.⁸ But after purging this critique of its radical aspects, flexible capital offered workers the option of fleeing the office (but not work) through the new communication technologies; to ‘be with people’ by expressing their own creative and relational qualities in teamwork; and to overshadow the issue of property and distribution of wealth under the ideology of the gift economy and free access to the information society. The result is that nowadays everyone is entitled to have free internet access, no matter whether they are homeless or survive on food stamps!

The largely untold side of this story, or its ‘obscene underside’ as Žižek would call it, is that the creative class quickly gentrifies the new urban districts where internet access is free but housing prohibitively expensive. Over the last two decades the cultural production of Richard Florida’s ‘high bohemians’ has been appropriated and re-sold at exorbitant prices by the real estate industry: in spite of their low income, artists are no longer seen as potential allies by the working class, but simply as the spearhead of gentrification.⁹ I think we need to ask ourselves how to reverse this trend. Where would you start from?

BH: I started by using new media to take to the streets, to spark confrontations. The thing is, spectacle has acquired a different meaning since the advent of flexible accumulation. It is no longer the homogeneous mass-produced image that characterised the state and corporate media of the 1950s and ’60s. Now it is something you constantly produce through a plethora of miniaturised devices. It has to be critiqued in motion, at the heart of interactivity.

This anthology contains great insights into the sources of what is now called ‘tactical media’, particularly in a series of texts running from Cildo Meireles’ ‘Insertions into Ideological Circuits’ to Paul Ryan’s ‘Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare’. The meeting between multimedia computers and the concept-art strategies for the activation of the viewer is directly prefigured in the alternative video movements envisioned by the journal Radical Software in 1970. Just as Meireles suggested in the Brazilian context, it is a matter of inserting subversive expressions into the very circuits where life under late capital is configured. To appropriate the media is tantamount to appropriating the means of production because, as Félix Guattari pointed out, what’s at stake is the production of subjectivity.¹⁰

Image: Theo van Doesburg, Counter-Composition V, 1924

Later developments can be glimpsed in the glossary of net-culture terms by the Raqs Media Collective or the interview with Ricardo Dominguez, one of the founders of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre. His work resonates with the hybrid border-crossing art of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and with the ‘invisible theatre’ of Augusto Boal in 1970s Brazil, which shifted Brecht’s alienation-effect into everyday spaces of performance. Figures like Boal are sources for the performative politics of the Zapatistas, with whom Dominguez has closely cooperated. So even in the most high-tech, networked performance there is a transformation of an aesthetic and revolutionary history stretching back to the Third World movements, which themselves reworked the internationalist struggles against fascism. If the anthology had included some links between the 1970s in Italy and the counter-globalisation movements, then we could trace similar lines of development in and around Europe. Unlike Boltanski and Chiapello, I don’t see how cultural issues can be disentangled from the politics of life and labour. Yet there has been a real decline in the capacity of artists to arouse outrage at both alienation and exploitation. The ideological force of neoliberal culture has been amazingly effective.

MD: In my view, there are two major reasons why the critique of alienation has withered. The first one is that as the opportunities for activists to insert themselves into the ‘ideological circuits’ increased, the feeling of being just another spectator declined (Indymedia’s motto ‘Don’t Hate the Media, Become the Media’ perfectly exemplifies this shift). With the emergence of the network society it is increasingly problematic to claim, as Debord did, that the spectacle is simply the language of capitalist separation, that is, a one-to-many relationship which rigidly divides ‘what is possible from what is permitted.’¹¹ In recent years, the single Spectacle has been accompanied by many spectacles which open up new political imaginaries while enhancing the autonomy of their producers.

The second reason why the 1960s artistic critique of alienation is no longer effective is that the new machines have become, as Donna Haraway once said, our ‘intimate components’ and ‘friendly selves’.¹² Since these machines enable a strange mix of repetitive and creative tasks, manual and intellectual activities, revolting against them would be like revolting against ourselves. But if in the age of networked publics every social and linguistic activity is immediately put to work, how can we produce subjectivities that do not simply feed capital? The text ‘How To?’ by the Tiqqun group, which can be criticised for its ambiguous celebration of political anonymity and insurrectionalist mystique, advances the idea of the Human Strike.¹³ From my understanding, this is a strike against the production of fake subjectivities and critiques which are not rooted in local communities sharing strong affective bonds. This could be read as a critique of the tactical media scene, and more broadly, of the tendency to generate critical discourses detached from any need to transform society from the ground up.

BH: ‘How To?’ is a poetic call to insurrection, resonating with a number of recent revolts. Tiqqun has developed a radical critique of cybernetic society, which they see as a total mobilisation of the ego for meaningless labour and consumption. Of course that implies a critique of tactical media, which has been largely neutralised by corporate and government sponsorship. Tiqqun proposes an anti-aesthetic, a way of cutting the feedback loops that bind us to our marketised selves. It is linked with a rising desire to exit the cities; but with an obvious difference from 1960s utopias, of the kind represented in the reader by the fascinating, yet little-known artist Bonnie Sherk with her text on the social art work of ‘The Farm’ in San Francisco. A more or less violent aesthetics of withdrawal from neoliberal networks is now being expressed in many countries, because it’s one way to begin shifting towards a new paradigm. A very dangerous way, however – which could also justify further escalations of the military-police state and the durable installation of authoritarian neoliberalism.

In the early part of this decade, I hoped that networked social movements could theatricalise the real social relations of neoliberal society, suspending its functional norms and opening up space and time for collective questioning. That was done by unleashing an unauthorised circulation of subversive ideas, to be embodied by militant groups in urban situations. Or anyway, that’s how I explained it in ‘The Revenge of the Concept’, included in this anthology. Those protests worked to a degree, because there has been an intense examination of neoliberalism including both social and ecological critiques. Now I’m hoping that social movements can influence the new economic paradigm that will ultimately emerge from the crisis, by inventing critical and poetic discourses, shaping viable territories and constructing cooperative machines. Leafing through the reader, I find myself wondering if our times can produce anyone like Theo Van Doesburg, who was both a dadaist and a member of De Stijl, and who called destructively for the end of art while designing a constructivist aesthetics of built environments. But that reference is a bit too genealogical! What do you see as the discontinuous breakthroughs of the present?

Image: Laibach poster, The Occupied Europe Tour, 1983

MD: I think we need to start by relocating the forms of alienation. As Matteo Pasquinelli points out in his new book Animal Spirits, the libidinal economy of the network society generates a symbolic surplus-value that the real estate market tries to parasite and put to work in the new creative districts of the world cities.¹⁴ The fact that information is an abstract, non-rivalrous good does not mean that its wealth cannot be appropriated and congealed into (private) space. From this flows the notion that the critique of intellectual property cannot be separated from a critique of material property and of rent, that is, of the earliest form of capitalist property.

In the contemporary factories of biopolitical production, artists are the urban pioneers who identify the hotspots in advance. Therefore it is their duty to ask themselves how to retain the value they produce through their common imagining activities and cultural production within the community in which they live. The reader features a great article on the group Park Fiction, which describes the successful struggle of a Hamburg association of residents to design and obtain a public park through a participatory planning procedure in the historic district of St. Pauli, against the attempts of the city to gentrify it.¹⁵

On a symbolic level the critique of alienation can take on many different forms. Personally I am fond of collective experiments such as Laibach, Luther Blissett, etoy, Ubermorgen, Rtmark, Yo Mango! and others which subtract themselves from the hegemonic field by changing the very coordinates in which they operate. The music and performances of Laibach exemplify this strategy perfectly. By juxtaposing industrial sounds, pop songs, totalitarian symbols, and avant garde art, Laibach restages the foundational violence of the nation state and of every spectacle. As they say in their manifesto, the Ten Items of the Covenant, included in the reader: ‘All art is subject to political manipulation […] except for that which speaks the language of this same manipulation.’¹⁶

It is important to recognise, however, that Laibach’s performances do not only target pop culture and totalitarian ideology but also art itself, in particular the will to power of the avant garde. I believe that a new artistic critique of alienation cannot ignore the basic fact that art is a form of power. This is particularly true now that art is no longer used, as in totalitarianism, to aestheticise politics, but to redesign the urban space according to the shifting needs of semiocapitalism. In this respect it would be very important to update Lefebvre’s analysis of the accumulation and distribution of power in urban space, to stimulate practices of reappropriation in which artists could play an important role. After all Lefebvre’s The Right to The City, written in 1967, became the slogan of a whole movement.¹⁷

Marco Deseriis <snafu AT thething.it> is a Ph. D. Candidate in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has co-authored, along with Giuseppe Marano, a book on Net.Art (Shake, 2003-08) and collaborates with the festival of Culture Jamming and Radical Entertainment The Influencers, http://theinfluencers.org

Brian Holmes <brian.holmes AT wanadoo.fr> is a cultural critic, living in Paris and Chicago, working with artistic and political practices. He is the author of Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and Politics in a Networked Era (Zagreb: WHW, 2002) and Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (New York: Autonomedia, 2008). He currently collaborates on the Continental Drift seminar with the 16 Beaver group in New York. Forthcoming book and text archive at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com

Info

Will Bradley and Charles Esche (eds.), Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, Tate Publishing UK, 2008

Footnotes

1 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. and ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, p.146.

2 Will Bradley, ‘Introduction’, in Will Bradley and Charles Esche (eds.), Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, London: Tate-Afterall, 2007, p.11.

3 William Morris, ‘The Socialist Ideal: Art’, in Art and Social Change, p.50.

4 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2007.

5 Situationist International (J. V. Martin, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem, René Viénet), ‘Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art’, in Art and Social Change, pp.125-9.

6 Brian Holmes, ‘The Flexible Personality: For A New Cultural Critique’, in Hieroglyphs of the Future, Zagreb: WHW/Arkzin, 2002. Available at http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en

7 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, The University of Chicago Press, 2006; Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’, available on multiple websites, including www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/ califIdeo_I.html

8 The San Francisco Diggers, ‘Trip Without A Ticket’, and, ‘The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City’, in Art and Social Change, pp.146-56.

9 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2002.

10 Félix Guattari, ‘On the Production of Subjectivity’, in Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Indiana University Press, 1995.

11 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, London: Rebel Press, 2002, p.14.

12 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991, p.178.

13 Tiqqun, ‘How To?’, in Art and Social Change, pp.297-312.

14 Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2009.

15 Christoph Schäfer and Cathy Skene with the Hafenrandverein, ‘Rebellion on Level P’, in Art and Social Change, pp.283-9.

16 Laibach, ‘Ten Items of the Covenant’, Art and Social Change, p.251.

17 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City’, in Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996, pp.63-177.

Source: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/concerning-art-and-social-change

The post CONCERNING ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE By Marco Deseriis and Brian Holmes appeared first on Void Network.

The post Συμπαράσταση στο Εμπρός και διαμαρτυρία στα δικαστήρια Παρ. 20/01/2017 στις 12:00 / Support Theatre Embros at the Trial 20/1 appeared first on Void Network.

PIRATE CINEMA Festival
FR.18 + SAT.19/11/2016
2 days of free film shows & talks

Eλεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο
Θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ
Ρ.Παλαμήδου 2 Ψυρρής
Free Self-Organised
Theatre EMBROS (R.Palamidou 2-Psiris) http://embros.gr

H Βερολινέζικη ομάδα Pirate Cinema
με την στήριξη 4 αθηναϊκών ομάδων παρουσιάζει
ένα 5ημερο πρόγραμμα 150 ταινιών
που προβάλλονται δωρεάν στην ιστοσελίδα
https://piratecinema.org/tv
και μας καλεί στο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ
να παρακολουθήσουμε δωρεάν ταινίες την
ΠΑΡ.18/11 (23.00-06.00) + ΣΑΒΒ. 19/11 (15.00-21.00)

Eπίσης,
το Σάββ.19/11 (19.00)
διοργανώνουν ανοιχτή συζήτηση με θέμα:
ΣΤΡΑΤΗΓΙΚΕΣ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΑΠΑΛΛΟΤΡΙΩΣΗ
ΜΗΤΡΟΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΩΝ ΧΩΡΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΚΙΝΟΥΜΕΝΩΝ ΕΙΚΟΝΩΝ

Το Pirate Cinema (Πειρατικός Κινηματογράφος) ως χώρος υφίσταται από το 2004 στο Βερολίνο,
και αντίθετα από άλλα εγχειρήματα που χρησιμοποιούν τον όρο “πειρατικό”, είναι πράγματι
υπέρ της πειρατείας. Αφετηρία του είναι η θέση ότι η παραβίαση των πνευματικών δικαιωμάτων
είναι η πιο πολλά υποσχόμενη τάση στον κινηματογράφο του 21ου αιώνα.
Το ότι ο κινηματογράφος κήρυξε πόλεμο εναντίον της πειρατείας είναι αναμενόμενο,
καθώς η κοινή χρήση αρχείων προσφέρει πολλά περισσότερα από την απεριόριστη πρόσβαση
σε περιορισμένα εμπορεύματα: Από το Napster μέχρι το BitTorrent, η πειρατεία πρόσφερε
πρωτόκολλα για την αναδιοργάνωση των μέσων διανομής, που με τη σειρά τους υποσκάπτουν
τα υπάρχοντα μοντέλα παραγωγής και κατανάλωσης.
Η “κρίση του σινεμά” – ως τέχνη, ως χώρος, ως οικονομία και ως ιδεολογία –
έγκειται ακριβώς στο γεγονός ότι το σινεμά έχει γίνει ένα ιδιοκτησιακό σύστημα,
οχυρωμένο απέναντι στις τεχνολογίες επικοινωνίας, χρησιμοποιώντας τα πνευματικά δικαιώματα
ως μια νέα μορφή λογοκρισίας.
Το Pirate Cinema λειτουργεί υπό την υπόθεση ότι μια κριτική του κινηματογράφου θα πρέπει
να είναι πρακτική, και ότι η μάχη εναντίον της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας είναι μάταιη
εάν δεν δημιουργεί και δεν γιορτάζει την δημιουργία ζωντανών τόπων και χώρων
όπου τα πνευματικά δικαιώματα έχουν ήδη καταργηθεί.

κινηματογράφος: https://piratecinema.org || αρχείο: https://0xdb.org
pirate cinema tv 14-20 Noεμβρίου 2016 : https://piratecinema.org/tv

Τhe Pirate Cinema group from Berlin
supported by 4 underground groups from Athens
organizes a stream show of 150 films that you can see them
live in internet site :https://piratecinema.org/tv
and invites us
in Occupied Self-Organised Theatre EMBROS
to watch free films together at
FR.18/11 (23.00-06.00) + SAT. 19/11 (15.00-21.00)
Also,
at SAT. 19/11 (19.00) they organise an open public talk:
STRATEGIES FOR EXPROPRIATION OF URBAN SPACES AND MOVING IMAGES

Pirate Cinema, as a space, exists since 2004 in Berlin, and unlike other ventures that use the term “pirate”, it is actually pro-piracy. It begins with the observation that in the 21st century, copyright infringement is the most most promising tendency in cinema. It’s no wonder that cinema has started a war against piracy, since filesharing has more to offer than just unlimited access to scarce commodities: From Napster to BitTorrent, it offered protocols for the redistribution of the means of distribution, which in turn undermines the existing modes of production and consumption. The “crisis of cinema” – as an art, as a space, as an economy and as an ideology – is precisely the fact that it has become a proprietary system, fortified against communication technology, using copyright as a new form of censorship. Pirate Cinema operates under the assumption that a critique of cinema has to be practical, and that the fight against intellectual property is pointless if it doesn’t create, and celebrate the creation of, zones, scenes and places where copyright is already suspended.

The cinema: https://piratecinema.org || The archive: https://0xdb.org

pirate cinema tv // 14-20 November 2016 :
free live stream https://piratecinema.org/tv

monday november 14 00:00 battleship potemkin (sergei m. eisenstein) 01:08 man with a movie camera (dziga vertov) 02:16 happiness (aleksandr medvedkin) 03:20 the parallel street (ferdinand khittl) 04:43 normal love (jack smith) 06:30 the drifting (paula delsol) 07:49 poor little rich girl (andy warhol) 08:56 the laughing man (walter heynowski, gerhard scheumann) 09:59 subjektitüde (helke sander) 10:04 diaries notes and sketches (jonas mekas) 12:59 out 1 (jacques rivette, suzanne schiffman)

tuesday november 15 01:21 sweet sweetback’s baadasssss song (melvin van peebles) 02:59 ganja & hess (bill gunn) 04:49 space is the place (john coney) 06:10 le fond de l’air est rouge (chris marker) 09:10 venom and eternity (isidore isou) 11:14 les filles de kamare (rené viénet) 12:41 in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (guy debord) 14:17 portrait of a female drunkard: ticket of no return (ulrike ottinger) 16:06 possession (andrzej zulawski) 18:10 our century (artavazd peleshian) 18:59 shoah (claude lanzmann)

wednesday november 16 04:02 superstar: the karen carpenter story (todd haynes) 04:45 the asthenic syndrome (kira muratova) 07:11 the white room (bill butt) 08:00 watch the k foundation burn a million quid (gimpo) 08:56 point break (kathryn bigelow) 10:58 heat (michael mann) 13:48 spin (brian springer) 14:46 l’abécédaire de gilles deleuze (pierre-andré boutang) 22:19 nico icon (susanne ofteringer) 23:27 i’ll be your mirror (edmund coulthard, nan goldin)

thursday november 17 00:16 half a life (romain goupil) 01:53 reprise (hervé le roux) 04:59 starship troopers (paul verhoeven) 07:08 23 (hans-christian schmid) 08:43 la commune: paris, 1871 (peter watkins) 14:29 trailer park boys s01e01 take your little gun and get out of my trailer park (mike clattenburg) 14:53 trailer park boys s01e02 fuck community college. let’s get drunk and eat chicken fingers (mike clattenburg) 15:16 trailer park boys s01e03 mr. lahey’s got my porno tape! (mike clattenburg) 15:40 trailer park boys s01e04 mrs. peterson’s dog gets fucked up (mike clattenburg) 16:03 trailer park boys s01e05 i’m not gay, i love lucy. wait a second, maybe i am gay (mike clattenburg) 16:27 trailer park boys s01e06 who the hell invited these idiots to my wedding? (mike clattenburg) 16:50 underground (emile de antonio, mary lampson, haskell wexler) 18:18 the weather underground (sam green, bill siegel) 19:49 the wire s01e01 the target (david simon) 20:51 the wire s01e02 the detail (david simon) 21:49 the wire s01e03 the buys (david simon) 22:44 the wire s01e04 old cases (david simon) 23:43 the wire s01e05 the pager (david simon)

friday november 18 00:43 the wire s01e06 the wire (david simon) 01:42 the wire s01e07 one arrest (david simon) 02:42 the wire s01e08 lessons (david simon) 03:38 the wire s01e09 game day (david simon) 04:34 the wire s01e10 the cost (david simon) 05:30 the wire s01e11 the hunt (david simon) 06:26 the wire s01e12 cleaning up (david simon) 07:23 the wire s01e13 sentencing (david simon) 08:28 los angeles plays itself (thom andersen) 11:17 chavez: inside the coup (kim bartley, donnacha o’briain) 12:32 london (patrick keiller) 13:53 london orbital (christopher petit, iain sinclair) 15:10 finisterre (kieran evans, paul kelly) 16:09 burn hollywood burn (robert luxemburg) 16:10 the grey video (laurent fauchere, antoine tinguely) 16:13 wolff von amerongen: did he commit bancruptcy offences? (gerhard benedikt friedl) 17:24 outfoxed: rupert murdoch’s war on journalism (robert greenwald) 18:41 pirated copy (jianjun he) 20:10 star spangled to death (ken jacobs)

saturday november 19 03:21 district b13 (pierre morel) 04:42 team america: world police (trey parker) 06:15 primer (shane carruth) 07:33 brick (rian johnson) 09:18 wizard people, dear reader (brad neely) 11:50 the scene s01e01 (mitchell reichgut) 12:09 the scene s01e02 (mitchell reichgut) 12:27 the scene s01e03 (mitchell reichgut) 12:43 the scene s01e04 (mitchell reichgut) 12:55 the scene s01e05 (mitchell reichgut) 13:09 the scene s01e06 (mitchell reichgut) 13:29 the scene s01e07 (mitchell reichgut) 13:49 the scene s01e08 (mitchell reichgut) 14:14 the scene s01e09 (mitchell reichgut) 14:29 the scene s01e10 (mitchell reichgut) 14:46 the scene s01e11 (mitchell reichgut) 15:06 the scene s01e12 (mitchell reichgut) 15:21 the scene s01e13 (mitchell reichgut) 15:53 the scene s01e14 (mitchell reichgut) 16:18 the scene s01e15 (mitchell reichgut) 16:41 the scene s01e16 (mitchell reichgut) 17:02 the scene s01e17 (mitchell reichgut) 17:13 the scene s01e18 (mitchell reichgut) 17:44 the scene s01e19 (mitchell reichgut) 18:09 the scene s01e20 (mitchell reichgut) 18:33 teh scene s01e01 (anonymous) 18:47 teh scene s01e02 (anonymous) 19:02 teh scene s01e03 (anonymous) 19:18 teh scene s01e04 (anonymous) 19:39 teh scene s01e05 (anonymous) 19:59 teh scene s01e06 (anonymous) 20:32 teh scene s01e07 (anonymous) 20:58 teh scene s01e08 (anonymous) 21:43 this film is not yet rated (kirby dick) 23:21 histoire(s) du cinéma: toutes les histoires (jean-luc godard)

sunday november 20 00:11 histoire(s) du cinéma: une histoire seule (jean-luc godard) 00:53 histoire(s) du cinéma: seul le cinéma (jean-luc godard) 01:19 histoire(s) du cinéma: fatale beauté (jean-luc godard) 01:47 histoire(s) du cinéma: la monnaie de l’absolu (jean-luc godard) 02:14 histoire(s) du cinéma: une vague nouvelle (jean-luc godard) 02:41 histoire(s) du cinéma: le contrôle de l’univers (jean-luc godard) 03:08 histoire(s) du cinéma: les signes parmi nous (jean-luc godard) 03:45 a personal journey with martin scorsese through american movies (martin scorsese, michael henry wilson) 07:30 the pervert’s guide to cinema (sophie fiennes) 10:00 l’avocat de la terreur (barbet schroeder) 12:11 good copy bad copy (ralf christensen, andreas johnsen, henrik moltke) 13:10 steal this film ii (anonymous) 13:55 the headless woman (lucrecia martel) 15:24 flesh (edouard salier) 15:34 logorama (françois alaux, hervé de crécy, ludovic houplain) 15:49 it felt like a kiss (adam curtis) 16:54 mondomanila, or: how i fixed my hair after a rather long journey (khavn) 18:06 a.k.a. serial killer (masao adachi) 19:28 the anabasis of may and fusako shigenobu, masao adachi and 27 years without images (eric baudelaire) 20:34 it may be that beauty has strengthened our resolve: masao adachi (philippe grandrieux) 21:48 the turin horse (béla tarr, ágnes hranitzky)

click the link to see the films or see you at EMBROS!: https://piratecinema.org/tv
κάνε κλικ για να δεις τις ταινίες ή έλα στο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ!: https://piratecinema.org/tv

διοργάνωση / organised by:
Pirate Cinema: https://piratecinema.org/tv
Aυτόνομη Ακαδημία / Autonomus Academy: http://avtonomi-akadimia.net/
Κενό Δίκτυο / Void Network: https://voidnetwork.gr
+the Institute [for Experimental Arts]: http://theinstitute.info
Contemporary Art Showcase Athens: http://c-a-s-athens.squarespace.com/

The post PIRATE CINEMA Festival FR.18 & SAT.19/11 EMBROS-Athens+150 FILMS free live streaming MON.14-SUN.20/11/2016 appeared first on Void Network.

photo by Image Loi / http://www.photoloi.com/

SPEAK NO EVIL 
Participation of poets Tasos Sagris and Sissy Doutsiou from Void Network to the event of underground literature magazine ANDLIA in Thessaloniki

Wednesday 21 October 2015 
starts at 18.00
Bensousan Han
6, Edessis str., 54625 Thesaloniki

Ποίηση / Μουσική / Είκόνα / Βίντεο / Φωτογραφία / 
σε μία μοναδική βραδιά που διοργανώνει η ομάδα 
του λογοτεχνικού περιοδικού Αντλία!

Την Τετάρτη, 21/10, η ομάδα της Αντλίας επιστρέφει στο Bensousan Han , για την 3η της εκδήλωση. Θα παρουσιαστεί το δεύτερο τεύχος του περιοδικού, ενώ παράλληλα η εκδήλωση θα περιλαμβάνει εικαστικά, φωτογραφία, multimedia δρώμενα ποίησης και ζωντανή μουσική.


Η εκδήλωση θα ανοίξει τις πόρτες της στο κοινό στις έξι [18:00] και θα έχετε την δυνατότητα να περιηγηθείτε στα δωμάτια του Μπενσουσάν που θα φιλοξενούν το κάθε ένα και από μία διαφορετική εγκατάσταση.

Πιο αναλυτικά το πρόγραμμα περιλαμβάνει:

– Εικαστικά έργα της ζωγράφου 
Χριστιάνας Παπακώστα
Christiana Papakosta’s visual art exhibition

– Αφιέρωμα στην εκφυλισμένη τέχνη 
(Entartete Kunst – 1937) archives

– Ποιητικές εγκαταστάσεις 
από την ομάδα της Αντλίας
poetry instalations by the team of Andlia

– Έκθεση φωτογραφίας
photo exhibition

– Multimedia δρώμενο ποίησης 
από την ομάδα Κενό Δίκτυο
ποίηση: Σίσσυ Δουτσίου, Τάσος Σαγρής
ήχος: dj Crystal Zero
visual art: Void Optical Art Lab
multi media poetry action from Void Network

– Live Concert: 
Tuflon  
https://myspace.com/tuflon/music/songs
Rebecca Challis 
https://soundcloud.com/rebeccachallis

Το 2ο τεύχος της Αντλίας θα διατίθεται στην εκδήλωση προς 4 ευρώ.

Είσοδος 2 ευρώ για την κάλυψη των εξόδων της εκδήλωσης και την ενίσχυση του εγχειρήματος της Αντλίας. 

Στο μπαρ του χώρου θα υπάρχει κρασί, ρακή και μπύρες, but U can bring your own booze 2!

Με την υποστήριξη του EntropiaRadio www.entropiaradio.gr

Φωτογραφική κάλυψη από τη φωτογραφική ομάδα του ArtRoom

Βιντεοκάλυψη από τον Ηλία Κουτρότσιο Ilias Koutrotsios του DEStv.

Το σχέδιο στην αφίσα και στο εξώφυλλο του 2ου τεύχους είναι της εικαστικού και tattoo artist Όλγας-Μαρίας Μάγγελ. Olga-Maria Nicotattoocrew
Το στήσιμο της αφίσας και του banner έγινε από τον Παναγιώτη Ξάνθο.

The post SPEAK NO EVIL / poetry event in WEN. 21/10/2015 Thessaloniki appeared first on Void Network.