minor matter, HAU (Hebbel am Ufer), Berlin, 2017, with Tiran Willemse, Jonathan Gonzalez, and Ligia Lewis. Courtesy: Ligia Lewis. Photo: Martha Glenn
Ligia Lewis in conversation with Alexandra Balona and Sofia Lemos. Photo: José Caldeira
By exploring how the logic of capitalist accumulation and neoliberal reasoning ruptures the metabolism of the earth’s systems, severing its basic operations of renewal, the programme encouraged multifarious approaches to planetary phenomena proposing a forum for discussing their eroding histories and coming perspectives.
First Assembly
The first convening sought to unpack asymmetries in property law, human rights, and environmental economy, as well as processes of singularity and commoning. Visual and performing arts carve out spaces from where to contest normative foundations and conceive legibility for matters of inequity, prejudice and negligence. While artistic practice bears witness to such relations, it also addresses their complex entanglements. Alexandra Bachzetsis’ performances, PRIVATE: Wear a mask when you talk to me (2016) and Private Song (2017) were presented in collaboration with the Serralves Museum.
Political scientist Nikita Dhawan asked one of the most challenging questions for critical social and political theory today: Why do nonhegemonic groups consent to their subjugation and accept their disenfranchisement as inevitable? Dhawan’s contribution focused on how the construction of international civil society actors as “givers” and the subalterns as “receivers” of help and solidarity results in the transnational elites monopolising agency and emerging as ethical subjects in the name of doing good. Desubalternisation, Dhawan argues, requires a global redistribution of intellectual labour, so that the discontinuity between the subaltern and the intellectual may be undone.
Nikita Dhawan, The Subaltern and the Intellectual: Ethico-Political Imperatives
SECOND ASSEMBLY
This convening investigated morphologies of knowledge in relation to the legacies of colonial and capitalist systems of governance as well as polarising agendas of political and corporate practices. While curatorial projects can reify grand narratives, they also have the potential to unpack the complexities of narrative forms. Contributors presented specific projects that reach beyond context or illustration investigating an understanding of curating as the production of and engagement with decolonial knowledge.
Curator Vivian Ziherl advanced a crystallography of the modern value form, based upon a re-evaluation of the temporal and territorial locatedness of so-called “primitive accumulation.” What moved into apprehension was a cost-offset matrix of the following fourfold categories: “the natural / the female / the racial / the prior”. Expanding on this research, Ziherl discussed the mercurial re/production of “the natural” in particular considering the emergence of Natural Law over the long durée, as well as work undertaken within the frame of art and research foundation Frontier Imaginaries.
Vivian Ziherl, The Fourfold Articulation
Starting from the assumption that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, what are the tasks involved in decolonizing knowledge?
Introduced as a paradigmatic shift, sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos unfolded the key concepts converging in his proposition “epistemologies of the south”: abyssal line, sociology of absences, sociology of emergences, ecology of knowledges, intercultural translation and artisanship of practices. Tracing the differences between art as an institution and art as the practice of artists, Sousa Santos proposed the cantilever, a structural element borrowed from architecture and civil construction, as a metaphor to characterize the artist as the one who may walk on the abyssal line and see both sides of it.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Decolonizing Art and Knowledge
Third assembly
This convening unpacked protocols of representation and strategies of support within techno-cultural infrastructures. Contemporary concerns with the mounting financialisation of subjectivity, precarisation of social life, and ensuing psychopathologies, increasingly require diverse semiotic frameworks to account for effects beyond the linguistic or the representational. Against the backdrop of exhorted nationalisms, increasing autonomy of corporate governance and big data over state control, as well as the intensification of anxiety underpinning labour deregulation, it engaged with the operating principles that organise energy, matter and information in networked capitalism, foregrounding institutional critique and radical solidarities.
Writer and educator, Ana Teixeira Pinto addressed the linguistic emergence of two terms related to displacement and their respective economies: Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who tended to soldiers suffering from a mysterious ailment: a virulent homesickness, whose symptoms included high fever, stomach ache, and fainting spells. The condition later spread to proletarianised peasants who, forced into factory work, pined for their ancestral lifestyles. In 2003, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, identified another form of displacement-related psychic distress, and named it “solastalgia.” Much like nostalgia, solastalgia hinges on a sense of alienation from one’s own environment. But whereas nostalgia relates to the uprooting of an individual, sufferers of solastalgia typically stay put – it’s their environment that gradually disappears.
Ana Teixeira Pinto, Alien Economies
Drawing on methodologies and concepts developed in the context of psychiatric and institutional practices from the 1950s, the institution is considered as an ecology of mental, social and environmental dimensions, and collective militant analysis as transformative, polyphonic, and continuous. By examining the practice of institutional analysis, as explored by psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari, researcher Susana Caló speculated on the value of extending principles of care from clinical settings to the wider community and the city while discussing the emancipatory potential of collective institutional processes.
Susana Caló, Can an Institution be Militant?
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