Coordinated by Giuseppe Micciarelli, Theo Prodromidis, Massimiliano Mollona,

We aim to hack the neoliberal cultural system and build a counter-diplomacy through common and interdependent learning between activists and scholars into struggles. 

Chiapas is a living example of self-government that has inspired activists all over the world. It has also inspired many researchers and thousands of essays in journals and publications. Many scholars have written, many have tried to support, some may just happen to appropriate this democratic struggle. The same dynamic occurred with other territories like Rojava and Palestine amongst other places of struggle around the world. 

Scientific knowledge often profits from political struggles and social movements, leaving nothing in return. It remains largely Western-driven, in the

even narrower sense of the top-ranking, rich, often private universities that manage to get funding in a sick mechanism of competition between academies. The rich get richer and lay the foundations for being richer in the future. 

Culture is not based on competition: we want to try to hack this dynamic by creating other lines of cooperation and funding for another way of doing con-research between scholars, activists and communities in struggle. In this way we aim to give our contribution for the de-neoliberalisation of society. We want to start with the de-colonisation of culture, building a COUNTER ALLIANCE OF CULTURAL SPACE,SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIES.

We want to challenge academic institutions in order to open up and build common educational programmes and thus to allow academic collaboration to play a role in international diplomacy. 

Help break the siege where communities in struggles are: rushed by the diplomacy of western countries, which do not recognise their institutions. We want to use “our” cultural institutions to make evident this contradiction of western countries. We want to use culture as an act of parallel and dynamic diplomacy.

Create opportunities for scholarships, teaching contracts for students and professors from those areas of the world. Concretely, we want to create co-tutorship study programmes, masters, PhDs or any other programme that would use Western institutions’ privilege to strengthen other learnings and curricula in other countries whether in the South or in conflict. We do not want an only strategic exchange, but one that allows us to decolonise cultural paradigms and forms of teaching, building an autonomous space of mutual teaching and learning between students, activists and scholars.

We want to create this by creating concrete opportunities not only for young students, but further for many scholars and activists that teach in not western  institutions.

PROFILES

Giuseppe Micciarelli jurist and political philosopher. PhD in Public Law, Theory of National and European Institutions and Legal Philosophy at the University of Salerno, Italy. He is member of Laboratorio filosofico-giuridico e filosofico-politico ‘Hans Kelsen and editor of Soft Power, Euro-American Journal of Historical and Theoretical Studies of Politics. His research interests include: theory of commons and self-government, state of exception and emergency, processes of political subjectivation and transformation of institutions in contemporary governmentality. As resident member of L’Asilo Naples, he contributed to the drafting of the “Declaration of urban civic and collective use” recognized by the City of Naples, Palermo, Chieri and Turin. He is also advisor of many experiences of social and civic activism about the issues of self organization, participatory democracy and neo-municipalism.

Theo Prodromidis  visual artist and director based in Athens, Greece. He studied Contemporary Media Practice at the University of Westminster and was awarded an MFA in Fine Art by Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007. His work has been exhibited and screened in galleries, museums and festivals such as Furtherfield, Galerija Nova, State of Concept, 5th and 1st Thessaloniki Biennale, 4th Athens Biennale, i.a. Since 2017, he has contributed to The School of Redistribution by Future Climates, to Project P.R.E.S.S. (Provision of Refugee Education and Support Scheme) by Hellenic Open University and part of WHW Akademija’s program To care for another, radical politics of care. Ηe is a member of the Institute Of Radical Imagination, a volunteer at the Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus and a member of the Solidarity Schools Network. For 2020-2021, he is the co-leader of “An album from our square” at Victoria Square Project, supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) at Columbia University. 

Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. He has a multidisciplinary background in economics and anthropology and his work focuses on the relationships between art and political economy. He conducted extensive fieldworks in Italy, UK, Norway and Brazil, mainly in economic institutions, looking at the relationships between economic development and political identity through participatory and experimental film projects. His practice is situated at the intersection of pedagogy, art and activism. He has rececntly published Art/Commons.