IRI shares the Declaration by Dmitry Vilensky published on Chto Delat website with the idea to open a space of critical thinking on the complex present situation that art and cultural institutions are called to face.
“With great sadness, Daria Serenko (Feminist Anti-war resistance) and I have decided not to participate in the discussion organized by Creative Time and Vera List Center “Teach-in on Ukraine for Artists and Activists”. We want to thank Larissa Babji, Nikita Kadan, and Mykola Ridnyi for their willingness to take part in this event together with us.
After spreading information about the event on social media, Daria and I both received a lot of angry messages. The accusation was that Western experts and Russian activists would have nothing to teach about the war in Ukraine, and that especially the Russians should give their places to Ukrainian speakers in light of the current situation.
Of course, neither Daria nor I can teach anybody anything about Ukraine – just opposite, we were invited modestly to talk about the situation around anti-war protests in Russia and to show solidarity with the Ukrainian struggle. We totally respect and understand the anger of anyone who is demanding a total and undifferentiated boycott of Russian voices in any context. There are no nuances in class war, as we used to say.
Those in Russia who have resisted the local fascist regime from the very beginning and have not received anything from it except repression, we do not need to be celebrated.
It is our privilege that we never had to speak from the position of nation, force, militarization, and violent struggle. This has never been our language of resistance. We have always spoken from the position of weakness, vulnerability and care that today is shared by all protesters in Russia and Belarus, facing draconic wartime legislation We will continue our anti-war campaigns in all possible forms.
Today’s growing movement against the war and the fascist regime continues an age-old struggle in Russia against autocracy and colonialism. We are proud to belong to this tradition which the current regime is trying to silence and erase.
There is an old Polish slogan: For our freedom and yours (Za naszą i waszą wolność). It was first seen in 1831 at a patriotic demonstration in Warsaw, held to commemorate the Russian Decembrists. In partitioned Poland, it meant that a Polish victory would also mean liberty for the peoples of Russia–fellow inmates in that “prison house of the peoples.” The slogan made it clear: the Polish struggle for self-determination and nationhood was aimed not at the Russian people but at tsarist despotism. It was also a call to action. To be freed from serfdom at the arbitrary hands of oligarchs and bureaucrats, Russians would have to topple the regime that expands into other countries and colonizes them. This common history of struggle against Russian imperial autocracy has a colossal meaning to all “real” Russian culture–and not the one we are now “learning” about from Putin and his cronies.
Today, what we need most are discussions based on mutual respect and solidarity. We cannot participate in discussions where all Russians and everything Russian is considered as a culture of oppression and colonization. We respect this view of Ukrainian patriots at a time of fascist war, in light of all the regime’s atrocities. But we cannot agree. Silencing our common history and our emancipatory heritage is exactly what Putin is doing. Please do not help him.
Nevertheless, we support your fight; it is our fight as well. We still believe that this war is not Russia’s war, but that of PutinZ and his regime and we are grateful to you for this chance to formulate and advocate this position.
Glory to Ukraine, glory to the people of Belarus and Russia who resist, glory to anyone who does their best to stop the war and care about life not death!”
The internal polarization in Ukraine between pro-European nationalism and Russian nationalism, which has lasted and grown for years, does not explain the political point of the contemporary conflict. It does not explain why this conflict will go down in history for having sanctioned the end of bipolarism and the formalization of multipolarity.
The solidarity of neighbouring countries such as Poland, the Baltic countries, Romania, Moldova expresses this. The dominant narrative and also operational belief in the political subjectification of these peoples is the defence of civil rights and the desire for democracy against Putin’s autocratic and homophobic despotism. And this creates an internationalist axis between the movements of solidarity and mutual aid towards the Ukrainian resistance and activists who are filling the streets and suffering unprecedented repression in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Oppressed peoples in Ukraine are dying in the name of an idea of democracy that is unable to defend them, which is no longer able to prevent the threat of the atomic bomb on its own with its own economic and diplomatic power.
I think this is the most significant fact: there is a bloc that has sharpened the weapon of repression and authoritarianism and white supremacist populism that is no longer afraid to assert itself and which questions democratic principles and a culture based on civil rights.
And I say this because I am not listening to the old communists of the European left, but to the young antifa, anarchist and communard activists who are in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, the Baltic countries, Turkey and Russia
This advance, including military, by the Putin regime in Ukraine, is a sign of the crisis in the West. The West is in geopolitical decomposition. NATO is in geostrategic retreat. I would start from this consideration to understand what is happening.
In fact, Europe is proving defensive and powerless in the face of Putin’s criminal actions. It is watching the massacre in Ukraine helplessly, expressing its opposition with sanctions, but without sitting at the negotiating tables because de facto is not legitimated by Putin.
Europe is immobilized, rightly non-interventionist and pacifist for the terror of opening an atomic conflict. Terror that Putin does not have. Those who think that this crisis is being won by a more politically united and energetically autonomous Europe, strengthened by sanctions and its untainted morality, are wrong. Europe is uniting in this crisis, internal ties are strengthening, but it is not expressing strength, but hypocrisy as usual. Europe feels more united as people who are terrified and embraced in a bunker under the bombs feel more united … It is a cohesion dictated by fear not by a vision. NATO is defenseless from a diplomatic point of view, because it knows that it has lost the authority to mediate and or oversees global geopolitics without fighting. This is another fact: Europe and the United States have lost the role of arbiter of the world balance.
It is no longer enough to send a few Marines undercover as they have successfully done in half of South America. If they want to sit at the table, they must show that they have the courage to fight with the atomic bomb. For this they do cannot sit at the diplomatic table and they have also lost the right to speak. Only China perhaps could play this role. For this reason, I believe that the opposition, by the nostalgia for the cold war, between NATO and Russia, neither with NATO nor with Putin… is, after all, right, but out of focus.
The truth is that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union, Russia turned into a fake liberticidal, authoritarian and homophobic democracy and that the enlargement to the east of Europe came first of all for a sincere desire of the people to have civil rights and democratic governments. Soft power and Western interference to make this happen have occurred but they have been in the background and within a geopolitical framework in which NATO has lost ground everywhere.
With this I don’t want to defend NATO, of course. Indeed, we have almost always harshly criticized it, just think of Bush’s wars to export democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. But let us also realize that these wars have been a failure. And I believe they have failed militarily because they were already the latest rushed gestures within a West that have been losing and declining in the global political scenario for several decades. Putin is advancing, because he knows that China is advancing, the Arab world is advancing and because he knows that the West is in a terminal crisis, with respect to its position.
We should be happy that NATO is weak and that this West is decomposing because we have never liked NATO and this kind of West. But we should be equally angry that Putin is a dictator who kills intellectuals and homosexuals and massacres people in Syria, Chechnya and Ukraine.
However, if this is the case, we should also be very aware that there is a void and a very substantial disaster to be filled. There is no need to attack NATO or to rehabilitate NATO … Salvini, Trump, Bannon and Brexit are already thinking about it … there is a need and the urgency to have very quick ideas on what comes next and instead of NATO and of this West.
Because if these ideas do not come to us quickly and we waste time barking against NATO, there is an increasing risk that in the meantime Putin or some nationalist in his place will also take away those few civil rights and democratic principles that we still have the privilege to have.
On closer inspection, the only alternative projects that grew up in the folds of globalization and the crisis of the West as an empire, were the EZLN and Kurdish confederalism. They are the only experiments with which an attempt has been made to create counter-hegemony, including military ones, from an indigenous (non-Western) perspective and at the same time further develop the culture of civil rights, feminism, interdependence between humans and the environment and direct democracy.
There is a need as soon as possible for a European political project that asserts itself on the same level: as a democratic space, of civil rights but which is also capable of being very radical on ecology, universal income and post-colonialism.
If Europe is not radically green and radically open in its migration policies, it will not be able to defend democratic and civil rights, and it will be politically wiped out by nationalism. I use the word radical deliberately because I suffer from the opposition that has arisen in recent years between civil rights and social rights. I think this opposition is false and a product of liberal washing.
If we take anti-patriarchy, ecology and decolonization seriously, in a radical way, we soon come to talk about universal basic income, school, health, minimum wage, right to housing and the cost of the gas bill.
European party representation is clearly lagging in grasping this agenda, with the exception of the political class that has grown up in the ranks of Podemos in Spain, in municipalist experiences such as Barcelona en Comun and now Možemo in Zagreb, or part of the ongoing discussion in the European Greens. As I said at the beginning of this speech, the only ones to keep the anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, decolonial and ecological agenda are the social movements.
Those same social movements that are bringing humanitarian aid to refugees first Syrian, Afghan, sub Saharan, and the anarchist and anti-fascist Ukrainians who are shooting at Putin and Russian activists who are getting arrested in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. It is this alliance that the media and European parties should listen to and learn from in order to set a vision of Europe in a multipolar world.
Finally, there is a global geopolitical question. I started this article by sanctioning the end of bipolarism and the formalization of multipolarity. I then said that Europe has a future if it manages to re-establish itself on a radically post-colonial and ecological basis.
And I have said that if we do not want to succumb to Russian nationalist threats we must give an alternative vision of what will take the place from the void left by NATO. To do this, we need to look at Africa and South America in a completely new way. Starting with what is happening in Chile and the alliance between indigenous perspective, social justice, and ecology of the new President Boric, the post-Bolsonaro future of Brazil, and the enormous energy that the new generation of Africans is creating.
Emanuele Braga, March 2022
This post is open to comments for those who wish to contribute or articulate on the topic
“We don’t need new art, but new institutions instead” (Fusco, 2020) thus Coco Fusco declared in October 2020 when, amid theBlack Lives Matter outburst, we begin to realize that art institutions – museums, biennials, festivals, theaters, cultural centers – despite the declarations of intent, they continue to be spaces for the reproduction of a white, Eurocentric and patriarchal knowledge.
I would like to look at the relationship between art and political activism through a lens opening up on instituent practices because I believe it can account for the aesthetic dimension and the political dimension as interrelated, inter-acting forces, which mutually co-establish themselves in a continuous motion of material experimentation. When the reappropriation of art institutions is conceived and carried out in continuity with artistic practices, there is a different involvement of the artists, who are involved in a process of subjectivation, instead of a mere commitment or participation. It is not a question of taking a position on something that happens elsewhere or to others, but of putting into play and redesigning one’s biography, material conditions, relational and productive systems, multiple economies that operate continuous changes of scale – from the personal to the political, from singularities to what we can define transindividual (Simondon, 1989). Art is therefore reconfigured as a space of radical imagination, capable of rethinking the status of institutions, artistic and not (cfr. Van Campenhout, L. Mestre 2016), as well as that of creation, aesthetics, and languages.
With Deleuze of Instincts and Institutions (1955), we can describe institutions as expressions of imaginative power and social creativity, places where tendencies and desires manage to have an impact on the real, and where the world becomes available as a space for action. So says Sara Ahmed, providing a feminist perspective on the relationship between spatiality, acting, and (from my point of view) institutions, in which the bodily dimension is decisive: what we come into contact with, shapes us (AHMED, 2007). This availability of space for action is not uniformly distributed: not all bodies and subjects can access it in the same way, or have the same forces, temporalities, materialities at their disposal. This availability differs from body to body, defined by proximity to or distance from this space of possibility, and it is crossed by inequalities. Instituent practices generate systems of proximity, in which languages, experiences, knowledges, habits, postures are reproduced, and in which variation and codification are continuously at stake. In addition to aesthetic and poetic practices, writing and composition unfold their full potentials in their ability to bring new political and bodily performances into the world, thus questioning the existing framework. Hence, gesture, body, and public space as a generative choreographic but also political sequence.
How to create new institutions? Can this work of political creation draw on procedures, repertoires, gestures, and knowledges trained in the arts? In the era of exhaustion of political and social mediations, can artistic institutions function as alternative spaces for new citizenship and social cooperation? What autonomies does artistic and creative work need, to express itself as a full liberated power? In which subjectivity is it embodied? These are the focuses around which this path unfolds, composting theoretical issues with inventions that come from the practices. As Valeria Graziano writes, what is at stake is understanding whether the artistic field, emerging from an idea of self-sufficiency, can become a tool capable to generate other ways of creating:
“The recreative industries always corresponded to exercises in the fragile temporality of sheltering both our labor force, allowing us to experience its potency as it disentangles itself away from capitalist forms of relation, but also to experience our constitutive difference not as something to be merely managed, but as the true source of the pleasure found in the ‘creative function’ of the body politics.” (Graziano, 2019)
Dark Matter (1). What do we say when we say “artist”?
I have been working for twenty years in the performing arts in different roles: as a performer, actress, author, dramaturg, and educator in the transmission of knowledge and training. As an “artist” it is politically necessary for me to destabilize the status of exceptionality and separateness of the artistic work. A status enjoyed on the level of social recognition and that contributes to the construction of an abstract and almost mystical figure, the last remnant of a now-vanished aura, and intertwined with the all-male myth of the “genius-creator”. On the contrary, and in spite of any claim to the autonomy of the aesthetic, those who work in the artistic field find themselves with both feet firmly planted in the material swamp of the slippery real neoliberal economies, where – too much often in fact – the differences of social class and origin decisively contribute to the progress of professional biographies and “careers”. Art – when observed under the lens of the work and forms-of-life of those who practice it – is anything but a sharp object with well-defined contours. Besides the more official, recognized, and variously “contractualized” works, there is, as a matter of fact, a whole “dark matter” that has no name. Borrowing the definition from astrophysics, that is how Gregory Sholette defines the whole hidden activity that institutions, ministerial programs, and influential voices of culture do not recognize, yet constitutes the complex and multidimensional body of the production and economies of the art world:
“it includes makeshift, amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organised practices – all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice to be invisible.” (Sholette, 2011)
As a note of my personal biography – being pretty aware it being part of a collective biography – I would add that in this dark matter, we might also count all those activities that are not closely artistic, yet allow the sustainability – always on the verge of survival – of the very fragile economies of those who work in the art world in Italy. As a consequence of the absence of a welfare system recognizing the statute of structural intermittence of the artistic work and its specific forms of precariousness, the off-work and unemployment-covered hours must actually be filled by other jobs. Jobs that must themselves be precarious and intermittent enough to combine with the unpredictable instability of artistic activity; jobs that therefore one may be able to abandon at any time in the event of an artistic engagement or the confirmation of an artistic residence, without any consequences; jobs that must allow (unpaid) time to dedicate to the development and promotion of one’s own artistic projects; jobs which must be invisible enough, not to affect the identity of the “artist”. Being a bartender, a waitress, a dishwasher, working in catering – the catering sector being the dark side as opposed to the glittering of the art world – working in clubs, doing graphics, projects in schools, art-linked teaching in the most different fields, workshops, seasonal jobs, and moreover cleaners, riders, babysitters, call center operators, leafleting, and so on. Who am I, how am I defined socially? Low-paid, unsecured, and mostly undeclared jobs that reappear at different times in the artist’s professional life and not just in the early years of training. In the absence of welfare measures, these junk jobs or stopgap jobs fill and compensate for an existence marked by an intermittence not only of income but also of professional identity, a discontinuity that defines subjectivities with a temporality “other” than that of the wage-labor society. “Against-the-time jobs” – one may define them – which have the effect of fragmenting, even more, our already fragmented enough lives. So many pieces that often struggle to make a whole.
How can we explain this composite economy made up of many often concurrent and inconsistent identities? And again, is it really possible to speak of the “artists” without naming this material component that absorbs life, time, and energy, and which is treated as the shameful shadow to be omitted from curricula and portfolios?
Practices of radical imagination
Start from the practices is an indication that comes from feminist thought and which allows us to reposition the relationship between art and politics in the contemporary world. A relationship not without shadows and ambiguity. Performing arts are here meant as practices, as ways of human doing, as a space for counter-hegemonic narratives, rather than as art objects that can be decoded according to the canons of aesthetics or art history. bell hooks write – in his fundamental reflections on the need to decolonize narratives, representations, and on the strategic centrality of cultural formations – that language is a place of struggle (hooks, 1990)
Following this indication, two possible tracks open up. One track is about investigating artistic processes focusing on the experimentation of languages and the imagination of the sensible, bringing the world to the world every time anew. Giving the final cut to the original gap between feminism and art in Italy, Carla Lonzi already in 1977 in the Female Revolt Second Manifesto declared that the bare theme setting is no sufficient criterion for evaluating the political consistency of an artistic (or political) action. Indeed, quite the opposite: “the more you deal with the woman, the more alien you are to me”. A radical and final declaration – displaced on the level of the aesthetics – that cuts ties with a whole tradition of political art that thematizes and argues, tells, and represents without affecting the existing canons and grammars. Art expresses a part of its power in the ability to make the world – or in Rancière words, to open up a new distribution of the sensible: “aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity” (Rancière, 2000). In this sense, language is to be considered among the institutions of social organization, starting with Hume who theorized the mobility and the evolutionary capacity of social institutions as a result of historically and culturally determined conventions. Nature and the artifact are configured in a bidirectional dynamic co-implicating and modeling each other – a theme upon which feminist thought has dug and continues to dig unprecedented and generative paths. (Caleo, 2018). Thus, crystallized social relationships are naturalized – as it happens to the relationship between the sexes and the institution of heteronormative binarism – yet, with Butler, they can also be subverted at any time. (Butler, 1988). It’s about interrupting the repetition of the performance and of the given repertoires, in order to open up to the instituent potential and the rewriting capacity that the performative makes manifest. It is in these connections and at the productive intersection of those debates, that the idea of fictional institutions opens up. To be understood in both ways: as the conventional and artificial the character of the institutions, which are therefore to be considered fictions, narratives that can always be rewritten from scratch; but also – thus Blanga-Gubbay and Piazza – as a terrain of possible falsification and invention, which trespasses into the exercise of art. Here we investigate the possibility that invented institutions, as well as aesthetic acts, can impact reality with transformative effects. At the same time, fictional institutions have the capacity to crumble and tarnish the alleged solidity of the existing institutions: “they do not claim their realness, but rather transport the same ideas of institutionality as in the realm of fiction.” (Blanga-Gubbay, Piazza).
A parallel track – one upon which I focus further below – attempts recognition of the political action of artists and art workers who have activated processes of subjectivation and instituent proposals. In Italy at different temporal heights and in different ways, these struggles have taken on the practice of occupying, managing, or self-governing spaces as a form of artistic precariousness self-organization. The occupation of spaces traditionally is an invention made available to movements since the 1960s and 1970s, and which in Italy has an extraordinary intensity – from housing occupations to the occupation of workplaces, social centers, urban spaces, and abandoned lands. IN the very same years and in addition to those occupations, the artistic experimental scene also passed through the creation of capillary networks of non-institutional places – from cellars to galleries, and independent festivals. The Italian feminist movement, unlike the North American one, rather than negotiating entry into “major” institutions – whether they were artistic institutions or university departments has – has known an extraordinary proliferation of autonomous institutions: libraries, publishing houses, self-managed counseling centers, independent self-awareness spaces, study groups, seminars for medical, sexual and political self-training, and homes for women. An archive so rich in innovations, knowledges, and imagination, that can always be thrown in, reactivated, incorporated in different times and contexts.
Looking at artistic activism of the 2010s, the practice of the occupations expresses its instituting capacity as well as its political autonomy. In Teatro Valle’s early days the activists declared “today we occupy a theater, just like once workers occupied factories”. A claim going beyond the self-representative dimension, and immediately leading to the productive dimension – through the direct management of the means of production, the setting up of informal economies, the experimenting of new relational systems – and the imaginative dimension of a new institutionality. The art of self-government in a different way, outside the neoliberal repertoires of production and competition, inventing new ways of cooperation able to trigger social transformations and recall a different idea of citizenship.
Teatro Polivalente Occupato
Ten years later today, in a fully changed political social phase, yet again on the verge of a crisis that will hit hard, I am interested in the possibility of building ramified genealogies. Multiple genealogies – from the nineties to nowadays – useful to link the threads among some junction experiences that marked and reconfigured the political space, as well as the languages of the artistic activism in Italy. With a cross-eyed and a chronologically reversed gaze, I am going to look at the experience of the TPO from a perspective that embodies the experience of the Teatro Valle Occupato, Macao, L’Asilo, reading again and opening again questions in light of the political urgencies of the present. Rather than a historical analysis, keeping these stories alive and always playing at inventing new connections is an exercise in prefiguration launched towards the future (Graziano, 2016). A getting intimate with other temporality and stories – Haraway would say – as a practice of imagination and thought.
2011 Teatro Valle Occupato / Macao / L’Asilo
The pulsating matrix of the occupations of theaters and art spaces was the need to self-organize precarious work during the crisis. We are in the open flow of a movement that is active on several fronts, born to counter the economic crisis of 2008 and the austerity policies that intend to address the crisis by cutting resources and welfare. The neoliberal choice to privatize and cut funds and resources in the public sectors of immaterial and cultural work (schools, universities, cultural heritage, performing arts industry) is equivalent to a direct contraction of the employment opportunities, in a sector already heavily exposed and precarious. In Italy, in the 2009-2010 two-year period, universities are fighting against the Gelmini reform, which with a series of measures reorganizes education and public universities in a decidedly corporate-management direction. Not only students but also precarious researchers are mobilized to occupy the roofs of universities. It is propagation by contact: the meeting with the researchers – reinforcing the awareness that there were common conditions in cognitive and cultural work – pushes the singularities inside the immaterial production sector which remained on the margins of public discourse, and up to then dispersed, to speak up.
A week of “Spacial Struggles”, Teatro Valle Occupato, September 2013
At the time of the temporary occupations of the Cinema Metropolitan in Rome in January 2011 (which was closed to be transformed into a shopping center), and after that on June 11 during the occupation of the Teatro Valle, the activists defined themselves as “intermittent and precarious cultural workers” (AA.VV. DeriveApprodi, 2012).Those occupations will be then followed by the occupation of L’Asilo in Naples and Torre Galfa skyscraper and Macao in Milan. Other occupations follow across the entire national territory. Those actions are the result of an already active relational policy, a federative doing and thinking together, a connective tissue, which is initially favored precisely by the nomadic and mobile nature of the workers of the art and performing arts sector: who are almost never definitively rooted, who use work in different places and contexts, who frequently change employers, and who often know each other. This cartography includes the sister experiences of Sale Docks in Venice and Angelo Mai in Rome which, although previously born, share the same postures and desires. A network composed of sometimes ephemeral and heterogeneous nodes – unstable yet boiling – of spaces but also of territorial micro-politics, groups, and scattered subjectivities.
Teatro Valle Occupato, Artcock “Inside Teatro Valle”, December 2011
On a smaller scale, this rising movement breathes in resonance with other global insurgencies, different from each other, yet interconnected by common words and practices, such as the re-appropriation of public spaces and the call for self-government and direct democracy: from the Spanish 15M to the revolutions in North Africa, the Occupy Movement in the US, Gezi Park in Istanbul, the revolts and experiences of self-government during the crisis in Greece (schools and hospitals).
I would like to focus in particular on one node in the generative richness of the cultural world struggles: the graft between, on the one hand, the artistic precariousness subjectivation process seeking its own forms of self-organization, speaking out, finding alliances and inspiration in other sets of cultural (and not) precariousness; and on the other hand, the many scattered struggles over the commons: from public water, the damaged territories of the South, the No Tav in Val Susa, to the digital commons. It is a double movement: on the one side, to allow art workers struggle to escape from corporatism within which they often entrench themselves in the need to recognize their own exceptional nature; on the other side, to open a perspective on the productive commons, intended not only as primary resources management alternative model but also as work direct self-government in a collective and disseminated way. In this tangle, the theme of new institutions becomes an innovative tool and practice of artistic activism, generating models, prototypes, experiments actually in progress of possible systems of production.
MOTUS at Teatro Valle Occupato, projection on stage, 1995
Many are the experiments: permanences; training schools for workers; self-inquiries; collective art management tables; participatory writing of new statutes; alternative forms of income as well as informal and circular economies, or the use of a common currency; the collaboration with universities and the decentralization of research activities outside the academy; self-training seminars; collective writing; new dramaturgy projects; the creation of artistic, performative, musical, visual, editorial, curatorial projects. This is the terrain – as Giuseppe Allegri points out – on which creative and minor use of common law is activated, through non-state institutions where
“it is possible to experiment with practices of freedom, inventing forms of self-governance in relationship to others: imagination and a constituent practice, which is the result of social conventions that, instead of replicating the tradition, find new ways of behavior and rules of conduct produced by the collective agreement around the satisfaction of the needs of a community that intends to self-govern.” (Allegri, 2012)
1995 “From the hypermarket to cyberspace”. Teatro Polivalente Occupato (Bologna)
On November 6, 1995, Teatranti Occupanti, an acronym bringing together several young research companiesoccupies the theater of the Academy of Fine Arts via Irnerio 54/c in Bologna, which had remained closed for thirty years: “From now on, every possibility is open, if desired”. Desire and subjectivity are the first elements that I am interested in highlighting because it is in these years that we begin to thematize and recognize – even if this term was not yet used – the question of the precariousness of the artistic world. The subjectivity that takes shape in this occupation is varied and multifaceted: students, technicians, artists from various disciplines, performers, visual artists, videomakers, musicians, choreographers, graphic designers, self-builders, set designers, curators, sound technicians, cybernauts. Often, with that undisciplined posture typical of the countercultures of the 1990s, one is more than one thing at the same time. The choice to name themselves “theater people”, and not “artists” gives a sense of the complexity of roles and functions, rejecting the idea that the artist is separated from the environmental ecosystem. After all, a company is (historically) already a small cell, a nomadic collective identity, an ephemeral temporary institution. Here also available as the first infrastructure of political organization: at the time of occupation, the coordination of the companies dissolves reconfiguring itself into a more open and heterogeneous subjectivity. Over a period of ten years, the Tpo will in fact be inhabited, with different degrees of intensity, by many artists and companies sometimes transitory, or resident, regular guests, as well as its belonging militant activists.
Teatro Polivalente Occupato, 1995
Unlike other independent spaces or festivals – as in those same years in Bologna in the case of the Link -, the selection and design of a precise aesthetic line have never been the guiding criterion. I believe this as a choice of cultural policy which, sometimes putting at risk the level of “artistic quality” – a concept with which the occupants explicitly argue since the moment of occupation – opens up to other possibilities that are not yet codified. Like at Teatro Valle, an inhomogeneous and osmotic modality is preferred to the program and the curatorial identity, that allows those spaces to be transformed into a very fertile compost, nourishing undergrowth that, feeding the scene from the bottom, allows even unexpected combinations to grow. Unstable assemblages, which mix and hybridize different communities – from the hypermarket to cyberspace, that’s to say. Once again, desires!.
The attempt to keep both the political and the artistic experimentation together has generated innovative practices on both fronts. First of all on the front of the art world where the dominant practice of groups and companies was certainly to regularly use informal, independent, or occupied spaces and contexts, yet mostly without determining their political perspectives. Although the independent circuits established in the 1980s and 1990s were large, interconnected, and highly populated – in the performing arts, as well as in the music and publishing industry, with all the independent labels, magazines, and fanzines -, the experimental scene continued to depend on more institutional systems. Tpo attempts therefore a path of strong autonomy which – starting from its own material, economic and production conditions – opens a path of subjectivation: “it has contributed to developing specific skills with respect to the use of technical and artistic means of production” (1997). The issues of cultural and immaterial work and precarious subjectivity will become central in the struggles of the following years – from the manifestations of MayDay (2001) and San Precario (2004) to the struggles of the French intermittents, with their coming to the surface in 2003 and the following cycles of struggles -, but they find a first dazzling incarnation in the experience of the TPO, prefiguring new forms of artistic activism.
TPO 2000
Second of all, the attempt is also innovative on the front of the political spaces, in which cultural activity has always been perceived as a sideline programming, rather than as a field of struggle and a space for the cultural workforce self-organization. In the experience of the Tpo, activism is also expressed through aesthetic choices, experimentation with new languages, new productive and cooperative practices. Not by chance, it chooses to label itself an “occupied theater” rather than a social center, precisely to mark a discontinuity in its approach to the materiality of cultural work. It is a work of political imagination, as well as of artistic invention. No coincidence that the Tpo becomes humus for two other experiences at the crossroad of the struggles of the following years: the birth of the Bolognese node of Indymedia, and Sexyshock (2001) a feminist pink – queer activism space.
Alike the Valle, also Tpo (no) plan was to occupy it for three days and “see how it went”: an ability to improvise that we can read as one of the skills that art can lend to political organization, namely a form of instant composition, connected to the present and open to the unexpected, in some way an alternative to the programs and plans of traditional political structures.
Dark Matter #2. Between the folds
The critical analysis of live arts gives us a privileged observation point from which to read the transformations of contemporary work in the neoliberal framework – it is in fact the “activity without work”, unproductive, performative, that becomes the paradigm of production in the post-Fordist economy, as Virno highlights in his seminar “A Grammar of the Multitude” (Virno, 2004). In my opinion today it is precisely this trait placing art, and in particular live arts, in intimate proximity with capitalism, that we must know how to look at. Proximity that hides in the folds of an aestheticization of the political that every form of artistic activism must question and undermine. Even the gradual collapse of the boundary between artist and activist is sometimes almost encouraged by the institutions and the art market and reveals peculiar traits of ambiguity. In the society of performance, this indistinction is accompanied by the request to be more and more performative, more and more involved: the artist must be able to be the entrepreneurs of themselves (cf. Gentili, Niccoli, 2015). Thus, politics becomes work, and vice versa. Already in 2001 Virno clearly pointed out that creativity had been transformed into managerial skills of the self, in an increasingly opaque indistinction between life-time and work-time. That is what Hito Steyerl calls an economy of the presence, which also becomes a measure of efficiency, and the value of social activity put to work:
“in addition to developing works, artists, or more generally content providers, nowadays have to perform countless additional services, which slowly seem to become more important than any other form of work. The Q&A is more important than the screening, the live lecture more than the text, the encounter with the artist more important than the one with the work. Not to speak about the jumle of quasi.academic and social media PR formats that multiply the templates in which unalienated presence is supposed to be delivered. The artist has to be present, an in Marina Abramović’s eponymous performance”. (Steyerl, 2017)
In recent years – especially since the 2008 economic crisis and the global insurgencies that resulted out of it – art institutions, biennials, festivals, forums, conferences, and also many other artistic processes, focused their programming on radical politics and the performance of the struggle. The creative economy extracts value putting into play the political and the common, as Marco Baravalle points out in his analysis of new curatorial trends: it is possible to recognize in their “mimetic” forms “the governmental trait of contemporary cultural industries, that function precisely through the enhancement of the interstitium, the differential of freedom, the compatible excess”. (Baravalle, 2016). Neoliberal governmentality that parasites the relational forms and the networks created by social cooperation, resorting to the use of the rhetoric of participation and community, in the mimetic desire to re-shape the expressive and trans-bodily intensity of the struggles, and increase the value of the experience that they offer. Temporary communities occasionally convened, pre-packaged contexts in which it is possible to place oneself, in a safe and conflict-free way. In what way is this action of absorption actually compensated with forms of widespread redistribution, or with the negotiation of different production models?
We can certainly read this trend as a symptom of needs that are not satisfied – the need to participate, to feel part of a community of meaning, to speak up, to subvert asymmetrical and toxic relational systems – and which get intercepted by the more organized artistic system. Yet this trend risks being a mere substitute – deconflicted, pacified, neutralized – for political action. Anesthesia and aestheticization. Political radicalism becomes a packaging, translated into a regime of representation in which every transformative force is neutralized. Even though they evoking political radicalism, seldom do such contexts become real spaces of subjectivation, or even more concretely, infrastructures of support and active solidarity for the more fragile and more exposed organized forms of activism.
At the same time, this attitude leaves the door open to possible action strategies. In the experience of the cultural occupations – such as Valle, Macao, L’Asilo – many have been the experiments in which a strategic alliance has been attempted with some formal institution – universities, international cultural institutes, foundations, publishing houses, national theaters of other European countries, or even fashion brands, to name a few – whose objectives stratify. From a purely defensive level, where the support of official institutions aims to publicly “protect” the activist spaces from possible acts of repression. To a level where the practices become more complex and substantial: including forms of redistribution of resources, or forms of provision of logistic and service infrastructures, such as access to calls, use of spaces, transnational networks, or agreements. Another possible area of engagement of cultural institutions opens up on the right to the free movement of bodies, in an attempt to actively oppose – not only as a form of self-representation – the violent European migration policies. As in the case reported by Hito Steyerl of the Cultural Center of Suruç in Turkey, which during the emergency, became a place to welcome refugees fleeing the borders after the Daesh attack in Kobanê. The artistic institutions could be able to mobilize the available means and infrastructures, both material and relational. Let’s imagine the saturation of the administrative functions specific to the institution, to multiply protocols, authorizations, study visas, certified training activities, and so on.
This is undoubtedly a battlefield that can be activated and solicited by artists and cultural workers in the coming years, and whose ability to generate conflict – instead of the domesticated spaces of the art market – will be a useful indicator. Occupying – both materially and symbolically – the territory of the institution has a very different meaning from institutionalizing anomalous spaces, or the mimetic reproduction of existing institutions. This difference passes precisely through the transformation of the political space and the “performative reconfiguration of institutions, as an infinite and not-determined place of conflict” (Athanasiou, 2016). Furthermore, through the relational ecosystem created by the Institute for Radical Imagination – a fictional institution that also includes Macao, Sale Docks, and L’Asilo – it was possible to engage the Reina Sofia Museum, a prestigious Spanish artistic institution, to be part of a network that supports the action of artists/activists engaged in the struggle for unconditional basic income. (see Art for Ubi Manifesto). This same ability to diversify and hybridize different levels and actions is the sign of the intelligence of the struggles, which know how to move simultaneously, on different levels, with different strategies. Inventing and giving shape to new autonomous institutions of the municipality and, at the same time, hacking where possible, the existing institutions, creating monster assemblages and navigating between the interstices, like reticular mushrooms, thriving in between the cracks. Post-anthropocentric practices for transcorporeal subjectivities to come.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bettina Cottone, Elena Lolli, Andrea Masu, Valentina Medda, Giulia Selmi, Marco Otto Mercante, Massimo Carozzi (and others) who in these years, in various ways, with their reflections and affective archives push to keep alive the artistic and political thought on the Teatro Polivalente Occupato 1995/2005.
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Ilenia Caleo is a performer, activist, and researcher. Since 2000 she has been working as an actress, performer, and dramaturg in the contemporary scene, collaborating with various companies and directors including Motus, Davide Iodice, Lisa Natoli. With Silvia Calderoni, in 2018, she created KISS, a performance project with 23 performers, produced by Santarcangelo Festival and CSS Udine. Master Degree in Contemporary Philosophy, Ph.D. Fellow in Art and Performance Studies at Università La Sapienza (Roma). Her research focuses on bodies, feminist epistemologies, aesthetics, new institutions, and forms of cultural work. At present, she is a researcher at the IUAV University of Venice and coordinator of the Arts Module within the Masters in Gender Studies and Politics at the University Roma Tre. She collaborates with the research group of the five-year project “INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)”, ERC Starting Grant directed by Annalisa Sacchi (IUAV). She is an activist in commons and queer-feminists movements. Politically and artistically she has grown up in the underground counterculture.
Keywords
political theory / subjectivation / new cultural institutions / performing arts / performativity
Abstract
There is a family similarity between art and politics, between art and activism, following Deleuze (1987) who notices a constitutive affinity between the work of art and the act of resistance. Starting from the practices – an indication that comes from trans-feminist thought and that allows us to reposition the relationship between art and politics in the contemporary, a relationship not without shadows and ambiguity. I intend the performing arts as practices, ways of human doing, a space for counter-hegemonic narratives (hooks, 1998), rather than as art objects that can be decoded according to the canons of aesthetics or art history (Deleuze, Guattari, 1991; Rancière, 2000).
This paper, therefore, investigates, on the one hand, the artistic practices that focus on the experimentation of languages and the work of political imagination (Athanasiou, 2016) – the theme, as Carla Lonzi (1977) already declared, completing the original break between feminism and art in Italy, is not a sufficient criterion. On the other hand, it attempts a recognition of the practices and political actions of artists and art workers who have activated processes of subjectivation and institutional practices (Ahmed, 2007; Deleuze, 1955; Van Campenhout, Mestre, 2016), starting from the multiple genealogies of some experiences in Italy from the 1990s until nowadays – from the Tpo of Bologna to the Teatro Valle Occupato, passing through Macao and the Angelo Mai. The critical analysis of live arts gives us a privileged observation point to read the transformations of contemporary work in the neoliberal framework – it is precisely the unproductive, performative “activity without work” that becomes the new paradigm of production in the post-Fordist economy. (Virno, 2001). In my opinion, it is also this trait that today places art, and in particular live arts, in intimate proximity with capitalism (Kunst, 2015) and between the folds of an aestheticization of the political, that every form of artistic activism must question and put in crisis (Steyerl, 2018).
From the creative city to the caring city, proposals for new relational paradigms. An Interview to Marco Baravalle and Emanuele Braga. Read more on Nero Magazine
Too much love and friendship connect me to many people working for and around Venice Biennale. Too much admiration connects me to many that thanks to La Biennale made Venice a place to come back to instead of a “once-in-a-lifetime” tourist destination. Not light-heartedly these pages will go down as an exercise of speculation and critique. I am participating in the uncertainty of those people risking to lose their jobs, watching their business fail, not getting their contracts renewed, being unable to access the already miserable existing welfare measures. Considering the earnings in monetary terms: room attendants, janitors, technicians, workers, freelancers, researchers, teachers, journalists, tourist-guides, artists, architects, curators, performers, etc. will – more or less – lose something due to a possible (yet hopefully unlikely) cancellation or postponed events programmes linked to the various departments of La Biennale.
Do we change, now?It will probably always be worse: the techno-authoritarian drift
Coronavirus management risks dragging everyone into techno-authoritarianism: a social life awaits us in which we are controlled every move we make. Through GPS, cell phones, cameras in public spaces and streets it will be possible to understand if we really respect the rules of social distancing. At first they will tell us that their data collection will respect anonymity and that it will be performed “only” to understand mass behavior. Then they will come to individual sanctions and integrated ranking systems. Those who are unemployed will have to stay at home or go shopping at the most, only those with a job will be allowed to move or take a plane.
If we have a fever a sensor will prove it for us, and it will directly communicate it to the person who is processing the complete picture of our profile.
Individual biometric data, data on our movement, data on our economic situation, data on our sleep and our free time, will transform society and the way it is managed, highlighting the social areas to support and the areas to sacrifice.
This is what awaits us after Covid-19, this is how states and markets are thinking of reorganizing the crisis and the post crisis, or the permanent infra crisis. This is the toolbox for the bio-politician at the end of the 20th century.
Those who govern us are now turning to those tools. In the past ten years, perhaps China was the boldest in testing a pervasive and data driven governmental social control program called Social Credit System, Silicon Valley practiced with Cambridge Analytica piloting two or three elections quite successfully, but they were only test benches. Society must be administered through data we can collect. Data must be as accurate and precise as possible. Doing so risks may decrease. Whose risks? Market, growth and productivity risks. If there are too many sick people, factories’ assembly lines must slow down and start a few less planes. If there are few sick people, it’s possible to push for a moment on the accelerator. If there are too many riots among the poor, better to increase welfare a little. If nobody complains old people in hospices can silently crack, people who are no longer productive and only represent a burden on pensions.This crisis is not originated by banks and financial system, but from the real economy. That’s the reason why the reaction will not simply imply the financial system to vampirize state welfare, real estate investments and working conditions. What awaits us is something even worse: direct selective control over populations and resources. Financial activity will no longer be sufficient: what capital will need is a designed extermination of lives and control over resources.
This probably is the real news after the advent of the virus: biopolitical control based on data analysis will not only be functional to a neoliberal agenda, but it will be aimed at a Malthusian program of selective extermination mixed to a biotechnological and military control of lives and natural resources on a global scale.
The Things out of fashion
This scientific use of data to administer the “factory-society” will be the neoliberal bi-partisan response to COVID-19. I believe it will imply the principle of selecting the unnecessary: the ones who are considered useless and weak. Those who will apply this principle will de facto be more selective than those who declared themselves openly fascist, nationalist or than those who are eager to gain full powers. It will be the triumph of the modernist project conceiving society as a designed machine of production capable of extracting value from our lives and resources to accumulate profits.
I call it “out of fashion” because this tired political class imagery is inspired by those great science fiction movies from the 80s and 90s until getting to the first series of Black Mirror ten years ago. I don’t think I’m being too pessimistic by saying that this is what will most likely happen.
On the contrary, what we are interested in is something else: we are interested the possible not in the probable. The probable is the result of a calculation where costs and benefits are optimized without questioning the existing paradigm. The point is to change the rules of the game, instead of simply to minimize losses.
We are the heretical daughters and sons of this generation. For us this stuff is out of date. We see through different eyes. We refuse to be reduced to numbers that count for an interest rate, we must be able to look beyond data, profiles and brownie points, we are much more than computing power.
If the future awaiting us all is data driven, the point is not simply to behave well and dynamically obey the rules of social distancing, the point is to understand which political model are these rules functional to? If the only attempt is to minimize life losses to guarantee the economic model that led us to this crisis with a minimum of profit then the right thing to do is to go on strike. We are by far beyond this techno-fetishist dream of controlling nature, growth and production.
The radical imagination
We like profiles, we like curves and we even know how to read them. We like softwares, we like sensors and we also know how to code them. We like to set the alarm clock and let a machine take care of what to do. We are that generation that grew up with algorithms and screens in place of dolls and toy cars. We played, loved, used upside down those tools, we threw against the wall artificial intelligence, plastic things, touch screens and metal detectors.
We are not against computers and data, but we rebel against the all too human and porn-patriarchal dream of reducing everything to a toy for control in the hands of increasingly impotent people.
Now we really understand what it means to be deeply powerless when we open the door and feel the fear of dying breeze. We are the ones who do not want to die and do not want to kill their loved ones.
What we really care about now is a radical change: a gesture of radical imagination, now!
The fundamental problem urging us to find an answer now without wasting any time is: what is useful? what do we really need now?
Remaining in the psychosis of the emergency we are only increasing anxiety and making more and more mistakes. What is going on is real, it is no fantasy. People are really dying of a virus that has made the leap in species and which we have difficulty controlling.
The theme of the construction of the self is linked to our capability to accept that the other is not something to be controlled with hysteria, instead it is something to be understood. When Donna Haraway says that only from some concepts we can think of other concepts, she suggests that everything is in a “specific relationship”. Now more than ever Our task is to stay in this understanding of respons-ability. If we let the car run in the direction in which it has accelerated so far we will go more and more towards the tragedy and hit against a wall.
The dream of one thing: some points for the big jump
1 / Universal Basic Income
Europe and the entire world are entering a crisis which will not be the same for everyone. Many will not be able to support themselves through their work. Precarious, self-employed, unemployed workers will not have enough income to survive.The present model of production based on support for banks and businesses to get work and wages moving again is not sustainable. It is extremely urgent to set the economic measures for this crisis differently. This is the time for a universal and unconditional basic income covering the whole population. It must be conceived as a non-emergency measure and a long-term plan. Anti-crisis economic financial coverage measures must not increase national debts. Europe must promote for its own survival common fiscal and economic policies for debt mutualisation in the creation of new liquidity instead.The same logic must be followed by bottom-up self-organised networks of alternative economic spaces, both at local and transnational level. We must develop networks based on mutualism, that do not generate credits or debits. They should manage common portfolios together, supporting access to goods and resources and the income for everyone.
2 / The Care
This pandemic made clear the scandal of neoliberal policies based on cutting welfare during the past thirty years. This pandemic has shown with all its evidence the centrality and importance of social reproduction. Everything now turns around the capacity of public health, of doctors, researchers and nurses, to cope with the saturation of the resuscitation rooms.
Now everyone can see that we are in the hands of those who are delivering goods and food to our homes, those who are cleaning offices and hospitals, those who are taking care of the elderly, those who are continuing to pick tomatoes in the countryside: they are mostly migrant workers. These are the ones who are suffering even more these days. These are the women suffering from domestic violence in their own homes. These are the ones who are taking care of the education of boys and girls now that schools are closed.
This is the social fabric that was always made invisible. This is the social fabric that was always denigrated and considered marginal in the eyes of economic and investment policies. The Unnecessary Ones! They are the ones who are saving our ass, right now that capitalism is in shock and does not know what to do. They are the ones who – as it has always been, stressing the “always”! – are doing everything possible to resolve the crisis.
This is where we have to start from again: from the bottom-up self-organized welfare, from the groups of activists who are bringing drugs and food to those who cannot move from home, from the new logistics of the doing in common, of the taking care of, of the doing what is useful.
We must claim to start from policies that put first public investment in health, in anti-violence centers, in education, in housing and social services.
We must immediately demand the regularization of all immigrants on European territory.
And if they have the courage to go back to make invisible the care, worse to criminalize it, or throw it into the hands of wild privatizations, we all should go on strike, because now more than ever if this social block stops, then the entire world will stop.
3 / The Cosmos
It is pointless to fight like superheroes for nature, for the forest and against climate change. We are at a very important political crossroad. Environment as an ecosystem and as a common good is at stake. The process of creating a common area cannot man as the hero or the guilty one on the one hand, and climate, biodiversity, plastics, robots on the other. We must get out of the paradigm of the modern era, based on a system of control, profit, sins and debts. Even in a Calvinist perspective made of self-flagellation and guilt, we continue to consider the Vitruvian man being the center of the universe. The new perspective, considering the ecosystem as a whole, can only represent the beginning of a new cosmogony, where human beings are not at the center of the universe, they are fighting with the forest and not in the forest. The human being is no foreign privileged body. The human being struggles together with biodiversity, together with air and together with water.
4 / The Digital Platforms
We must invent new digital platforms capable of taking away the monopoly of big capital platforms. After the 2008 crisis, large digital platforms took on the task of monitoring and determining social behavior. The pandemic future will increase the role of digital platforms in determining our social behavior. The only alternative to this concentration of power is to increase democratic control of social platforms, in the many possible ways placing them in the hands of democratic states. At the same time, we need to develop cooperative models of digital platforms. From knowledge archiving, to logistics, distribution, welfare services, food and energy chains, we must develop self-organized cooperative platforms that decentralize governance and federate reproductive and productive alliances.
We must promote a double movement: strengthen the role of democratic states in the development and control of digital infrastructures as a welfare and non-business oriented service, and, at the same time, develop cooperative and independent bottom-up platforms. Only one of these two directions can reveal to be weak or authoritarian, which is why we must promote their synergistic and coexistent proliferation.
5 / The Bodies
We are losing our bodies and the relationship between the bodies as we have known it until now. To claim a body means to escape the total digitalization of our interconnections. The speed of the optical fiber, the speed of transmission and production of information is not comparable to the transmission speed of our nervous system. If we saturate our perception at the speed of the optical fiber we will dissolve. Our body can only suffer, scream, go crazy, paralyze and dissolve, if it will be immobilized and connected most of the time to a wifi router.
To de-automate this process of digitizing our relationships and destroying our bodies, we need to build new rituals. New circuits for the making of relationships.
The creation of this body is an ecosystemic working: we need to build balanced complex systems as a refuge for all those scarcities and resources that are running out. Affectivities, mineral resources, sexuality, food, concepts, economies, artificial intelligence must weave together to build a new, monstrous and balanced social body.
6 / The Cultures
What is lacking the most in the digitalization of social life is cultural production. In the reclusive and digitized society, in the automated disciplinary society, what will fail most is knowing how to think. Museums, schools, universities, concert halls, cinemas, art spaces, research centers, libraries as conceived, designed and attended until now, no longer have a physical reason to exist.
Culture must reclaim a right of intermittence, being able to be the place to take distance, the epoché [ed. suspension]in an infected world, the convivial space to be able to sleep, to rest and to dream. Culture is the place where alterity is built. The right to sleep and to dream meaning the right to unplug from some of the forms that have so far doped and saturated the forms of artistic production.
The virus will perhaps make biennials, fashion week and all the great events that in recent decades characterized the enhancing creativity cycle by transforming culture itself into the major branch of the tourism industry and real estate market. Shortly said: we could only toast to their possible obsolescence. This is the moment to fill this void with an artistic production based on the long-term, the care, the integration with local and decentralized supply chains. A synergic perspective of the many artistic disciplines no more conceived as spectacle, but rather conceived as the research field and symbolic engine to dream of the world to come.
Growing up in the 1980s (I was 10 in 1980) my politics has been a minor form of resistance – a militant self-reflection, a plural mode of articulation – against the immaterial violence of finance; the molecular capture of late capitalism; the ghostly superficiality of the neoliberal person and the grand narratives of the male, bourgeois, white civilization that (re)emerged at the end of history.
Today I face a different history. Capitalist institutions have reorganised themselves following the old predatory and monopolistic logic. In 2011 and 2013 I did not understand that the young comrades who were out in the street with me were fighting a different war – a war against their physical and political annihilation – and moved in a different existential space – a space of immense material and imaginative desolation. I could not fathom that their future would arch back into the folds of totalitarianism as witnessed by our ancestors. Now it is clear. We live in a time of radical enclosures. People everywhere are being jailed, expelled, stigmatized and confined in intellectual, moral and physical enclosures put up by capitalist markets and absolutist states operating in tandem. It is not only about the “excluded.” The condition of refugees and exiles represent us all.
To be radical today means to claim the gestures of commoning, culture of solidarity and determination to exist in common back from the history of anti-totalitarian and anti-capitalist struggles and to bring these histories and practices to bear onto our future. I see culture, art and imagination as forces that can both freeze the flow of life (in a movement of institutionalization) and put life in motion (in moments of radical opening). Culture is radical (anti-capitalist and decolonised) when it goes beyond the enclosures of the “usual people” and builds connections across socio-economic divides; challenges the cynical language of the master and the exclusionary logics of difference, negative freedoms, boycotts and art occupations that mirror the occupations of capital (it’s impossible to beat the master on his own turf) and embarks in empathic and sensuous journeys outside of the capitalist “self.” As we enter into a new era of primitive accumulation, the virtuoso skills of the baroque intellectual have become obsolete. We need a light and portable weapon stripped down to its very core (Susan Sontag – the radical intellectual as ascetic and destroyer).
For me radical imagination stems from a double movement of anti-capitalist critique and of epistemological and discursive construction of a new post-capitalist imaginary, including new forms of production and representation in which art and politics inform each other. But this radical imagination is risky. It needs a safe space and a long-term horizon to be cultivated. The Institute wants to be such safe space – an alter-institution, both inside (because of where we come from) and outside (because of what we are aiming for) the hegemonic institutions of capitalism (museums, universities and institutional politics) and “the west” intended as a mental and a geopolitical space. The Institute wants to be a space of freedom, an exilic space turned into commons – not as act of survival but as “communal luxury.”
I see the institute as a research-curatorial-activist group engaged in research interventions (starting from the 5 we highlighted in Naples) and working with a methodology that combines pragmatic and tactical actions with an ongoing reflection on how, as a culturally diverse and geographically dispersed collective, we can institute otherwise.
the call from the projects comes from a specific urgency and the institute becomes a structure also for archive (memory and documentation). Became a repository. A specific methodology, and conceptual framework.
Relationship between the visible and the invisible
To map or to create a diagram means to visualize a certain chose contents, be it the physical geography of a portion of space or the relational network of people and organizations working to define an Institute for Radial Imagination. Of course, by creating maps, we are only partially describing already existing territories that will define the space covered by the Institute activity.
During the first phase of this attempt we immediately encounter a first problem of knots that can not be mapped, of relations that can not be made public because of safety reasons. This happens in Turkey of course, but it could happen elsewhere, especially if IRI will focus on the space of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. So first of all we decided to allow a geography of opacity, but the presence of invisible territories must not lead to a disengagement on these very portions of space. How do we visualize the urgencies, the emergencies, but also the richness of answers and the agency that these invisible territories embody? How do we, as an Institute, culturally and politically deal with it without paternalism and without the arrogance of representing them and speaking for them?
Translation and Geography
An issue, linked to the previous point, that emerged in the conversation with alessandro Petti, in that of translation of the theoretical vocabulary of the Institute. Alessandro noted that the vocabulary of the commons could be shared even in the Arab context, even if, historically, it has more to do with Islam. Alessandro also pointed out that it would be important to really engage with the space of the Mediterranean also by promoting activities in those contexts that apparently look “more difficult”.
Representative logic
Another issue with design the rational map of the Institute was the difficulty of appear in the diagram as a spokesperson of a certain activists group, where the issue of representation is especially felt. Again, the dialectic between visibility and invisibility comes back and it raises questions about the individual and the collective. Questions that are probably relevant for our Insitute too. How an aspiring Institution for Radical Multitudinarian Imagination represents itself?
Finding the right routes
The single knots of the Institute already show a very complex geography, a variety of fields of intervention that (from activism, to art, to academia) compose a rich map. This may sound obvious but the map Showa that we deal with individual or collective subjects characterized by full agendas and scarcity of time, sometimes facing a lack of resources, sometimes dealing with repressive political conditions and/or with the global economy attention. A crucial challenge for the future of IRI will be to serious consider these starting conditions. We need to find those unexplored routes on the map that will boost meaningful cooperation between the different knots and not only a reciprocally instrumental relation on episodic bases.
Towards a queer Institute?
We must pay attention to gender balance, the risk of creating a male Institute is always present. And gender balance is a good starting point, a deeper reflection should be developed on the “becoming minor” of the institute. Do we instead want a queer institution? What does it mean? How do we achieve this goal?
