Tag: Emanuele Braga

Art for Radical Ecologies, News

THE CLIMATE JUSTICE LEAGUE Workshop | WCCJ 2023

ENGLISH

In the framework of the World Congress for Climate Justice, Milan 2023

📍 State University of Milan, via Festa del Perdono 7, Cloister Legnaia (Aula EcoLab)
🗓 12 October 2023
🕦 H 16:30 – 18:30

THE CLIMATE JUSTICE LEGUE Workshop

curated by Emanuele Braga

with the complicit participation of Andreco,  Andrea Natella, Noura Tafeche, Serpica Naro and Dirty Art Department (Jerszy Seymour, Theo Dietz e Rosa Meulenbeld), Institute of Radical Imagination (Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Maddalena Fragnito, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto)

The CLIMATE JUSTICE LEAGUE saw its genesis at LE ALLEANZE DEI CORPI Festival, Milan KINLab September 2023

A generative co-creation of eco-warriors icons front for climate justice. The Climate Justice League will be present in the form of big cardboard puppets, ready to enter the street and march around the planet.

Subvertising and radical imagination: we need super heroes for climate justice! In the history of art and activism we have always practiced the situationist art of inventing fictional characters alongside real everyday struggles and which embodied the spirit of the time. Luther Blisset, San Precario, Serpica Naro, Gaetano, to name a few famous ones close to us, born in Milan and Italy. In this era of great upheavals, of floods, tornadoes and heat waves, in this Milan where the parks are closed due to cyclones, the entire Po Valley has been flooded and in the Alps there are no longer glaciers and water reserves… who can come to our rescue? What are the faces of the new CLIMATE JUSTICE LEAGUE? And above all, who are the evil forces behind all this?
After the great success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Yesman and Pussyriot have just released the new face of Barbie Eco Worrior which you can find on  https://www.barbieliberation.org/. These and other super personalities will participate in the WORLD CONGRESS FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE hich will be held in Milan next 12-15 October. On this occasion Institute of Radical Imagination will also launch the anti-speciesist, fossil free and post-anthropocentric ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES MANIFESTO.

ITALIANO

Nell’ambito del World Congress for Climate Justice, Milano 2023

📍 Università Statale di Milano, via Festa del Perdono 7, Chiostro Legnaia (Aula EcoLab)
🗓 12 Ottobre 2023
🕦 H 16:30 – 18:30

LA CLIMATE JUSTICE LEGUE Workshop

a cura di Emanuele Braga

con la partecipazione complice di Andreco,  Andrea Natella, Noura Tafeche, Serpica Naro and Dirty Art Department (Jerszy Seymour, Theo Dietz e Rosa Meulenbeld), Institute of Radical Imagination (Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Maddalena Fragnito, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto)

La genesi della CLIMATE JUSTICE LEAGUE è stata presentata a LE ALLEANZE DEI CORPI Festival, Milano KINLab September 2023

Una co-creazione generativa di icone di eco-guerrieri in prima linea per la giustizia climatica. La Climate Justice League sarà presente sotto forma di grandi pupazzi di cartone, pronti a scendere in strada e marciare intorno al pianeta.

Subvertising e immaginazione radicale, ovvero: abbiamo bisogno di  super eroə per la giustizia climatica! Nella storia dell’arte e attivismo  abbiamo praticato da semprei l’arte situazionista dell’invenzione di personaggi fiction al fianco delle lotte reali di tutti i giorni e che incarnassero lo spirito del tempo. Luther Blisset, San Precario, Serpica Naro, Gaetano, per citarne alcuni famosi e a noi vicini, nati a Milano e in Italia. In questa epoca di grandi stravolgimenti, di alluvioni, tornadi e ondate di calore, in questa Milano in cui i parchi sono chiusi per ciclone, tutta la pianura padana è stata alluvionata e sulle alpi non ci sono più ghiacciai e riserve idriche… chi può venire in nostro soccorso? Quali sono i volti della nuova CLIMATE JUSTICE LEAGUE? E soprattutto chi sono le forze del male che stanno dietro a tutto questo?
Dopo il grande successo di Barbie di Greta Gerwig, Yesman e Pussyriot hanno appena liberato il nuovo volto di Barbie Eco Worrior che potete trovare sul sito https://www.barbieliberation.org/.  Questə e altrə super personaggə parteciperanno al congresso mondiale per il clima WORLD CONGRESS FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE che si terrà a Milano il prossimo 12-15 Ottobre. In questa occasione Iinstitute of Radical Imagination con la piattaforma antispecista, fossil free e post-antorpocentirca l’ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES MANIFESTO. 

Art for Radical Ecologies, Workshop

ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES (MANIFESTO) ASSEMBLY #2 | VENICE CLIMATE CAMP 2023

ENGLISH

ART FOR RADICA ECOLOGIES platform

Institute of Radical Imagination with Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto

September 9th, at 3.30 pm

What does ‘radical ecologies’ mean? An appointment to proceed in the collective writing of a manifesto that positions the art world in the fight for climate justice.

Follow up to the Art for Radical Ecologies Assembly opended at Venice Climate Camp 2022, to move towards the Art for Radical Ecologies (manifesto)

Venice Climate Camp 2023 full program

ITALIANO

ARTE PER LE ECOLOGIE RADICALI la piattaforma

Institute of Radical Imagination con Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto

9 Settembre alle 15:30

Cosa significa “ecologie radicali”? Un appuntamento per procedere nella scrittura collettiva di un manifesto che posizioni il mondo dell’arte nella lotta per la giustizia climatica.

Il seguito all’Assemblea Art for Radical Ecologies aperta al Venice Climate Camp 2022, per andare verso Art for Radical Ecologies (manifesto)

Programma Venice Climate Camp 2023

Articles

WORK, NOT UBI, MAKES US MORE LONELY AND COMPETITIVE

Marco Baravalle & Emanuele Braga

read the interview on SHIFTER

ENGLISH

Marco Baravalle and Emanuele Braga will be at Teatro do Bairro Alto, in Lisbon, for a live presentation of the Art for UBI manifesto. Before that, they answered some questions about this work and its central theme, the Unconditional Basic Income (RBI or UBI).

You dedicate all your time to studies. You behave in class, read the textbooks, do your homework. Progress and repeat the procedure at each new difficulty level until you unlock a new map. In the world of work, the days lengthen, and your concentration narrows. There is no longer time for discovery and all the time must be dedicated to complying, with professionalism and resilience, with the orders of the boss. You depend on your salary, social security does not guarantee a dignified life, and among so many duties, changing is no longer a right. You have to work at the expense of the present, and work with fear of the future that you never know what it will bring. Working to pay the rent, to feed the family, to enjoy the world. It is from the work that the reward comes, it is the work that justifies the salary, and it will be our aptitudes to do so that guarantee us a dignified life, we are told. But will it be so?

Without telling anyone’s story, this story that anyone can identify with, reflects a systemic narrative. Our life, from an early age, is organized according to work, in a bet based on the expectation that the salary will fulfill, one day, in a hypothetical future, the missive of guaranteeing each employee a dignified life. But if for many years its questioning was out of the question, the data we have today make it more difficult to believe it.

The inflation that is reflected in the profits of large corporations, the galloping cost of housing in low-wage areas, precariousness, which is spreading around the world like a virus that erodes rights and guarantees, with an almost pandemic character, or the flagrant crisis climate, not only threaten the promise of seeing a dignified life in wages, but also denote the perversity of the paths we have followed behind this idea. Faced with so many signs, it is urgent to broaden the horizons of our vision and that is the proposal of the Institute for Radical Imagination, the space where the Art For UBI manifesto by Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga and Gabriella Riccio was born.

“While the financial elite continues to use the art market as a safe haven for financial assets, the Covid-19 pandemic has further highlighted the fragility and precariousness of artistic workers around the world. This context fueled the discussion around the Universal Basic Income. The Art for UBI manifesto argues that this measure is a necessary condition to rethink an ecologically extractive economic model, correct race and gender asymmetries and change the current neoliberal structure of the art world”, reads in the project description.

Bringing together in book format a set of artists’ essays on Unconditional Basic Income, Baravalle, Braga and Riccio seek not only to create a publication that informs this debate, but also to initiate a broader conversation about the necessary changes in our society. As a result of this intention, Baravalle and Braga will be on the 29th of June (Thursday) at the Teatro do Bairro Alto, in Lisbon, for a live presentation of their manifesto and, before that, they responded by email to a short interview about their investigation.

Emanuele Braga is an activist, artist, co-founder of the Institute of Radical Imagination and member of MACAO, a structure where he experimented with Common Coin and Bank of the common. He contributed to the Income performances. The unconditional speech, at Wiener Festwochen in June 2021, and in One income, many worlds, at Museo Reina Sofia, in September 2021. Marco Baravalle is an activist, researcher, co-founder of the Institute of Radical Imagination and member of S.a.L.E. Docks, an independent collective dedicated to the relationship between art, activism and gentrification. He was one of the contributors to the performance One income, many worlds, at the Museo Reina Sofia, in September 2021.

Shifter (S.): I know it’s a tough question but since you’ve delved into the topic. Are you able to give us a snapshot of the horizon in relation to UBI? What did you feel are the main obstacles and, by the way, what did you feel would be the biggest gains globally?

E.B.: I think we need to flip the perspective: the truth is that work is no longer enough. The financialization of the economy and the dismantling and precarization of the labor market have made it impossible to distribute sufficient wealth through work. For this reason, I believe we should take these two possible scenarios in the European area seriously: on one hand, struggles for a welfare system that replaces and complements the lack of income from work. On the other hand, we must prepare for major processes of social expulsion and revolt.

M.B.: If, as Emanuele says, wage work is no longer the unique tool for the distribution of wealth, is also true that the main obstacles to deeply rethink our system in Europe, come from reactionary governments which, beyond their populist rhetoric, once in power, cut on the already weak welfare system and enact laws that widen the gap between rich and poor. We are witnessing this very process right now in Italy. But this is not simply a problem of the far right. The rigidity with which Macron reacted to the large French movement against his pension reform is unbelievable. On the other hand, the movements in France show that broad layers of society are strongly posing the issue of income distribution and are also doing so in connection with other issues, such as that of environmental justice.

S.: Lately, with the emergence of generative technologies we have seen a fuss about a possible devaluation of artists. However, if we understand these models we see that they are not really creative, they cannot really replace artists, they can produce objects that replace art in the value chains. This has more to do with the economic model of art than with art itself? Do you agree that there is confusion around this idea, and that it is important to think collectively about what is art and what is the art market?

E.B.: I don’t believe that AI is stealing artists’ jobs. I think the relationship between art and technological innovation should be interpreted in a different way. Creativity, the figure of the artist, has been the laboratory for transitioning from the paradigm of factory work to the post-Fordist one. It’s a production model based on being entrepreneurs of oneself, being flexible, collaborative, and multitasking. Within the paradigm of creative industries, the social organization of digital platforms has developed. The laboratory of creativity and the surplus it continually reproduces are captured by capital in the form of technological innovation. Creativity dissolves into society like an aspirin in a glass of water, as Paolo Virno said in “Grammar of the Multitude.” Now I add: from that glass of water, algorithmic control of society and the automation of our behaviors have emerged. Behind AI, there is the collective intelligence of billions of people who contribute to its capabilities, and hundreds of thousands of underpaid workers who invisibly maintain its infrastructure and functioning. Unlike the creative industries, art now more than ever has a role in giving expression to subversion, sabotage, and the space to de-automate the technological circuits of domination.

S.: Do you think it is important to free artists from this almost existential need to produce for the market?

E.B.: I don’t want to perpetuate the idea of art as a space of privilege, created by individuals who can afford it economically and culturally. Our friend and comrade Gregory Sholette, in “Dark Matter,” contrasts the enormous invisible production of symbols, art, and culture that takes place in activism and social cooperation with the few artists recognized as famous by the art system and the market. The immense production of art, signs, and culture within society is to famous artists what dark matter in the universe is to the few visible stars. I believe that as art institutions, we need to build discursive devices that exist within the social and the struggles. While the art market tends to commodify activism and militant research, aestheticizing the struggles, I believe in the exact opposite: we should understand how expressive dispositifs can become war-machines (in the sense Gilles Deleuze uses this term) to organize processes of liberation within society.

M.B.: I would like to add that I think it is very important to create new possibilities of subjectivation for artists outside the market. This is one of the goals of radical art, to find ways for art and for being an artist (or art worker) within, but also against and beyond the predefined track (art school-biennials-museum-gallery). This doesn’t mean, as in the common sense of avant-garde, to merge art and life, but to win new autonomy for the art fact, more autonomy from the pervasive presence of capital.

S.: Do you think this change is essential and necessary to unlock transfeminist and decolonial struggles? Can it be a way to mitigate structural inequalities?

E.B.: The feminist perspective was the first to focus on this point, going beyond the interpretation that the working class made of Marx. Feminists have asserted that the central aspect of capital extraction lies in the invisibilization of reproductive labor. Capital has always profited from the cycles of life reproduction more than from exploiting wage labor. In the investigations we are conducting in various European territories, it becomes evident that citizenship and race are the other main dispositifs of exploitation. Denying equal rights and forcing individuals along racial lines to perform the most degrading jobs and social positions is an incredible lever for exploitation and the accumulation of privilege. Recognizing a Universal Basic Income and universal social services such as education, healthcare, and housing for everyone is undoubtedly a measure that breaks the chains of blackmail and exploitation. It is a way to ensure that all individuals have access to a basic level of economic security and fundamental services, regardless of their background or circumstances.

M.B: We see how often gender, race and class exploitations are intersected. We need to find ways to create a positive intersectionality too. That is why, beyond its social impact, we focused on the possible impact of UBI on gender, race, and ecological inequalities. If I may, one limit that is often visible within the art world at this very moment is a widespread attention towards decolonial and queer perspectives, but in the framework of a general acceptance of the neoliberal system. On the contrary, I agree with the Combahee River Collective (a collective of Afro-American feminists from the 70s) when they wrote: “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation”.

S.: Some critics of UBI say that promoting such an agenda – where the money goes to the individual – may promote a more individualized society and lead to a disconnect from collective causes or even a weakening of social democracy. What would be your counter-argument to this criticism?

E.B.: I have no idea; I’m not trying to sell anything, but to understand. In the investigations we have conducted by listening to people, I have come to understand that people are prone to depression, burnout, bullying, feeling lonely and isolated, to the point of quitting their jobs because it is work that induces individualism, loneliness, and selective competition. Work, not UBI, leads us to be lonely and competitive. Secondly, people who have access to social services and income support usually begin to cooperate. They do things they couldn’t afford to do before. I believe it is similar to managing leisure time, time for nurturing relationships, for play, for doing something meaningful, for organizing based on one’s beliefs. I don’t think anyone has ever feared that granting more leisure time would result in a society of competitive individualists. It seems absurd and propaganda full of bias and preconceptions.

M.B.: I think such a statement is simply a lie. The neoliberal system is based on the ideology of individualization. Cooperation is disincentivized, our networked economy is the fruit of social intelligence, but its fruits are sifted and harvested for profit. Instead, we think that income guarantee measures and a solid welfare system are important tools to free up all that time now invested in individual competition and give more breathing space to collective dynamics and cooperative processes.

S.: Your project has several formats, among them a book where you put together several perspectives on the UBI. You identify yourselves as artists but you are a little different from the orthodoxy of producing pieces for the market or the galleries. Do you think it is important to go down this path, and create these pretexts for artists to think more about the world and less only about their next exhibition or their next work?

 E.B.: The history of art is filled with artists who have said things that couldn’t be said, who have shown what cultural and political regimes tried to make invisible. The history of art is also populated by political dissidents and activists who pretended to be artists or used art as a means to express their thoughts without being directly imprisoned. The history of art I want to belong to is populated by these kinds of figures. I challenge you to search carefully and study the history of art beneath the surface of appearances because I don’t believe you will find many artists who have made their mark without belonging to one of these two categories.

M.B. In my case I don’t even identify as an artist. I usually introduce myself as an activist, researcher and curator. To me, Art For UBI is mainly a tool for experimenting a method of performative militant investigation. Something where aesthetics and politics intersect. Maybe Emanuele is right, our genealogy is to be found mainly in that “other” history of art (one of the many that exist), and indeed what characterizes our curriculum is a long commitment to grassroots activism.

S.: And how important is it to do it collectively? Do you think that the traditional path of art is giving rise to artists who are also more isolated? Is it necessary to recover the social fabric?

E.B.: I have been working as an artist for 25 years, and I have always signed my main works with collective signatures. In truth, even when I sign a work with just my name and surname, I know deep down that I am cheating. I strongly feel that the works, actions, speeches, and texts we produce are the result of complex situated relationships. I would be nothing without the network of relationships in which I choose to operate. Authorship lies more in the series of interdependencies we choose or happen to have. I am nothing on my own. And my name is always an anagram, the meaning of which is continuously evolving and implies collective intelligence, non-human resources, desires, and conditions of oppression. That is why I advise everyone, when they sign a work as a single author, to spend a lot of time explicitly elucidating the genealogy and interdependencies from which it derives.


M.B. Emanuele’s answer perfectly works for me too. Let me add one thing. Besides recovering the social fabric, I think what is commonly called radical art must also re-discover its way to conflict and social struggles. Too often in the past decades socially engaged art has presented itself with an NGO attitude, worried about repairing supposed micro-fractures while completely ignoring the structural causes of such damages.

PORTUGUES

Marco Baravalle e Emanuele Braga estarão no Teatro do Bairro Alto, em Lisboa, para uma apresentação ao vivo do manifesto Art for UBI. Antes disso, responderam a algumas questões sobre este trabalho e o seu tema central, o Rendimento Básico Incondicional (RBI ou UBI, na sigla em inglês).

Dedicas todo o teu tempo aos estudos. Comportas-te nas aulas, lês os manuais, fazes os trabalhos de casa. Progrides e repetes o procedimento a cada novo nível de dificuldade até que desbloqueias um novo mapa. No mundo do trabalho os dias alongam-se, e a tua concentração afunila-se. Já não há tempo para a descoberta e todo o tempo se deve dedicar ao cumprimento, com profissionalismo e resiliência, das ordens do patrão. Dependes do salário, a providência social não garante uma vida digna, e entre tantos deveres mudar deixa de ser um direito. Há que trabalhar para as custas do presente, e trabalhar com medo do futuro que nunca se sabe o que trás. Trabalhar para pagar a renda, para alimentar a família, para fruir do mundo. É do trabalho que surge a recompensa, é o trabalho que justifica o salário, e serão as nossas aptidões para o fazer a garantir-nos uma vida digna, dizem-nos. Mas será mesmo assim? 

Sem contar a história de ninguém, esta história com que qualquer um se pode identificar, reflete uma narrativa de carácter sistémico. A nossa vida, desde cedo que se organiza em função do trabalho, numa aposta baseada na expectativa de que o salário cumprirá, um dia, num futuro hipotético, a missiva de garantir a cada assalariado uma vida digna. Mas se durante muitos anos o seu questionamento esteve for de questão, os dados de que hoje dispomos tornam mais difícil acreditar nela. 

A inflação que se reflete nos lucros das grandes corporações, o galopante custo da habitação em zonas de baixos salários, a precariedade, que se vai disseminando pelo mundo como um vírus que corrói direitos e garantias, com um carácter quase pandémico, ou a flagrante crise climática, não só ameaçam a promessa de ver no salário uma vida digna, como denotam a perversidade dos caminhos que temos percorrido atrás desta ideia. Perante tantos sinais, urge alargar os horizontes da nossa visão e essa é a proposta do Instituto para a Imaginação Radical, espaço onde nasceu o manifesto Art For UBI de Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga e Gabriella Riccio. 

“Enquanto a elite financeira continua a usar o mercado de arte como um porto seguro para ativos financeiros, a pandemia da Covid-19 evidenciou ainda mais a fragilidade e precariedade de trabalhadores do meio artístico em todo o mundo. Este contexto alimentou a discussão em torno do Universal Basic Income (Rendimento Básico Universal). O manifesto Art for UBI defende que esta medida é condição necessária para repensar um modelo económico ecologicamente extrativista, corrigir assimetrias de raça e género e mudar a atual estrutura neoliberal do mundo da arte”, lê-se na descrição do projeto. 

Reunindo em formato livro um conjunto de ensaios de artistas sobre o Rendimento Básico Incondicional, Baravalle, Braga e Riccio, procuram não só criar uma publicação que informe este debate, como iniciar uma conversa alargada sobre as mudanças necessárias na nossa sociedade. Fruto dessa intenção, Baravalle e Braga estarão dia 29 de Junho (Quinta feira) no Teatro do Bairro Alto, em Lisboa, para uma apresentação ao vivo do seu manifesto e, antes disso, responderam por e-mail a uma pequena entrevista sobre a sua investigação. 

Emanuele Braga é ativista, artista, cofundador do Institute of Radical Imagination e membro de MACAO, estrutura onde fez experiências com Common Coin e Bank of the common. Contribuiu para as performances Income. The unconditional speech, no Wiener Festwochen em junho 2021, e em One income, many worlds, no Museo Reina Sofia, em setembro 2021. Marco Baravalle é ativista, investigador, cofundador do Institute of Radical Imagination e membro de S.a.L.E. Docks, coletivo independente que se dedica à relação entre arte, ativismo e gentrificação. Foi um dos contribuidores para a performance One income, many worlds, no Museo Reina Sofia, em setembro 2021.

Shifter (S.): Sei que pode ser uma pergunta difícil, mas dado que mergulharam no tema: são capazes de nos dar um retrato do horizonte do RBI? Quais são os principais obstáculos e quais seriam os principais ganhos globalmente?

Emanuele Braga (E.B.): Acho que temos de alterar essa perspectiva: a verdade é que o trabalho já não chega. A financeirização da economia e o desmantelamento e a precarização do trabalho tornaram impossível distribuir suficiente riqueza através do trabalho. Por essa razão, acredito que na área europeia devemos levar estes dois possíveis cenários a sério: por um lado, lutas pelo estado social que substitua e complemente a falta de salário pelo trabalho. Por outro, temos de nos preparar para grandes processos de expulsão e revolta social.

Marco Baravalle (M.B.): Se, como o Emanuele diz, o dinheiro do salário já não é a única forma de distribuição da riqueza, também é verdade que o grande obstáculo para pensar o nosso sistema da Europa, vem dos governos reacionários, por de trás de retóricas populistas, que uma vez no poder cortam no já fraco sistema de proteção social e decretam leis que aumentam a diferença entre os ricos e os pobres. Estamos a assistir a esse processo agora em Itália. Mas não é um problema exclusivo da extrema direita. A rigidez com que o Macron reagiu ao grande movimento francês contra a sua pensão de reformas é inacreditável. Por outro lado, estes movimentos em França mostram que mais camadas da sociedade estão a questionar em força a distribuição de rendimentos, e também o fazem em conexão com outros problemas, com a justiça ambiental.

S.: Ultimamente, com a emergência dos modelos generativos temos visto muita conversa sobre a possível desvalorização dos artistas. Contudo se entendermos como funcionam estes modelos vemos que não são criativos, não podem substituir artistas – quanto muito podem produzir objectos para ser transacionados nas mesmas cadeias de valor. Acham que isto tem mais a ver com o modelo económico do que com a arte em si? Acham que é importante colectivamente pensar o que é a arte e o que é o mercado da arte? 

E.B.: Eu não acredito que a IA esteja a roubar trabalhos de artistas. Acho que a relação entre a arte e a inovação tecnológica tem de ser interpretada de forma diferente. A [ideia de] criatividade, a figura do artista, foi um laboratório para a transição do paradigma do trabalho operário para um paradigma pós-fordista. É um modelo de produção baseado em ser empreendedor de si próprio, flexível, colaborativo, multi-tarefa. Dentro deste paradigma das indústrias criativas, a organização social das plataformas digitais desenvolveu-se. O laboratório da criatividade e o excedente que esta continuamente reproduz são capturadas pelo capital em forma de inovação tecnológica. A criatividade dissolve-se na sociedade como uma aspirina num copo de água, como diz Paolo Virno no “Gramática da multitude”. Eu acrescento: que desse copo de água emergiu uma sociedade de controlo algorítimico e a automação dos nossos comportamentos. Por trás da I.A. está a inteligência coletiva de milhões de pessoas que contribuíram para as suas capacidades, centenas de milhar de trabalhadores mal pagos que invisivelmente mantém a infraestrutura e o seu funcionamento. Ao contrário das indústrias criativas, a arte mais do que nunca tem o papel de dar expressão à subversão, sabotagem, ao espaço para desautomatizar os circuitos tecnológicos de dominação. 

S.: Acreditam que o RBI podia ser importante também para libertar artistas da sua necessidade quase existencial de produzir para o mercado? 

E.B.: Eu não quero perpetuar a ideia da arte como um espaço de privilégio, criado por individuos que podem pagar por ela económica e culturalmente. O nosso amigo e camarada, Gregory Sholette, no “Dark Matter”, contrasta a enorme produção invisível de símbolos, arte, cultura, que se dá no ativismo e na cooperação social, com os poucos artistas reconhecidos como famosos pelo sistema artístico e o mercado. A imensa produção de arte, signos, e a cultura da própria sociedade está para os artistas famosos como a matéria negra no universo está para as poucas estrelas visíveis. Eu acredito que enquanto instituições artísticas, temos de construir dispositivos discursivos que existam dentro do social e das lutas. Enquanto o mercado da arte tende a mercantilizar o ativismo e a investigação militante, a estetizar as lutas, eu acredito no oposto: devemos compreender como os dispositivos expressivos podem tornar-se máquinas de guerra (no sentido em que Gilles Deleuze usa este termo) para organizar processos de libertação na sociedade.

M.B.: Quero acrescentar que é muito importante criar novas possibilidades de subjetivação dos artistas fora do mercado. Esse é um dos objetivos da arte radical, encontrar caminhos para a arte e para ser um artista (ou um trabalhador da arte) dentro, mas também contra e para além dos caminhos pré-definidos (escola de artes-bineal-museu-galeria). Isto não significa, como no senso comum de vanguarda, fundir a vida e a arte, mas antes ganhar uma nova autonomia para a arte, uma maior autonomia da presença pervasiva do capital.

S.: Acreditam que esta mudança é importante para desbloquear outras “lutas transfeministas e decoloniais”? Pode servir para mitigar desigualdades estruturais?

E.B.: A perspectiva feminista foi a primeira a focar-se neste ponto, a ir para além da interpretação que Marx fez da classe trabalhadora. As feministas afirmaram que um dos aspetos centrais da extração de capital reside na inivisibilização do trabalho reprodutivo. O capital sempre lucrou mais de ciclos de reprodução mais do que da exploração do trabalho assalariado. Na investigação que estamos a fazer em vários territórios europeus torna-se evidente que a cidadania e a raça são outros dois grandes dispostivos de exploração. Negar direitos iguais, e relegar indivíduos racializados aos trabalhos e às posições sociais mais degradantes, é uma alavanca incrível para a exploração e a acumulação de privilégio. Reconhecendo um Rendimento Básico Incondicional, e serviços sociais universais como a educação, a saúde, ou a habitação para todos, é, sem dúvida, uma medida que quebra a cadeia de chantagem e exploração. É uma forma de assegurar que todos os individuos têm acesso ao nível mais básico de segurança económica e aos serviços fundamentais, independentemente do seu contexto ou das suas circunstâncias.

M.B.: Vemos muitas vezes como as explorações do género, raça e classe se intersectam. Precisamos de encontrar formas de criar intersececionalidade positiva também. É por isso que, para além do impacto social, nos focados nos possíveis impactos do RBI no género, raça e nas desigualdades ecológicas. Se me permitem, um limite que é por vezes visível dentro do mundo da arte neste preciso momento é a atenção generalizada a perspectivas decoloniais e queer, mas enquadradas no sistema de aceitação geral do sistema neoliberal. Pelo contrário, eu concordo com a Combahee River Collective (um colectivo de feministas afro-americanas dos anos 1970) quando escreveram: “Nós somos socialistas porque acreditamos que o trabalho deve ser organizado para benefício colectivo daqueles que trabalham e para criar produtos, não lucros para os chefes. Os recursos materiais devem ser equitativamente distribuidos por aqueles que criam esses recursos. Nós não estamos convencidas, contudo, que uma revolução socialista que não seja também feminista e anti-racista, garanta a nossa liberação”

S.: Alguns críticos do RBI dizem que promover essa agenda – de dar dinheiro aos individuos – pode promover uma sociedade mais individualizada, provocar a desconexão de causas colectivas e um enfraquecimento do estado social. Como responderiam a esta crítica?

E.B.: Não faço ideia, não estou a tentar vender nada, mas a tentar compreender. E na investigação que temos feito ao ouvir as pessoas, eu fui-me apercebedo que as pessoas estão vulneráveis a depressão, burnout, bullying, a sentirem-se sós e isoladas, ao ponto de se despedirem dos trabalhos porque é esse trabalho que induz o individualismo, a solidão e a competição seletiva. O trabalho, não o RBI, torna-nos mais sós e competitivos. Para além disso, as pessoas quando têm acesso a serviços sociais e a apoios ao rendimento, geralmente, começam a cooperar. Fazem coisas que antes não se podiam dar ao luxo de fazer. Penso que é similar À gestão do tempo de lazer, tempo de nutrir relações, de brincar, para fazer algo com significado, para se organizar com base nas suas convicções. E não acho que alguém tema que dar mais tempo de lazer às pessoas possa resultar numa sociedade de individualistas competitivos. Parece-me absurdo e uma propaganda cheia de viéses e ideias pré-concebidas.

M.B.: Eu acho que tal afirmação é simplesmente uma mentira. O sistema neoliberal é baseado na ideologia da individualização. A cooperação é desincentivada, a nossa economia em rede é fruto da inteligência social, mas os seus frutos são escolhidos e colhidos apenas por lucro. Em vez disso, acreditamos que as medidas de garantia de rendimento e um sistema de segurança social sólido são instrumentos importantes para libertar todo o tempo atualmente investido na competição individual e dar mais espaço às dinâmicas colectivas e aos processos de cooperação.

S.: O vosso projecto tem várias vertentes, entre elas um livro com várias perspectivas sobre o RBI. Vocês identificam-se como artistas, mas o vosso trabalho foge à ortodoxia da produção de peças para o mercado e as galerias. Acham que é importante seguir esta via, criar pretextos para os artistas pensarem mais sobre o mundo e menos sobre a próxima exposição?

E.B.: A história da arte está cheia de artistas que disseram o que não podia ser dito, que mostraram o que os regimes políticos e culturais tentaram tornar invisível. A história da arte é também povoada por dissidentes políticos ou ativistas que fingiram ser artistas ou que usaram a arte como forma de exprimir os seus pensamentos sem serem directamente presos. A história da arte a que quero pertencer é povoada por este tipo de figuras. E deixo o desafio de procurar e estudar cuidadosamente a história da arte para além da superfície, porque não acredito que se encontre muitos artistas que tenham deixado marca sem pertencer a uma destas duas categorias.

M.B.: No meu caso, nem me identifico como artista. Normalmente apresento-me como activista, investigador e curador. Para mim, o Art for UBI é sobretudo uma ferramenta para experimentar um método performativo de investigação militante. Algo onde a política e a estética se intersectam. Talvez o Emanuele esteja certo, a nossa genealogia encontra-se principalmente nessa ‘outra’ história da arte (uma das várias que existem) e, de facto, o que caracteriza o nosso currículo é um logo compromisso com o activismo de origem popular.

S.: E quão importante é fazê-lo coletivamente? Acham que o caminho tradicional das artes tem dado lugar a artistas mais isolados? É necessário recuperar o tecido social neste aspeto?

E.B.: Eu tenho trabalhado como artista nos últimos 25 anos, e sempre assinei os meus principais trabalhos com assinaturas colectivas. Na verdade, mesmo quando assino um trabalho só com o meu nome e apelido, eu sei que, lá no fundo, estou a fazer batota. Tenho uma grande convicção de que os trabalhos, as acções, os discursos, e os textos que produzimos, são resultado de um complexas relações situadas. Eu não seria nada sem a rede de relações em que escolho operar. A autoria baseia-se mais nessa série de interdependências que escolhemos ou que calhamos a ter. Eu sozinho não sou nada. E o meu nome é sempre um anagrama, cujo significado está em constante evolução e implica inteligência colectiva, recursos não humanos, desejos e condições de opressão. É por isso que aconselho toda a gente, quando assina uma obra como autor único, a passar muito tempo a elucidar explicitamente a genealogia e as interdependências de que ela deriva.

M.B.: A resposta do Emanuele adequa-se perfeitamente ao meu caso. Mas deixa-me acrescentar uma coisa: para além de reconstituir o tecido social, eu acho que aquilo que habitualmente se chama arte radical também deve redescobrir o seu caminho para os conflitos e as lutas sociais. Muitas vezes, nas décadas passadas, a arte engaja socialmente apresentou-se muitas vezes com uma atitude de ONG, preocupada em reparar supostas micro-fracturas enquanto ignorava completamente as causas estruturais de tais danos.

Presentation

ART FOR UBI | Talk TEATRO DO BARRIO ALTO

Organized by TBA Teatro do Barrio Alto Lisbon Portugal

Listen to the talk on YOUTUBE

ENGLISH

ART FOR UBI Talk

With Marco Baravalle & Emanuele Braga (Institute of Radical Imagination) moderated by researcher Rita Barreira.

29 June 18:30

While the financial elite continues to use the art market as a safe haven for financial assets, the Covid-19 pandemic has further highlighted the fragility and precariousness of artistic workers around the world. This context fueled the discussion around the Universal Basic Income (Universal Basic Income). The Art for UBI manifesto argues that this measure is a necessary condition for rethinking an ecologically extractive economic model, correcting race and gender asymmetries and changing the current neoliberal structure of the art world. The Universal Basic Income can be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, an alternative to the dominant entrepreneurial individualism, valuing the common and care. Written collectively within the Institute of Radical Imagination and edited by Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga and Gabriella Riccio, Art Form UBI (Manifesto) [Venice, Bruno, 2022] contains contributions from several artists, theorists and activists who address RBI in the generalized picture of the precariousness of artistic work, the search for income in transfeminist and decolonial struggles, mutualism practices in the independent artistic scene, the relationship between finance, fabulation and cryptophilosophy.

ACCESSIBILITY Streaming available on the same day at Teatrodobairroalto.pt and on social networks

Price Free admission upon prior ticket collection from 3 pm (maximum of 2 tickets per person) Sala Manuela Porto

go to full program

PORTUGUES

ART FOR UBI Discurso

Con Marco Baravalle & Emanuele Braga (Institute of Radical Imagination) moderated by researcher Rita Barreira.

29 Junio 18:30

Enquanto a elite financeira continua a usar o mercado de arte como um porto seguro para ativos financeiros, a pandemia da Covid-19 evidenciou ainda mais a fragilidade e precariedade de trabalhadores do meio artís- tico em todo o mundo. Este contexto alimentou a discussão em torno do Universal Basic Income (Rendimento Básico Universal). O manifesto Art for UBI defende que esta medida é condição necessária para repensar um modelo económico ecologicamente extrativista, corrigir assimetrias de raça e género e mudar a atual estrutura neoliberal do mundo da arte. O Rendimento Básico Universal pode ser visto como uma ferramenta para abrir novos espaços subjetivos, alternativa ao individualismo empreen- dedorista dominante, valorizando o comum e o cuidado. Escrito coletiva- mente no âmbito do Institute of Radical Imagination e editado por Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga e Gabriella Riccio, Art Form UBI (Manifesto) [Veneza, Bruno, 2022] contém contribuições de diversas artistas, teóricas e ativistas que abordam o RBI no quadro generalizado da precariedade do trabalho artístico, a procura de rendimentos nas lutas transfeministas e decoloniais, as práticas de mutualismo na cena artística independente, a relação entre finança, fabulação e criptofilosofia.

ACESSIBILIDADE Streaming disponível no próprio dia em teatrodobairroalto.pt e nas redes sociais

Preço Entrada Livre mediante levantamento prévio de bilhete a partir das 15h (máximo de 2 bilhetes por pessoa) Sala Manuela Porto

ir para o programa
Presentation

IASC CONFERENCE 2023 | THE COMMONS WE WANT

Institute of Radical Imagination joined IASC International Association for the Study of the Commons and is taking part to the international conference The Commons we want: between historical legacies and future collective actions held in Nairobi, Kenia June 19-24 2023 in the following two panels:

Sub-theme 8. Opportunities and challenges of digital commons

PANEL 8.7. June 20, 2023 09:00 (10:00 CEST)

New approaches to commons governance from the blockchain ecosystem

Co-Chairs: Seth Frey (University of California Davis, USA) and Andy Tudhope (Independent scholar and practitioner, South Africa)

3. Technological Tools for the Commons. Dissident Algorithms’ Organizations

Emanuele Braga (Institute of Radical Imagination, Italy) and Maddalena Fragnito (Coventry University, UK)

This paper focuses on relational and technological tools for self-organization that have been developed within movements for the commons during the last 10 years between the financial and the pandemic crisis and beyond. Within the self-managed spaces taken into account, horizontal, non-hierarchical decision-making processes have been developed, mostly based on the sharing of means of production, and a supportive and non-competitive distribution of knowledge.
This research would like to update the concept of DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, in the context of the process of commoning. In the international debate, DAO contains the challenge to shape the life of an organization on the basis of the set of tools using mainly blockchain technologies to automatize different autonomous peer initiatives. I would like to raise the question: which of these sets of tools is really sustainable to foster collaboration instead of competition by going beyond the capitalistic mode of production?
The project aims to introduce a survey and map the most interesting tools and methodologies in use within the European panorama of activism for a post-capitalist ecological transition. The survey and the mapping process aim both at making technological tools available and experimenting with them in the specific context of the Institute of Radical Imagination’s productive and collaborative platform.
The Institute of Radical Imagination was born in 2017 as a monster/alternative institution by artists, activist researchers and cultural operators.

go to panel

Sub-theme 10. Local institution building and radical futures for the commons

PANEL 10.12. B June 20, 2023 11:00 (12:00 CEST)

From the governance of the commons to a wider commons-inspired governance: obstacles and institutional changes inside the State and the Market

Co-Chairs: Margherita D’Andrea (University of Naples Federico II , Italy) and Giuseppe Micciarelli (University of Salerno/DISPC, Italy)

4. Intersections between arts, militant research and the commons

Gabriella Riccio (Institute of Radical Imagination, Italy)

What is the relation between artistic practices and the commons? Is it just a matter of providing cultural opportunities for the community and those that are not able to have access to it? Could art practices in the commons open up to popular cultures? Could this coming together foster new publics, opening new possibilities for appreciating a variety of cultural productions? Does it aim to create contradictions in the cultural production system? Is it a way to give asylum to productions outside the market? Or all these things together? As the Institute of Radical Imagination, we are a group of curators, activists, scholars and cultural producers with a shared interest in co-producing research, knowledge, and artistic and political research interventions for a transition to post-capitalism. We will discuss issues we face with our artistic, academic and political activism: How do the voices/careers of artists who approach the commons intersect and/or change and transform their art, performances, and way of sharing? How does artistic education affect the way that artists can engage with the commons? How do IRI or other forms of activism based on culture, arts and commons influence the policies of traditional cultural institutions? Is it possible? Can we imagine an alternative way to create festivals that are not mere exhibitions of ideas, or that are not connected to and based on mainstream proposals? Are there some interesting case studies on distributing resources and opportunities in a horizontal and non-hegemonic way between commoners even when individual careers, productions, and lives are involved?

go to panel
Workshop

COMMONING OUR WORK, COMMONING OUR INSTITUTIONS | IMPULSE AKADEMIE

Organized by Cheers for Fears in the framework of IMPULSE Theater Festival Akademie Düsseldorf

ENGLISH

PRODUCE LESS, WORK BETTER!

THE LIBERAL PERFORMING ARTS BEYOND GROWTH

Endless growth is impossible on a planet with limited resources. The transition into one post growth society is inevitable. And yet the free performing arts are also the dogma of growth determines: So much research has been done in the past three pandemic years, confirmed and produced like never before. Based on working conditions and social security, it has changed to the vast majority of artists nothing has changed, they remain precarious. How do we get out of this hamster wheel? The academy addresses this issue in several lectures and three multi-day workshops. Students and actors from artistic practice, production, dramaturgy, administration, Unions and social services join forces in the search for new employment and production conditions: What does a different theater work look like, if less, but more sustainable? is being produced? When labor, ideas and material are not heated quickly, but used long term will be? When the concern for each other and the creation of common goods and practices is at the center push ?

German & English

REGISTER AT https://www.impulsefestival.de/impulse-akademie-anmeldung

go to full program
Friday, 06/16 and Saturday, 17.06.

10.00-13.00 and 15.00-17.00 work in the workshops

Workshop 1: Commoning our work, commoning our institutions. A post-capitalist training of shared work and production

With Gabriella Riccio & Emanuele Braga (Institute of Radical Imagination)

Can artistic practice be a model for ways out of the crisis? In the workshop “Commoning our work, commoning our institutions”, artists and activists from the Institute of Radical Imagination report on their practice: They try to create spaces for the growth of the commons against privatization, gentrification and exploitation – from the micro level of the individual to the reconquest or occupation of urban space and the influencing of planning and politics. Together with the participants, they try to develop the idea of ​​a theater of the commons. The concept of the commons is based on the experience in self-governing art and cultural spaces such as L’Asilo (Naples) or MACAO (Milan), in which the focus is on joint work for a shared space in the city that belongs to everyone.

GERMAN

WENIGER PRODUZIEREN, BESSER ARBEITEN!

DIE FREIEN DARSTELLENDEN KÜNSTE JENSEITS DES WACHSTUMS

Unendliches Wachstum ist auf einem Planeten mit begrenzten Ressourcen nicht möglich. Der Wandel zu einer Postwachstumsgesellschaft ist unausweichlich. Und doch sind auch die Freien Darstellenden Künste vom Dogma des Wachstums bestimmt: Gerade in den vergangenen drei Pandemiejahren wurde so viel recherchiert, konferiert und produziert wie nie zuvor. An den Arbeitsbedingungen und der sozialen Absicherung hat sich für die allermeisten Künstler*innen allerdings nichts geändert, sie bleiben prekär. Wie kommen wir raus aus diesem Hamsterrad? Die Akademie bearbeitet diese Frage in mehreren Vorträgen und drei mehrtägigen Workshops. Studierende sowie Akteur*innen aus künstlerischer Praxis, Produktion, Dramaturgie, Verwaltung, Gewerkschaften und Förderwesen begeben sich gemeinsam auf die Suche nach neuen Arbeits- und Produktionsbedingungen: Wie sieht eine andere Theaterarbeit aus, wenn weniger, aber dafür nachhaltiger produziert wird? Wenn Arbeitskraft, Ideen und Material nicht schnell verheizt, sondern langfristig genutzt werden? Wenn die Sorge umeinander sowie die Schaffung gemeinsamer Güter und Praktiken in den Mittelpunkt rücken?

Deutsch und Englisch

ANMELDUNG UNTER https://www.impulsefestival.de/impulse-akademie-anmeldung

zum vollen Programm gehen
Freitag, 16.06. und Samstag, 17.06.

10.00–13.00 Uhr und 15.00–17.00 Uhr Arbeit in den Workshops

Workshop 1: Commoning our work, commoning our institutions. Ein postkapitalistisches Training geteilten Arbeitens und Produzierens

Mit Gabriella Riccio & Emanuele Braga (Institute of Radical Imagination)

Kann künstlerische Praxis ein Vorbild für Wege aus der der Krise sein? Im Workshop „Commoning our work, commoning our institutions“ berichten Künstler*innen und Aktivist*innen des Institute of Radical Imagination aus ihrer Praxis:  Sie versuchen, Räume für das Wachstum der Commons gegen Privatisierung, Gentrifizierung und Ausbeutung zu schaffen – von der Mikroebene des Individuums bis hin zur Rückeroberung oder Besetzung von städtischem Raum und der Beeinflussung von Planung und Politik. Gemeinsam mit den Teilnehmenden versuchen sie, die Idee eines Theaters der Commons zu entwickeln. Der Begriff der Commons stützt sich dabei auf die Erfahrung in selbstverwalteten Kunst- und Kulturräumen wie L’Asilo (Neapel) oder MACAO (Mailand), in denen die gemeinsame Arbeit für einen geteilten Raum in der Stadt, der allen gehört, im Mittelpunkt steht.

English

INCONDIZIONATAMENTE Vita Reddito Amore | Performance
Italiano | English

Basket Court, Piazza Selinunte Milan | September 30th 2022 at 6 pm followed by the Panel The Art of the Commons + October 1st 2022 at 5 pm | In the framework of FAROUT Festival/Base MIlano & Walk the red line Festival/Le Alleanze dei Corpi

BASED ON AN IDEA BY

Anna Rispoli

for the Wiener Festwochen 2021
CONCEPT, DRAMATURGY, DIRECTION

Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio (Institute of Radical Imagination) & Anna Rispoli

TEXT

Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio (Institute of Radical Imagination) & Anna Rispoli + 11 inhabitants of Milan

INTEINTERVIEWS

Laila Sit Aboha, Iman Salem

WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF

Samuel Adoma, Fabrizio Bassani, Nadia Belatik, Ale Cane, Ivan Carozzi, Yuri Simone D’Ostuni, Osasele Eromosele/Iman Salem, Simona Franzé, Federico Fumagalli, Roberto Mastroianni/Lorenzo Fidanzi, Vincenzo Pizzolante/Dario Leone, Gabriella Riccio e Anna Rispoli.

A PRODUCTION BY

Institute of Radical Imagination

PARTNERS

Base Milano, Le Alleanze dei Corpi, Landscape Choreography

Credits Incondizionatamente

UNCONDITIONALLY. Life Income Love

What would the world be like if everyone had enough money to lead a worthy life? What if everyone got a universal and unconditional basic income?

Starting from the Art for UBI (manifesto), IRI proposes discussions on the role that art and the world of cultural production should have in the struggle for financial redistribution based on mutualism, on the methods of self-management of resources, on access to the means of production. and other solidarity practices.

With performance UNCONDITIONALLY. Life Income Love, people of different backgrounds and working conditions gather in a choreographed assembly to discuss the impact that a universal and unconditional income would have on their lives. Is the RBUI a “simple” financial measure or a fundamental tool for a radical alternative to the neoliberal reality in which we live? What would it be like if income and working hours weren’t linked? If you could say no to the blackmail of precariousness? End the race and gender asymmetries so common in today’s labor market? Detoxify the planet from ecologically dangerous jobs? Caring and helping each other in the face of the endless invitation to be competitive individuals? These are some of the questions that inspire public dialogue.

On this occasion, an IRI team worked to adapt Anna Rispoli’s proposal and produce a performance that takes up these lines through a series of interviews with a group of people who live and work in Milan and who are interpreters of this representation.

Emanuele Braga
Gabriella Riccio
Anna Rispoli

Emanuele Braga is an artist, theorist and activist. Co-founder of the MACAO assembly of artists (2012), as well as of the dance company Balletto Civile (2003), of the contemporary art project Rhaze (2011), Landscape Choreography (2012), and member of the Institute of Radical Imagination. His research focuses on alternative models of cultural production, processes of social transformation in relation to digital technologies, political economy, labor rights and the institution of the commons.

Gabriella Riccio, choreographer and performer artist lives between Naples and Madrid. She founded Caosmos (2001) and ciagabriellariccio (2003). She is an activist in the movement of commons and self-governing cultural spaces, she is an “inhabitant” of L’Asilo-Ex Asilo Filangieri in Naples (2012) and co-founder member of the Institute of Radical Imagination (2018). Gabriella works at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics in contemporary prefigurative practices on the border between performance, artistic creation and activism.

gabriellariccio.it

Anna Rispoli works on the border between artistic creation and activism, to explore in a performative way the triangulation between man-city-identity and to test possible affective appropriations of the public territory. The forms vary according to the conceptual needs of each project. Anna Rispoli is part of the Common Wallet, a red informal de economía solidaria that persuades a “polyamorous relationship with money”.

annarispoli.be

Milan, Piazzale Selinunte – October 1, 2021

Milan, KinLab – September 30, 2021

Art for UBI Terraforming, courtesy of Emanuele Braga
Presentation

THE ART OF THE COMMONS | Panel

Basket Court, Piazza Selinunte, Milan – September 30th at 7 pm

Free entrance

MODERATOR

Emanuele Braga

WITH

Marco Baravalle, Kuba Szreder, Alberto Cossu, Gabriella Riccio, Massimiliano Mollona

Recent publications will be presented on the theme of precariousness and income: Art for UBI (manifesto), The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World, Art/Commons, Autonomous Art Institutions Artists Disrupting the Creative City.

PROFILES

Kuba Szreder is a researcher, lecturer and independent curator, working as an associate professor at the department for art theory of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He has co-curated many interdisciplinary projects hybridizing art with critical reflection and social experiments. He actively cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of post-artistic practitioners, clusters of art-researchers, art collectives and artistic institutions in Poland, the UK, and other European countries. In 2009 he initiated the Free / Slow University of Warsaw, and in 2018 he established the Center for Plausible Economies in London, a research cluster investigating artistic economies. His most recent book The ABC of the projectariat. Living and working in a precarious art world, was published by the Whitworth Museum and Manchester University Press in December 2021.

——

Alberto Cossu is a sociologist and media scholar who does research at the intersection between digital media and activism qualitative and digital methods collaborative and digital economies. Before joining the University of Leicester he was Lecturer in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and previously a Research Fellow at the Department of Social & Political Sciences University of Milan where he has obtained his PhD in Sociology. During his PhD he has conducted research on the mobilisation of knowledge and art workers in Italy; within the EU project P2PValue he was part of an international team led by Prof. A. Arvidsson on peer-to-peer models of organisation and production in Italy and France on digital economy and co-working spaces in Italy and Thailand.

——

Marco Baravalle is a member of S.a.L.E. Docks, a collective and an independent space for visual arts, activism, and experimental theater located in what had been an abandoned salt-storage facility in Dorsoduro, Venice. Founded in 2007, its programming includes activist-group meetings, formal exhibitions, screenings, and actions. In addition to managing the diverse programming at S.a.L.E. Docks, Baravalle is currently a research fellow at INCOMMON (IUAV University of Venice). His fields of research include the relationship between art, theatre and activism, creative labor, gentrification, and the positioning of art within neoliberal economics.

——

Emanuele Braga co-founder of Macao center, an artist, researcher and activist. In addition to his work at Macao, he co-founded the dance and theatre company Balletto Civile (2003), the contemporary art project Rhaze (2011), as well as Landscape Choreography (2012), an art platform questioning the role of the body under capitalism. His research focuses on models of cultural production, processes of social transformation, political economy, labor rights and the institution of the commons.

——

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.  Mollona is a founding member of the  LUC Laboratory for the Urban Commons (LUC), Athens.

——

Gabriella Riccio is an artist, activist and independent researcher. Since 2000 she has been active as choreographer, as well as cultural advisor. Since 2010 Gabriella is engaged in the movement for the commons, artworkers struggles and the Italian movement of self-governed cultural spaces, where as a resident member of L’Asilo – Ex Asilo Filangieri in Naples, she contributed to the Declaration of urban civic and collective use. She is regularly invited as keynote, public speaker and lecturer on practices of commoning and governance. She contributed to EU participatory policy development within the framework of EU Citizen’s Engagement and Deliberative Democracy Festival, EU projects Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities,  DISCE Developing Inclusive Sustainable Creative Economies, Creative Lenses. She contributed to several publications, a.o. Home of Commons, online toolkit for participatory development  2021, Per un approccio sistemico al patrimonio culturale: usi civici e beni comuni. Il caso dell’Ex Asilo Filangieri di Napoli in Visioni al Futuro 2018, La pratica dell’uso civico come scelta estetica etica e politica per il sensible comune in Stefano Rodotà, I beni comuni. L’inaspettata rinascita degli usi collettivi, 2016, L’Asilo as a case study for Creative Lenses,  and L’Asilo in Models to Manifestos, 2019.  Gabriella is a co-founding member of the Institute for Radical Imagination.

Uncategorised

INCONDIZIONATAMENTE Vita Reddito Amore | Performance
Italiano | English

Campo di Basket, Piazza Selinunte Milano 30 Settembre ore 18:00 a seguire il Panel L’Arte dei Commons + 1 ottobre ore 17:00 Nell’ambito di FAROUT/Festival Base & Le Alleanze dei Corpi

Basato su un’idea di Anna Rispoli
Idea Drammaturgia Regia: Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio (Institute of Radical Imagination) & Anna Rispoli
Testo: Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio (Institute of Radical Imagination) & Anna Rispoli + 11 abitanti di Milano
Interviste: Laila Sit Aboha, Iman Salem
Con la partecipazione di: Samuel Adoma, Fabrizio Bassani, Nadia Belatik, Al Cane, Ivan Carozzi, Yuri Simone D’Ostuni, Osasele Eromosele/iman Salem, Simona Franzé, Federico Fumagalli, Roberto Mastroianni/Lorenzo Fidanzi, Vincenzo Pizzolante/Dario Leone, Gabriella Riccio e Anna Rispoli.
Una produzione Institute of Radical Imagination
Partners: Base Milano, Alleanze dei Corpi, Landscape Choreography
INCONDIZIONATAMENTE VIta Reddito AmoreDownload

UNCONDITIONALLY. Life Income Love

Campo di Basket, Piazza Selinunte Milano, Settembre 2022
Credits Incondizionatamente

Come sarebbe il mondo se tutt* avessero sufficiente denaro per condurre una vita degna? Se tutt* ricevessero un reddito di base universale e incondizionato?

Partendo dall’Art for UBI (manifesto), l’IRI propone discussioni sul ruolo che l’arte e il mondo della produzione culturale dovrebbero avere nella lotta per la redistribuzione finanziaria basata sul mutualismo, sulle modalità di autogestione delle risorse, sull’accesso ai mezzi di produzione e altre pratiche solidali. 

Con la performance INCONDIZIONATAMENTE. Vita Reddito Amore,  persone di diversa estrazione e condizione lavorativa si riuniscono in un’assemblea coreografata per discutere dell’impatto che un reddito universale e incondizionato avrebbe sulle loro vite.  Il RBUI è una “semplice” misura finanziaria o uno strumento fondamentale per un’alternativa radicale alla realtà neoliberista in cui viviamo? Come sarebbe se guadagno e ore di lavoro non fossero legati? Se si potesse dire no al ricatto della precarietà? Porre fine alle asimmetrie di razza e genere così comuni nel mercato del lavoro di oggi? Disintossicare il pianeta da lavori ecologicamente pericolosi? Prendersi cura e aiutarsi a vicenda di fronte all’infinito invito a essere individui competitivi? Queste sono alcune delle domande che ispirano il dialogo pubblico.

In questa occasione, un team dell’IRI ha lavorato per adattare la proposta di Anna Rispoli e produrre una performance che riprende queste linee attraverso una serie di interviste ad un gruppo di persone che vivono e lavorano a Milano e che sono interpreti di questa rappresentazione.

What would the world be like if everyone had enough money to lead a worthy life? What if everyone got a universal and unconditional basic income?

Starting from the Art for UBI (manifesto), IRI proposes discussions on the role that art and the world of cultural production should have in the struggle for financial redistribution based on mutualism, on the methods of self-management of resources, on access to the means of production. and other solidarity practices.

With performance UNCONDITIONALLY. Life Income Love, people of different backgrounds and working conditions gather in a choreographed assembly to discuss the impact that a universal and unconditional income would have on their lives. Is the RBUI a “simple” financial measure or a fundamental tool for a radical alternative to the neoliberal reality in which we live? What would it be like if income and working hours weren’t linked? If you could say no to the blackmail of precariousness? End the race and gender asymmetries so common in today’s labor market? Detoxify the planet from ecologically dangerous jobs? Caring and helping each other in the face of the endless invitation to be competitive individuals? These are some of the questions that inspire public dialogue.

On this occasion, an IRI team worked to adapt Anna Rispoli’s proposal and produce a performance that takes up these lines through a series of interviews with a group of people who live and work in Milan and who are interpreters of this representation.

.

Milan, Piazzale Selinunte – October 1, 2021

Milan, KinLab – September 30, 2021

Art for Radical Ecologies

ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES (MANIFESTO) @ Venice Climate Camp 2022

Una piattaforma iniziata da Institute of Radical Imagination & Sale Docks al Venice Climate Camp 2022

English | Italiano

Programma

Workshop / Assemblea Plenaria

Art for Radical Ecologies (Manifesto)

9 Settembre, 2022, ore 14.00

Venice Climate Camp, Lido di Venezia

Organizzato da Institute of Radical Imagination & Sale Docks

condividi l’evento FB

The Venice Climate Camp 2022 is the opportunity to bring together art and performing arts workers to initiate a discussion that will lead to the collective writing of a manifesto on the role of art in the struggle for climate justice and in the creation of new ecologies (which take into account the intersection of environmental and social facts). If the pandemic had already dramatically underlined the consequences of extractivist anthropization, the war in Ukraine (in addition to its immediate death toll) is a manifestation of what Andreas Malm has called ‘fossil fascism’, a mix of authoritarianism and fossil fuels that weakens the already insufficient measures to combat global warming.  The scarcity of Russian gas has brought coal back into vogue and, in Italy, the construction of new re-gasifiers is on the agenda. The decision to organize the workshop at the Venice Climate Camp (promoted by Rise Up For Climate Justice and Fridays For Future) reflects our belief in the importance of freeing art from the capture of institutional circuits. We want to experience, as participants in social movements, aesthetic-political concatenations that interpret creativity as a radical character of the social and not as a commodity. The participants also share the conviction that the fight for climate justice is, necessarily, a fight against and beyond extractive capitalism, even in its green version (actually an attempt to turn the crisis into new accumulation).

The workshop will be a moment of discussion based on the practices of the invited guests, who convoke some central themes: the use of art as a method of inquiry and visualization in the climate crisis; the production of activist art forms that look at the performativity of direct action; art as a ground for radical imagination in designing new ecologies that reshape the relationship between human and non-human; art as an archive of movement practices and so on.

During Camp days, in addition to the main meeting moment, there will be a screening of films by Oliver Ressler, a workshop by Paolo Cirio and collective performative practice by Andreco.

First participants: Sale Docks, Institute of Radical Imagination, Caracol Olol Jackson, Rise Up For Climate Justice, Andreco, Annaclara Basilicò, Paolo Cirio, Terike Haapoja, Rosa Jijon, Francesco Martone, Teresa Masini, Oliver Ressler, Federica Timeto 

Art for Radical Ecologies

ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES (MANIFESTO) ASSEMBLY #1 | Venice Climate Camp 2022

A platform impulsed by Institute of Radical Imagination & Sale Docks at the Venice Climate Camp 2022

English

Program

Workshop / Plenary Assembly

Art for Radical Ecologies (Manifesto)

September 9th, 2022, at 2 pm

Venice Climate Camp, Lido di Venezia

Organized by Institute of Radical Imagination & Sale Docks

Share the Fb event

The Venice Climate Camp 2022 is the opportunity to bring together art and performing arts workers to initiate a discussion that will lead to the collective writing of a manifesto on the role of art in the struggle for climate justice and in the creation of new ecologies (which take into account the intersection of environmental and social facts). If the pandemic had already dramatically underlined the consequences of extractivist anthropization, the war in Ukraine (in addition to its immediate death toll) is a manifestation of what Andreas Malm has called ‘fossil fascism’, a mix of authoritarianism and fossil fuels that weakens the already insufficient measures to combat global warming.  The scarcity of Russian gas has brought coal back into vogue and, in Italy, the construction of new re-gasifiers is on the agenda. The decision to organize the workshop at the Venice Climate Camp (promoted by Rise Up For Climate Justice and Fridays For Future) reflects our belief in the importance of freeing art from the capture of institutional circuits. We want to experience, as participants in social movements, aesthetic-political concatenations that interpret creativity as a radical character of the social and not as a commodity. The participants also share the conviction that the fight for climate justice is, necessarily, a fight against and beyond extractive capitalism, even in its green version (actually an attempt to turn the crisis into new accumulation).

The workshop will be a moment of discussion based on the practices of the invited guests, who convoke some central themes: the use of art as a method of inquiry and visualization in the climate crisis; the production of activist art forms that look at the performativity of direct action; art as a ground for radical imagination in designing new ecologies that reshape the relationship between human and non-human; art as an archive of movement practices and so on.

During Camp days, in addition to the main meeting moment, there will be a screening of films by Oliver Ressler, a workshop by Paolo Cirio and collective performative practice by Andreco.

First participants: Sale Docks, Institute of Radical Imagination, Caracol Olol Jackson, Rise Up For Climate Justice, Andreco, Annaclara Basilicò, Paolo Cirio, Terike Haapoja, Rosa Jijon, Francesco Martone, Teresa Masini, Oliver Ressler, Federica Timeto 

ph by Gabriella Riccio
Raising Care, The School of Mutation

RADICALISING CARE | Elke Krasny & Maddalena Fragnito
This conversation takes place at KINLAB in Milan ( Piazzale Segesta, 3) and online at  The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Raising Care on APRIL 6th 2022 at 18:00 CET. Join us on Zoom or follow us on live streaming on IRI YouTube Channel

Elke Krasny, co-editor of Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating in conversation with Maddalena Fragnito co-editor of Ecologie della cura. Prospettive transfemministe. Moderators Emanuele Braga and Zoe Romano

Profiles

Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Department of Education in the Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Krasny’s scholarship, academic writings, curatorial work, and international lectures address questions of care at the present historical conjuncture with a focus on emancipatory and transformative practices in art, curating, architecture and urbanism. The 2019 exhibition and edited volume Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated and edited together with Angelika Fitz, was published by MIT Press and introduces a care perspective in architecture addressing the anthropocenic conditions of the global present. Her 2020 essay ‘In-Sorge-Bleiben. Care-Feminismus für einen infizierten Planeten‘ develops a care-ethical perspective for pandemic times and was published by transcript in Michael Volkmer’s and Karin Werner’s volume Die Corona-Gesellschaft.

Maddalena Fragnito is an artist and activist exploring the intersections between transfeminisms and technologies by focusing on practices of “commoning care”. At the moment, she is a Doctoral Student at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures. She cofounded MACAO (2012), an autonomous cultural centre in Milan, and SopraSotto (2013), a self-managed kindergarten by parents. She is co-author of “Rebelling with Care” (2019), “Pirate Care Syllabus” (2020) and “Ecologies of Care. Transfeminist perspectives” (2021). During the pandemic, she joined the Institute of Radical Imagination by developing the Rasing Care iteration. 

Zoe Romano is a craftivist, digital strategist and lecturer focused on social innovation, women in tech, technology, open design. She graduated in Philosophy at the University of Milan, worked for several years in digital communication and tech, developed her social skills as media-hacktivist on precarity, material and immaterial labor in the creative industries. She worked for Arduino as digital strategist from 2013 to 2017 and then co-founded WeMake Makerspace in 2014. She’s now a consultant on R&D, teaches courses in various organisations and collaborates on eu-funded digital social innovation projects. She takes part on research/activism activities and develops projects around e-textiles and digital fabrication in different contexts.

Emanuele Braga co-founder of Macao center, an artist, researcher and activist. In addition to his work at Macao, he co-founded the dance and theatre company Balletto Civile (2003), the contemporary art project Rhaze (2011), as well as Landscape Choreography (2012), an art platform questioning the role of the body under capitalism. His research focuses on models of cultural production, processes of social transformation, political economy, labor rights and the institution of the commons.

Articles

MILITANT MUTUALISM AND THE EXIT OF EMPIRE

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

Art for UBI, On the Precipice of Time - The Zapatista Forum

ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #3 | Assembly

Art for UBI Terraforming, courtesy of Emanuele Braga

Location / Lugar Museo Reina Sofia, Edificio Sabatini Jardin Date / Fecha: September 17 19:00

with Andy Abbot, Emanuele Braga, Marco Baravalle, Érik Bordeleau, Ilenia Caleo, Anna Cerdà Callís, Kuba Szreder.

Art for UBI Terraforming, courtesy of Emanuele Braga
Art for UBI Terraforming, courtesy of Emanuele Braga

Third public assembly organized by the ART for UBI (Manifesto) an initiative born within the framework of the activities of The School of Mutation by the Institute of Radical Imagination. The Pandemic of Covid19 has been correctly defined as a syndemic. The term clearly shows how pre-existing conditions of social, race, gender and environmental asymmetries, influenced the impact of Covid19, exposing to serious consequences poor and precarious workers, women and lgbtqia+ subjectivities, racialized and indigenous people and those living in areas more subjected to pollution and extractivism. In Europe (and elsewhere) thousands of billions of Euros are allocated to respond to the crisis. Unfortunately, at least from European perspective, it looks like the vast majority of these funds will go to the supply side, in the vain hope that financing private companies will have an overall positive impact on society. The result will be a further polarization of global richness, and the progressive impoverishment of millions of people. Contrary to this option, It is time to support the implementation of forms of universal, basic and unconditional income. We believe UBI is a struggle of primary importance in order to finally achieve a fair remuneration for the value freely extracted from our lives on a daily basis (for example through platform capitalism and through the still invisible care work performed mainly by women). We believe UBI will have a radical impact on social life, not only in terms of reducing poverty and precarity, but also freeing time and energies to build worlds where care, mutual aid and the commons become priorities.

Using the ART FOR UBI [Art for Universal Basic Income] Manifesto as its starting point, the IRI has been proposing discussions on the role that art and the world of cultural production should play in the fight for financial redistribution based on mutualism, methods of self-management of resources, access to the means of production and other solidarity practices. This activity begins in the Museum’s Sabatini Garden, with a “performative round table” based on the proposal of the artist Anna Rispoli, who regularly works on topics such as remuneration, income and the UBI (universal basic income), mixing performance, social research and conducting real experiments on how to share assets and financial resources.

PROFILES

Andy Abbot is an artist, musician and cultural activator. He has exhibited and performed as a solo artist and in various collaborations, including the Black Dogs art collective. He participates in different projects as a musician, both solo and in groups, and composes music for film, performance and installations. In 2012 he obtained his PhD from the University of Leeds with his thesis “Art, self-organized cultural activity and the production of post-capitalist subjectivity”.

——

Marco Baravalle is a member of S.a.L.E. Docks, a collective and an independent space for visual arts, activism, and experimental theater located in what had been an abandoned salt-storage facility in Dorsoduro, Venice. Founded in 2007, its programming includes activist-group meetings, formal exhibitions, screenings, and actions. In addition to managing the diverse programming at S.a.L.E. Docks, Baravalle is currently a research fellow at INCOMMON (IUAV University of Venice). His fields of research include the relationship between art, theatre and activism, creative labor, gentrification, and the positioning of art within neoliberal economics.

——

Emanuele Braga co-founder of Macao center, an artist, researcher and activist. In addition to his work at Macao, he co-founded the dance and theatre company Balletto Civile (2003), the contemporary art project Rhaze (2011), as well as Landscape Choreography (2012), an art platform questioning the role of the body under capitalism. His research focuses on models of cultural production, processes of social transformation, political economy, labor rights and the institution of the commons.

——

Anna Cerdà Callís is a manager and cultural activist. She has been working in the MACBA Department of Exhibitions since 2005, a task that she combines with the field of music. She co-directed the popArb festival (2005-2015) and since 2017 she is involved in the design and organization of Acció Cultura Viva. She is also part of the governing council of La Murga, and participates in MIM (Women of the Music Industry) and the board of the Xàfec association of small festivals.

——

Ilenia Caleo is performer and researcher in queer studies and feminist epistemologies at the IUAV University of Venice. She is among the co-founders of Campo Innocente, a network founded after the pandemic outbreak to defend art workers rights and to promote UBI.

——

Érik Bordeleau is a researcher at the SenseLab of the Université Concordia de Montreal and the Center for Arts, Business and Culture of the Stockholm School of Economics, which he combines with his activity as a fugitive financial designer at the Economic Space Agency (ECSA). His work is articulated at the intersection of political philosophy, media and financial theory, contemporary art, and film studies. He is currently working on creating a Master’s program in Cryptoeconomics at the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) with campuses in Dublin and New York.

On the Precipice of Time - The Zapatista Forum

UNA RENTA, MUCHOS MUNDOS | Performance

Spanish | English

Location / Lugar: Museo Reina Sofia, Jardin Edificio Sabatini Date / Fecha: September 17, 18:00 Language / Idioma: Español Access / Entradas: Free until full capacity, free tickets available from Reina Sofia Museum website (here) from September 15

the performance introduces the Art for UBI #3 | assembly at 19:00

Based on an idea by / Basado en una idea de Anna Rispoli

Concept Concepto Marco Baravalle, Elena Blesa, Emanuele Braga, Sara Buraya Boned, Gabriella Riccio, Anna Rispoli

Text / Texto Marco Baravalle, Elena Blesa, Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio, Anna Rispoli and 14 citizens of Madrid and Barcelona

Direction / Dirección: Gabriella Riccio

Research & Interviews / Investigación y Entrevistas: Gabriella Riccio with the collaboration of Ana Campillos, Maite Gandulfo, Maria Mallol, Celina Poloni

With the support of / Apoyan Hablarenarte / Planta Alta

With the participation of / Con la participación de: Miguel Ángel Álvarez Tornero, Andrei Alexandru Mazga, Sara Babiker Moreno, Elena Blesa Cabéz, Amalia Caballero, José Antonio Campillos Martín-Consuegra, Constanza Cisneros, Ana Gutiérrez Borreguero, Sebastián Laina, Mar Núñez, Lucía Núñez Ortega, Gabriella Riccio, Juan Manuel Rodriguez, Hella Spinelli

A production by / Una producción de: Institute of Radical Imagination, FfAI Foundation for the Arts Activities / Museo Reina Sofia

Espanol_Una-Renta-Muchos-MundosDownload

One income, many worlds

Sabatini Gardens, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, September 21, 2021

Con el Manifiesto ART FOR UBI [Arte por la Renta Básica Universal] como punto de partida, el IRI viene proponiendo discusiones sobre el papel que el arte y el mundo de la producción cultural deben tener en la lucha por una redistribución financiera basada en el mutualismo, los métodos de autogestión de recursos, el acceso a los medios de producción y otras prácticas solidarias. Esta actividad comienza en el Jardín de Sabatini del Museo, con “Una renta muchos mundos” mesa redonda performativa basada en la propuesta de la artista Anna Rispoli, que trabaja regularmente temas como la remuneración, los ingresos y la RBU (renta básica universal), mezclando performance, investigación social y realizando experimentos reales sobre cómo compartir bienes y recursos financieros.

En la performance Una Renta, Muchos Mundos (One Income, Many worlds) un grupo diversificado de personas interpretará una asamblea ficticia en forma de discurso público coral donde se analiza el hipotético impacto en sus vidas de una renta universal, básica e incondicional en el contexto de la actual crisis pandémica. ¿Es la RBU una medida financiera “simple” o una herramienta fundamental para una alternativa radical a la realidad neoliberal que vivimos? ¿Qué pasa con ganar dinero no relacionado con el trabajo y las horas de trabajo? ¿Y la posibilidad de decir no al chantaje de la precariedad? ¿Qué hay de poner fin a las asimetrías de raza y género tan comunes en el mercado laboral actual? ¿Qué hay de desintoxicar el planeta de trabajos ecológicamente peligrosos? ¿Qué pasa con el cuidado y la ayuda mutua frente a la interminable invitación a ser individuos competitivos? Estas son algunas de las preguntas que inspiran el diálogo público La actuación será seguida por el panel Art For Ubi # 3 en el Museo Reina Sofía.

En esta ocasión, un equipo del IRI ha trabajado para adaptar la propuesta de Rispoli y realizar una dramaturgia que retome estas líneas a partir del diálogo con un grupo de personas que viven y trabajan en España, y que han participado en una serie de entrevistas que han dado lugar a la dramaturgia de esta performance. Esta fase de investigación, se enmarca dentro del Programa Abierto de DESVÍO una herramienta de diálogo y trabajo colectivo impulsada por hablarenarte / Planta Alta que se propone accionar y afectar nuestro contexto inmediato.

Using the ART FOR UBI [Art for Universal Basic Income] Manifesto as its starting point, IRI has been proposing discussions on the role that art and the world of cultural production should play in the fight for financial redistribution based on mutualism, methods of self-management of resources, access to the means of production and other solidarity practices. This activity begins in the Sabatini Garden of the Museum, with “One income many worlds” performative round table based on the proposal of the artist Anna Rispoli, who regularly works on topics such as remuneration, income and the UBI (universal basic income), mixing performance, social research and conducting real experiments on how to share assets and financial resources.

In the performance Una Renta, Muchos Mundos (One Income, Many worlds) a diversified group of people will perform a fictional assembly in the form of a public coral speech, where the hypothetical impact on their lives of a universal, basic and unconditional income is analyzed on the background of the current pandemic crisis. Is UBI a “simple” financial measure, or is it an essential tool for a radical alternative to the neoliberal reality we are experiencing? What about earning money unrelated to jobs and working hours? What about the possibility to say no to the blackmail of precarity? What about putting and end to race and gender asymmetries so common in today’s labor market? What about detoxing the planet from ecologically dangerous jobs? What about care and mutual aid in front of the endless invitation to be competitive individuals? These are some or the questions inspiring the public dialogue.The performance will be followed by the panel Art For Ubi #3 at the Museum Reina Sofia. 

On this occasion, an IRI team has worked to adapt Rispoli’s proposal and carry out a dramaturgy that takes up these lines from dialogue with a group of people who live and work in Spain, and who have participated in a series of interviews that have given rise to the dramaturgy of this performance. This research phase is part of the DESVÍO Open Program, a tool for dialogue and collective work promoted by hablarenarte / Planta Alta that aims to actuate and affect our immediate context.

UNA RENTA MUCHOS MUNDOS, Sabatini Gardens, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, September 21, 2021

Rearhsal at La Corrala, Madrid September 2021

DAO, The School of Mutation

THE ART OF DAO | Decentralised Autonomous Organizations for the Commons
School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration DAO Decentralised Autonomous Organizations for the Commons. The online meeting is on Wednesday, June 9th Round Table 15:00 CEST, Lecture 17:00. The lecture and the round table will be recorded and streamed in the museum, the zoom room will be open to the speakers.

Co-organized by 

Institute of Radical Imagination / The School of Mutation

The Sphere for LIFE on The Planet ORSIMANIRANA / MGK – Hamburg 

Program

15.00 – Round table 

NFT, Quadratic Vote and Common Wallets 

Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield), Emanuele Braga, Cem Dagdelen (CurveLabs / The Sphere), Massimiliano Mollona (Goldsmith University/IRI) in discussion with Erik Bordeleau,  Massimo De Angelis and Jerszy Seymour

We gather around this table projects and researchers that experimented in the last decade on how to use blockchain and crypto-economic for the process of commoning. The challenge here is how to use technology, not for a blind techno-optimism, replicating the capitalistic financialization of the social, competition and individualism, but on the opposite, how new technologies could infrastructure the planet to come. In this round table, we question how NFT, decision-making process, fundraising and common management of resources can be the technological answers to political questions. 

17.00 – Lecture

We Too Have a Code:  Notes Around Digital Commons and the question of Programmability

Erik Bordeleau

We need to cultivate a new feel of the infrastructure that is up to the challenge of political organizing in the digital age. How do we conceive of the becoming machinic of the social, and the becoming social of the abstract machines we are part of? And how does that concern the formation of cosmo-financial or crypto-scalable commons to come?  Taking Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of surplus value of code as a starting point, this presentation will explore the question of organization as digital incorporation in an age of monetary experimentation, following the development distributed ledger technologies (DLT) and the emergent field of blockchain-based cryptoeconomics.

18.00 – Performance 

How to visualize an ecosystem

News

EINKOMMEN. DIE BEDINGUNGSLOSE REDE | Performance
English | Deutsch

After joining the Art for UBI (manifesto) Platform in 2020, Anna Redi presented the first performance based on the Art for UBI (manifesto) for the opening of the Wiener Festwochen 2021 in collaboration with Institute of Radical Imagination. Since then the Institute of Radical Imagination & Anna Redi have realised all the following performaces based ion the Art for UBI (manifesto) in Madrid, Milan, Venice.

Concept, Direction Anna Rispoli

In collaboration with Emanuele Braga, Maddalena Fragnito, Britt Hatzius, Irena Radmanovic, Common Income, ART for UBI, Institute of Radical Imagination, Volksbegehren Grundeinkommen: Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen Österreich, Generation Grundeinkommen, Verein Das Grundeinkommen, Attac Österreich, Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen Salzburg, Netzwerk Grundeinkommen Research,

Interviews Magdalena Fischer

Text Anna Rispoli, Katja Dreyer and 15 citizens of Vienna Production management Marine Thévenet

A commission and a production by Wiener Festwochen 2021

web_WFW21_Programmbuch_Kern_210329Download

INCOME. The unconditional speech

Eröffnungsrede der Wiener Festwochen 2021

How would we organise our lives if we didn’t have to earn a living? Indeed, what would we do if our livelihood was secured? In 2021, the Wiener Festwochen will once again open with a discursive debate; artist and activist Anna Rispoli is elaborating a choral speech on unconditional basic income. It is an appeal to reflect on distributive justice, precarity and sustainability. Based on interviews with Viennese citizens and against the backdrop of a work environment thrown even more out of sync by a virus, Income. The unconditional speech sees our present-day utopia as tomorrow’s realities. How would unconditional basic income redesign our lives, our towns and cities, society, and the world as a whole? Rispoli’s interventionist art practices aim to change the public space and are founded on the principle of affective mutual contamination. When words uttered by others pass through our own mouths, a form of non-monetary exchange is able to occur. An economy like we have never seen before!

Wie würden wir unser Leben organisieren, wenn wir nicht von Erwerbstätigkeit abhängig wären? Wenn für unsere Lebenserhaltung gesorgt wäre – was würden wir tun? 2021 eröffnen die Wiener Festwochen erneut mit einer diskursiven Debatte; die Künstlerin und Aktivistin Anna Rispoli gestaltet eine chorische Rede zum bedingungslosen Grundeinkommen. Ein Appell, über Verteilungsgerechtigkeit, Prekarität und Nachhaltigkeit nachzudenken. Basierend auf Interviews mit Wiener*innen und vor dem Hintergrund einer durch ein Virus erst recht aus dem Lot geratenen Arbeitswelt begreift das leidenschaftliche Plädoyer die Utopien von heute als die Realitäten von morgen. Wie würde ein bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen das Leben neu gestalten, die Stadt, die Gesellschaft, die ganze Welt? Rispolis interventionistische Kunstpraktiken zielen auf Veränderung des öffentlichen Raums und fußen auf dem Prinzip der gegenseitigen affektiven Ansteckung. Wenn die Worte anderer durch den eigenen Mund wandern, kann eine Form von nichtmonetärem Austausch geschehen. Eine Ökonomie wie noch nie!

Art for UBI (Manifesto)
Art for UBI

ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #2 | Open online Assembly
Online Assembly ART for UBI (Manifesto) N°2 on Thursday, December 17th at 18:30 CET. With Ilenia Caleo, Dena Beard, Julio Linares, Anna Rispoli, Emanuele Braga, Marco Baravalle. The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Art for UBI.  Join us on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87252121414 Meeting ID: 872 5212 1414

We continue our collective debate towards the drafting of the ARTS FOR UBI Manifesto. In this session we will address the mobilizations of art workers in Italy during the pandemic. We will analyze the experimental basic income for artists implemented by the city of San Francisco. We will talk about basic incomes models on blockchain and about art as a possible field of experimentation of alternative economic models

Art for UBI (manifesto) online assembly #2 December, 2nd 2020
PARTICIPANTS TO THE ASSEMBLY

Emanuele Braga (Macao – ITA) Emanuele is an activist and artist, member of Macao, center for art and research in Milano (IT). His intervention will describe the self organized Basic Income redistribution within the community of Macao in the last 5 years. http://www.macaomilano.org/IMG/pdf/3_-_commoncoin_basic_income.pdf?1498/0c7e90052d75f199cb712e014f1f8100f3113c3e

Marco Baravallle (S.a.L.E. Docks – ITA) http://www.saledocks.org/ Marco is a member of S.a.L.E. Doks, a self-managed art space in Venice. His intervention will focus on the importance of UBI and dis-identification in the organization of art and culture living labor.

Gabriella Riccio (L’Asilo – ITA) is an artist, activist and researcher, member of L’Asilo, art & culture common in Naples IT. L’Asilo elaborated on UBI within the framework of The commons as ecosystems for culture on EU scale.

Ilenia Caleo: Performer and researcher in queer studies and feminist epistemologies at the IUAV University of Venice. She is among the co-founders of Campo Innocente, a network founded after the pandemic outbreak to defend art workers rights and to promote UBI. (https://ilcampoinnocente.blogspot.com/)

Dena Beard: Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco. She received her M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Julio Linares: researcher at Circles, a blockchain based basic income made to promote local economies. https://joincircles.net/

Anna Rispoli: (Common Wallet) Common Wallet is a community based practice in Brussels created by artists. They are socializing their personal income basing the access to liquidity on mutual aid principles.

Giuseppe Micciarelli (L’Asilo – ITA) 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. L’Asilo elaborated on UBI within the framework of The commons as ecosystems for culture on EU scale.

Škart, Kuponi (coupons), 1995
Raising Care

RAISING CARE | Care for language
3rd online Assembly with Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza (Italy), Territorio Doméstico (Spain), Skart (Serbia), Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus (Athens), Obiezione Respinta (Italy), Mesa de mayores de Usera (Madrid).  The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Raising Care holds this online workshop based on exchange of practices on NOVEMBER 12th at 17:30 CET. Join us on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89525339150 Meeting ID: 895 2533 9150 
NEW PARADOXES OF THE POLITICS OF CARE 

Both ethics of care and care practices have moved forward during this last crisis. One of the aims of this collective 3-sessions-iteration would be to analyse this new tension among groups whose “care practices” were active from before the Covid-19 turn and also with groups which have been rising during covid. 

We plan to start a conversation among collectives by asking: 

  • who cares and who is cared for? 
  • what needs of “socialising care” (redistributing) are we meeting now? 
  • which tools are we using or building new because of new needs? 
  • how have reconfigured the public language/space/media. 
  • how care is becoming a term of the power, governments, media? 
  • which conflict in our practices are we finding? 
  • which relations we found among our “autonomous” practices of care and the role of the public sector nowadays? 
Profiles

Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza (Italy) Fighting fear together to defeat the virus. This initiative was created to address the risk of the collapse of the national health system during the Covid-19 emergency. Volunteers in support of the population, together with Emergency ONG, we organize intervention teams to make our active contribution to overcoming this emergency. https://www.facebook.com/brigatevolontarieMilano

Mesa de mayores de Usera (Madrid) is an organization of elderly people from Usera, a southern neighborhood of Madrid. Facing the lack of hedge during covid pandemia, the Usera Senior Board are self-organizing alternative tools with the aim of offering support to the elderly. Through social networks and email, the board faces isolation, provides information about the resources of the neighborhood and brings mutual care support. http://mayoresusera.alonsodiez.com/

Obiezione Respinta (Italy) is a movement fighting for sexual and reproductive self determination. Facing the increase of obstetric violence and general disinformation on medical / health practices aimed at women and lgbtqi subjects cases in Italy, Obiezione Respinta have created a self-managed platform that allows to report the places where the objection of conscience is in a common map. The platform offers a free service of access to information that is commonly not easily available. https://obiezionerespinta.info/info

Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus (Athens) has been active in the field of solidarity education since 2005, while in 2006 it took the legal form of an association, with its ultimate aim being the educational and training support and the cultural advance of immigrants and refugees residing in Greece. Last year, it had more than 670 registered students from 43 different national backgrounds and 38 volunteers in teaching and supporting roles. http://solidarityschools.gr/?page_id=12341&lang=en

Škart (Serbia) Škart (rejects/ausschus/scarto) group was founded in 1990 at the Architecture Faculty in Belgrade, Serbia-Yugoslavia. Through permanent inner conflict, together with various collaborators, the group survived 3 decades as a collective which is questioning edged forms of poetry, architecture, graphic design, publishing, music, performance, alternative education and social activism. http://www.skart.rs

Territorio Doméstico (Spain) is a feminist and transborderist collective in Madrid, formed by women, many of them housekeepers, climing visibility and social reorganization of care work. TD has been fighting for more than 14 years for the recognition of rights in household employment, the valuation of care work in a system that devalues them, makes them invisible and precarious, despite the fact that they are essential sustaining life. https://www.facebook.com/territoriodomestico

Raising care – is an iteration and a working group for the School of Mutation, by members of IRI and its network, that came together to reflect, organise and instigate a new approach to care as commons. The group consists of Elena Blesa Cábez, Emanuele Braga, Sara Buraya Boned, Jesus Carrillo, Maddalena Fragnito, Elena Lasala Palomar, Theo Prodromidis, Gabriella Riccio and Pablo García Bachiller.

Škart, Kuponi (coupons), 1995
Raising Care

RAISING CARE | Care for tools
2nd online Assembly with Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza (Italy), Territorio Doméstico (Spain), Skart (Serbia), Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus (Athens), Obiezione Respinta (Italy), Mesa de mayores de Usera (Madrid).  The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Raisin Care holds this online workshop based on exchange of practices on NOVEMBER 5th at 18:30 CET. Join us on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85257147600 Meeting ID 852 5714 7600
NEW PARADOXES OF THE POLITICS OF CARE 

Both ethics of care and care practices have moved forward during this last crisis. One of the aims of this collective 3-sessions-iteration would be to analyse this new tension among groups whose “care practices” were active from before the Covid-19 turn and also with groups which have been rising during covid. 

We plan to start a conversation among collectives by asking: 

  • who cares and who is cared for? 
  • what needs of “socialising care” (redistributing) are we meeting now? 
  • which tools are we using or building new because of new needs? 
  • how have reconfigured the public language/space/media. 
  • how care is becoming a term of the power, governments, media? 
  • which conflict in our practices are we finding? 
  • which relations we found among our “autonomous” practices of care and the role of the public sector nowadays? 
Profiles

Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza (Italy) Fighting fear together to defeat the virus. This initiative was created to address the risk of the collapse of the national health system during the Covid-19 emergency. Volunteers in support of the population, together with Emergency ONG, we organize intervention teams to make our active contribution to overcoming this emergency. https://www.facebook.com/brigatevolontarieMilano

Mesa de mayores de Usera (Madrid) is an organization of elderly people from Usera, a southern neighborhood of Madrid. Facing the lack of hedge during covid pandemia, the Usera Senior Board are self-organizing alternative tools with the aim of offering support to the elderly. Through social networks and email, the board faces isolation, provides information about the resources of the neighborhood and brings mutual care support. http://mayoresusera.alonsodiez.com/

Obiezione Respinta (Italy) is a movement fighting for sexual and reproductive self determination. Facing the increase of obstetric violence and general disinformation on medical / health practices aimed at women and lgbtqi subjects cases in Italy, Obiezione Respinta have created a self-managed platform that allows to report the places where the objection of conscience is in a common map. The platform offers a free service of access to information that is commonly not easily available. https://obiezionerespinta.info/info

Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus (Athens) has been active in the field of solidarity education since 2005, while in 2006 it took the legal form of an association, with its ultimate aim being the educational and training support and the cultural advance of immigrants and refugees residing in Greece. Last year, it had more than 670 registered students from 43 different national backgrounds and 38 volunteers in teaching and supporting roles. http://solidarityschools.gr/?page_id=12341&lang=en

Škart (Serbia) Škart (rejects/ausschus/scarto) group was founded in 1990 at the Architecture Faculty in Belgrade, Serbia-Yugoslavia. Through permanent inner conflict, together with various collaborators, the group survived 3 decades as a collective which is questioning edged forms of poetry, architecture, graphic design, publishing, music, performance, alternative education and social activism. http://www.skart.rs

Territorio Doméstico (Spain) is a feminist and transborderist collective in Madrid, formed by women, many of them housekeepers, climing visibility and social reorganization of care work. TD has been fighting for more than 14 years for the recognition of rights in household employment, the valuation of care work in a system that devalues them, makes them invisible and precarious, despite the fact that they are essential sustaining life. https://www.facebook.com/territoriodomestico

Raising care – is an iteration and a working group for the School of Mutation, by members of IRI and its network, that came together to reflect, organise and instigate a new approach to care as commons. The group consists of Elena Blesa Cábez, Emanuele Braga, Sara Buraya Boned, Jesus Carrillo, Maddalena Fragnito, Elena Lasala Palomar, Theo Prodromidis, Gabriella Riccio and Pablo García Bachiller.

Škart, Kuponi (coupons), 1995
Raising Care

RAISING CARE | Care for people
1st online Assembly with Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza (Italy), Territorio Doméstico (Spain), Skart (Serbia), Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus (Athens), Obiezione Respinta (Italy), Mesa de mayores de Usera (Madrid).  The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Raisin Care holds this online meeting on 29 OCTOBER at 18:30 CET. Join us on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84259733096
NEW PARADOXES OF THE POLITICS OF CARE 

Both ethics of care and care practices have moved forward during this last crisis. One of the aims of this collective 3-sessions-iteration would be to analyse this new tension among groups whose “care practices” were active from before the Covid-19 turn and also with groups which have been rising during covid. 

We plan to start a conversation among collectives by asking: 

  • who cares and who is cared for? 
  • what needs of “socialising care” (redistributing) are we meeting now? 
  • which tools are we using or building new because of new needs? 
  • how have reconfigured the public language/space/media. 
  • how care is becoming a term of the power, governments, media? 
  • which conflict in our practices are we finding? 
  • which relations we found among our “autonomous” practices of care and the role of the public sector nowadays? 
Profiles

Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza (Italy) Fighting fear together to defeat the virus. This initiative was created to address the risk of the collapse of the national health system during the Covid-19 emergency. Volunteers in support of the population, together with Emergency ONG, we organize intervention teams to make our active contribution to overcoming this emergency. https://www.facebook.com/brigatevolontarieMilano

Mesa de mayores de Usera (Madrid) is an organization of elderly people from Usera, a southern neighborhood of Madrid. Facing the lack of hedge during covid pandemia, the Usera Senior Board are self-organizing alternative tools with the aim of offering support to the elderly. Through social networks and email, the board faces isolation, provides information about the resources of the neighborhood and brings mutual care support. http://mayoresusera.alonsodiez.com/

Obiezione Respinta (Italy) is a movement fighting for sexual and reproductive self determination. Facing the increase of obstetric violence and general disinformation on medical / health practices aimed at women and lgbtqi subjects cases in Italy, Obiezione Respinta have created a self-managed platform that allows to report the places where the objection of conscience is in a common map. The platform offers a free service of access to information that is commonly not easily available. https://obiezionerespinta.info/info

Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus (Athens) has been active in the field of solidarity education since 2005, while in 2006 it took the legal form of an association, with its ultimate aim being the educational and training support and the cultural advance of immigrants and refugees residing in Greece. Last year, it had more than 670 registered students from 43 different national backgrounds and 38 volunteers in teaching and supporting roles. http://solidarityschools.gr/?page_id=12341&lang=en

Škart (Serbia) Škart (rejects/ausschus/scarto) group was founded in 1990 at the Architecture Faculty in Belgrade, Serbia-Yugoslavia. Through permanent inner conflict, together with various collaborators, the group survived 3 decades as a collective which is questioning edged forms of poetry, architecture, graphic design, publishing, music, performance, alternative education and social activism. http://www.skart.rs

Territorio Doméstico (Spain) is a feminist and transborderist collective in Madrid, formed by women, many of them housekeepers, climing visibility and social reorganization of care work. TD has been fighting for more than 14 years for the recognition of rights in household employment, the valuation of care work in a system that devalues them, makes them invisible and precarious, despite the fact that they are essential sustaining life. https://www.facebook.com/territoriodomestico

Raising care – is an iteration and a working group for the School of Mutation, by members of IRI and its network, that came together to reflect, organise and instigate a new approach to care as commons. The group consists of Elena Blesa Cábez, Emanuele Braga, Sara Buraya Boned, Jesus Carrillo, Maddalena Fragnito, Elena Lasala Palomar, Theo Prodromidis, Gabriella Riccio and Pablo García Bachiller.

Art for UBI

ART FOR UBI PLATFORM

Initiators

Expanding Nodes Venice

Art for UBI (manifesto) on the press

Art for UBI (manifesto) in the squares

A platform and a Manifesto on the role of art and art workers in the struggle for social justice

While the art market confirms his status as a safe-haven assets provider for the financial elite, the current pandemic has highlighted the fragility and precarity of art workers around the world, a condition common to a growing portion of humanity. In this situation a UBI (Universal Basic Income) would then represent a solution and indeed an urgent measure to implement. But UBI is not “only” a response to poverty, it is a necessary condition in order to rethink our extractivist ecological model, to correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care. If artists are already creating new collective economy models and alter-institutions, these small scale experiments will be much more valuable when connected with those growing social movements around the world fighting for a Universal Basic Income.

ART FOR UBI | The manifesto & the campaign

NOTES ON A PERFORMATIVE INVESTIGATION | Article

Related articles

Articles, IRI Publications, Rethinking Citizenship, Work and Labour Commoning

GESTURES OF RADICAL IMAGINATION: A PROGRAM FOR THE USEFUL REVOLUTION by Emanuele Braga

Image WHO

translation by Gabriella Riccio

Download

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.

Italian version on Dinamopress

Areas of Intervention, IRI Meetings

IRI MEETING #3 ATHENS | SOLIDARITY SCHOOLS

With the collaboration of the Solidarity School Mesopotamia and the Open School Piraeus, the Institute of Radical Imagination created a space to reflect on practices of radical pedagogy and set up together with solidarity schools for social activation and political prefiguration of education in the commons.

Continue reading “IRI MEETING #3 ATHENS | SOLIDARITY SCHOOLS” →
Areas of Intervention, IRI Meetings

IRI MEETING #2 MADRID | URBAN COMMONS

The second gathering of the Institute of Radical Imagination takes place from 28th of May to 2nd of June 2018 at the Ingobernable, Madrid.

The five-days event in Madrid will consist in two parallel sets of events: a MASTER in Urban Commons, organized by La Ingobernable in collaboration with IRI and involving various Spanish urban commons and social centres and a three-day workshop about the Institute of Radical Imagination’s forms of governance, sustainability, future projects and potential collaborations with social centres and urban commons across Europe’s south, the Mediterranean and the global South.

Continue reading “IRI MEETING #2 MADRID | URBAN COMMONS” →
Articles, IRI Meetings

NOTES ON MAPPING THE INSTITUTE OF RADICAL IMAGINATION

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?

NODES

ITALY

L’Asilo, Naples

Commons Napoli, Naples

S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice

Macao, Milan

Museo en Red, Madrid

SPAIN

La Fundacion de los Comunes, Madrid

CSO La Tabacalera de Lavapiès, Madrid

Museo en Red, Madrid

GREECE

Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus Athens

Solidarity School Network, Athens

Laboratory for the Urban Commons, Athens

TURKEY

Kirik, Istanbul, Turkey

EGYPT

Mosireen, El Cairo

RUSSIA

Chto Delat, St Petersburg, Russia

LATIN AMERICA

Red Conceptualismos del Sur, BsAs

BELGIUM

L’Internationale Association, Brussels

Image gallery image
Image gallery image
Image gallery image
Image gallery image
Areas of Intervention, IRI Meetings

IRI MEETING #1 NAPLES | RADICAL IMAGINATION

L’Asilo November 29th / Scugnizzo Liberato November 30th > Fb

PROGRAM

November 29th at L’Asilo

10:00 – 14:30 – Organisational meeting of the IRI’s steering committee:

  1. The Institute of Radical Imagination Introduced by Mao Mollona.
  2. New forms of collaboration. The museum of the commons with Manuel Borja Villel.
  3. Relations, aesthetics and politics Introduced by Marco Baravalle.
  4. Translation. Collaborative platforms, common language and methodology of working in commons introduced by Raúl Sánchez Cedillo.
  5. Legalising the Commons and new Municipalism introduced by Giuseppe Micciarelli.
  6. Mapping the Institute of Radical Imagination introduced by Emanuele Braga and Marco Baravalle.
Continue reading “IRI MEETING #1 NAPLES | RADICAL IMAGINATION” →