Tag: L'Internationale

Art and Activism, News

IRI AT THE DEMOCRACY PAVILION IN LJUBLJANA


THE DEMOCRACY PAVILION FOR EUROPE Ljubljana, March 9-11, 2022
ZRC SAZU

The Democracy Pavilion is a conference in Ljubljana organized by L’Internationale association and Zrc Sazu . Part of the #TheEuropeanPavilion program by European Cultural Foundation

📅 March 9-11

Programme 📌 https://internationaleonline.org/programmes/the_democracy_pavilion/…

Plans for this conference were first drawn up some months ago and we doubted whether to carry it on. We decided to use this platform to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and condemn the war.

We will begin the sessions on March 9 with news from artists and cultural workers in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora, to listen to what they want and need.

Our question: what does democracy mean in these current, bleak conditions? How do we both seek to defend the limited space to think and act that we still have and push for a new sense of living well and caring for the planet we share? 

📺  online at European Cultural Foundation YT channel

Hand-programDownload

Plans for the Democracy Pavilion were first drawn up some months ago. However, with the current Russian’s army invasion of Ukraine in our minds, L’Internationale association wants to use this platform to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and condemn the military invasion that affects the lives of millions of civilians.

During the three days, we will discuss many issues of democracy, Europe, colonial legacies and contemporary empires. We will do this with Ukraine in our minds and our hearts. We share the urgency of stopping the war and we are taking the actions that are in our hands as civilians to demand an immediate end to the attacks. In addition to solidarity with those who directly suffer from Russian aggression, we also want to stand with those who resist from inside Russia and who risk their own lives and well-being to defend others. Together, we must try to use art to imagine a society that will prevent such conflicts in future, and then go on to build it. We hope our conference can contribute a little to all these urgencies.

While condemnation of the war is crucial, it is in itself only one necessary step. We also find it important to maintain the spaces for public debate and analysis of the causes of the war and the position of arts and culture when life and democratic values are under threat. In that light, we carry the pain of ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere, as well as the histories of exploitation and erasure that still manifest themselves in the present. Our question remains what does democracy mean in these current, bleak conditions? How do we both seek to defend the limited space to think and act that we still have, and push for a new sense of living well and caring for the planet we share? We will begin the sessions on Wednesday with news from artists and cultural workers in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora. We hope that some of them will be able to travel to Ljubljana so that we can listen to what they want and need. With this invasion, it is more clear than ever that real existing democracy is under existential threat. While it is true that European democracies are imperfect, they have allowed for governments that are to some degree responsive to open, independent elections decided by debate and argument. Today, even that version of democracy is something we need to defend, as well as to nurture the better, more equitable, more joyful versions we hope can yet emerge. Re-energizing our common futures is something to which everyone can contribute; but we believe that the arts can play its role as an initiator of imaginative epistemologies and a new ethic of living together within the limits of the planet. We want to use this opportunity to explore that belief.

Curated by Zdenka Badovinac and Charles Esche, the Democracy Pavilion for Europe aims to contribute to the rethinking and potential revival of communal forms of decision making as a vision and practice, with artists playing a key role in their conception of different and better worlds and an ethics of living together differently on this planet.

The aim of the Democracy Pavilion for Europe conference is to concentrate artistic, activist, and institutional energies. The objective is to find ways for the creative community to understand democracy and its limits, articulate its values, and propose forms through which to build a new commitment to shared control, public interest and the commons.

The Pavilion will start as an international conference in Ljubljana on 9–11 March, organized by the L’Internationale association in cooperation with ZRC SAZU. This is the first step in the Pavilion’s planned programme that will unfold through local workshops at L’Internationale confederation member locations and transform into an online pavilion at: http://www.internationaleonline.org.

The Democracy Pavilion for Europe is part of The European Pavilion – an initiative by the European Cultural Foundation that aims to support and promote artistic projects that imagine desirable and sustainable futures for Europe. The European Pavilion was initiated by the Amsterdam-based European Cultural Foundation and is developed in partnership with the Camargo Foundation, the Kultura Nova Foundation, and Fondazione CRT.

Over the course of 2021, seven arts and cultural organizations in various countries across Europe have joined this exciting new initiative: ARNA (Sweden), Brunnenpassage (Austria), INIVA (London), OGR Torino (Italy), State of Concept (Greece), Studio Rizoma (Italy) and L’Internationale (Ljubljana, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain and Poland).

More information at: theeuropeanpavilion.eu

Coordination of the Democracy Pavilion: Nika Ham, Maria Mallol

PROGRAM

9 March, Day 1

Should we stay or should we go? Leaving or reforming liberal democracy

This day will be devoted to looking at people/groups/organizations that are questioning their experience of existing democracy and investigating an “elsewhere”, thinking about cultural efforts in communities, in cultural education, in other forms of change. Is existing liberal democracy a viable way towards emancipation, inclusion, and social justice? What is the potential relation between culture, social justice, and democracy? What cultural forms might sensibly contribute to these aims?

10:00–10:30 Welcome. Oto Luthar, Zdenka Badovinac, Charles Esche. On zoom: André Wilkens (Director of the European Cultural Foundation) and Lore Gablier (ECF program manager) presenting the European Pavilion Program and the European Culture for Solidarity Fund.

10:30–12:00 Artists and Democracy – Panel 1 Emergency action. Contributions from / for Ukraine.

Open panel. Artists and cultural workers in the Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora. including Nikita Kadan (artist and curator) and others depending on the current situation.

COFFEE BREAK

12:15–12:45 In conversation with Iskra Geshoska (zoom) 12:45- 14:00 Artists and Democracy – Panel 2 Gabriella Riccio – IRI Nika Autor

Moderator: Charles Esche

14:00h- 15:00 Lunch 15:00–17:00 Artists and Democracy – Panel 3 Dmitry Vilensky (zoom) Antifascist Year Eszter Szakács Moderator: Charles Esche

17:00–17:30 In conversation with Hazal Halavut (zoom) COFFEE BREAK

18:15 EVENING LECTURE Peter Klepec

10 March, Day 2

Using Democracy

On the second day, actors are invited who are active in politics, theory and institutional organisation and who make use of culture and art in their work. They are working within and around the liberal democratic nation state and the public sector, often looking for the opportunities it affords for dissent and for taking democratic power. How to use or access the languages of art and culture to question democracy or hold the state to its stated ideals? What is the relationship between democracy and public cultural institutions and subsidies? What is needed to reshape existing liberal democracy away from its apparent capture by the conservative and revolutionary right? 10:00–11:00 Conversation (zoom): Manuel Borja-Villel and Joanna Mytkowska Towards the Museum of the Commons.

What is the use of apparently democratic public institutions today? Moderator: Zdenka Badovinac

COFFEE BREAK

11:00–13:00 The Use and Abuse of Existing Structures

Asta Vrečko Tomislav Medak Aleksei Borisionok

Moderator: Bojana Piškur

13:00–14:00 – Lunch

14:00- 17:30 Constituting and reconstituting: practices and repairs

14:00–14:30 Tania Bruguera (zoom) 14:30–15:00 Sandi Hilal (zoom)

SHORT BREAK

15:20-15:40 Rolando Vasquez 15:40-16:10 Marcelo Expósito 16:10-16:30 Jonas Staal

16:30-17:30 Questions and open discussion

Moderator: Corina Oprea

COFFEE BREAK

18:15 EVENING LECTURE, Tomaž Mastnak

11 March, Day 3

Kakšna sramota! (What a shame!) The Case of Slovenia

The case of Slovenia: what is happening here and why? What is to be done about it in the cultural field? Artists, cultural workers, and activists from Slovenia are invited to discuss their role in the fight for democracy as it is currently threatened in Slovenia. The day will be dedicated to the sustainability of such resistance – to its economy, structure, networking, and archiving.

10:00 Introduction of the Historical Context Oto Luthar, historian and director ZRC SAZU (introduction by Zdenka Badovinac)

COFFEE BREAK

11:00–12:30 Artists and Activists – Panel I

NON-GRUPA Protestna ljudska skupščina (The Protest People’s Assembly) Aktiv delavk in delavcev v kulturi (The Culture Workers Active): Petja Grafenauer, Miha Zadnikar Vladozlom (via Zoom) 12:30-14:00 LUNCH 14:30–15:30 Artists and Activists – Panel II Miha Blažič, N’toko Tjaša Pureber COFFEE BREAK 15:30-17:30 WORKSHOPS Workshop 1: Artistic approach as basic tool of non-violent protests, Jaša Jenull (representative of The Protest People’s Assembly) The workshop will discuss the mechanisms, experiences, and practical approaches that have helped us carry out more than 90 mass protests and a large number of small artivist interventions over the past two years of struggle against the far right government in Slovenia. Through practical examples, we will present our answers to some of the key questions we have faced in our two years of constant presence on the street. Among others: How to make the invisible visible? How to effectively utilize mass media? How to maintain protest mobilization with the help of art in the long run? How to empower and connect the wider community of protesters using artistic approaches. The second part of the workshop will present a concrete protest action that will take place on the same day and offer participants the opportunity to participate in the protest itself.

Workshop 2: Culture, art, and political activism – key problems today, Miha Zadnikar (representative of the Culture workers active) This workshop will touch on crucial points of the (quite changed) activism / art / culture relationship that are critically seen from a critical perspective today.

The main topics will be:

a) older, recent, and unconscious traps of liberal / illiberal democracies

b) aggressive times of biopolitics; radical state repression and “predatory capitalism”

c) disintegrated subjects within the so-called cultural and creative sectors; cultural fetishism; defetism; recent unexpected difficulties in shaping heterogeneous political movements

d) questioning the “activism of names and family names”; personal career-making activism; grass-roots vs. NGO trends; autonomy and non-hierarchical politics

e) spontaneous inclinations towards a liberal political worldview / liberal jargon

f) opportunities and obstacles in attempts to move away from ideological struggles (with using reorganized and sharpened “national culture”) towards more productive (class) ways of struggle.

Participants:

Antifascist Year (Bogna Stefanska and Jakub Depczinsky), Nika Autor, Zdenka Badovinac, Miha Blažič – N’toko, Aleksei Borisionok, Tania Bruguera, Charles Esche, Marcelo Expósito, Iskra Geshoska, Petja Grafenauer and Miha Zadnikar (representatives of The Culture workers active), Hazal Halavut, Sandi Hilal, Jaša Jenull (representative of The Protest People’s Assembly), The Protest People’s Assembly, Nikita Kadan, Peter Klepec, Oto Luthar, Tomaž Mastnak, Tomislav Medak, Joanna Mytkowska, NON-GRUPA, Corina Oprea, Tjaša Pureber, Gabriella Riccio, Jonas Staal, Eszter Szakács, Rolando Vásquez, Dmitry Vilensky, Asta Vrečko, Miha Zadnikar (representative of the Workers in Culture Task Group), Vladozlom

Campaign

NORMALITY WAS THE PROBLEM

The context of the global pandemic has amplified all the inequalities that feed the capital accumulation system: gender inequalities (more violence in closed-door households, more care workload for women without schools or senior centers, more harassment on online channels…); the inequalities of border regimes; inequalities in the international division of labor, among many others. At the same time, all public goods have been eroded, as shown by the state of health systems around the world. That was and it is our normality.

Faced with this situation, governments in different parts of the world promote in a variety of ways a kind of return to normality based on the coercion of bodies, on restrictions, on the continuity of impoverishment processes and on necropolitical logics.

That is why we make an internationalist call to give body, words, breath to #NormalityWasTheProblem proposing, from the specific perspectives we inhabit, reflections, questions and answers, in the form of words, audiovisual clips, photos, collages, sounds …

Upload your proposals on  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1C8HyScMdxBkIByu-5hkQmA4ZUgiOhsYl?usp=sharing 

Or send them by email to normalitywastheproblem@gmail.com  

And they will be published here https://www.instagram.com/normalitywastheproblem/ 

Virologists have spent these last few months bent over their microscopes as they labour to identify the origin, vectors of contagion and ways to combat Covid-19. They are not there yet. But they can at least claim to have resolved many of the urgent questions and most pressing needs.

Meanwhile, activists and militants, the impoverished working classes and other unquiet critics of the status quo have been scrutinising the implacable effects of a better known but equally vaccine-less virus: capitalism.

As the pandemic has tightened its grip, it has thrown into stark relief the simmering inequalities that feed the accumulation of capital. Indeed, it has intensified them to an intolerable degree: inequalities of gender (a surge in violence behind closed doors, a ramped-up burden of care for women as schools and old people’s centres shut down, more online harassment, etc.); inequalities of frontier regimes (illegal migrants are shut out from emergency support measures); inequalities in the international division of labour (countries confront the same virus with vastly differing resources in terms of healthcare systems, material conditions of their population, etc.). And many more.

This situation, which we used to call normality, has revealed itself in its dystopian reality.

So, while governments talk about a return to normality or a new normality, we – those of us who seek an emancipatory change to this monstrous normalised reality – are throwing our thoughts, bodies and energy into forging new paradigms, alliances and practices that map the way to new horizons.

But how to translate this urgent desire into specific, down-to-earth, locally relevant measures? How can we vaccinate ourselves against capitalism on the eve of an economic crisis deeper than 2008? At a time when the forces of the far right are eager to seize on the discontent stoked by the pandemic’s material cost?

How can we avoid a return to the dangerous promises that the nation state will save us and instead forge new alliances and new forms of international cooperation?

How can we short-circuit the spaces where capital accumulation squeezes out the resources we have to live on? How can we rescue from rampant marketisationour homes, neighbourhoods, cities, towns, water, air, public spaces and natural and urban environments?

How can we protect social assets (educational systems, cultural institutions, social security systems, healthcare) and create other new goods, under common management, which can overcome the dangers afflicting “public” sectors that are increasingly falling into the claws of financial elites.

How can we break away from a financialised economy centred on accumulation and instead develop a social organisation based on the needs and desires of a decent, independent and free life?

This campaign invites everyone to put forward (in words, video, photographs, collage, sound, etc.), each from our own corners of the world and from the reality we live and see, more questions and more answers to meet the colossal challenge of our collective global demand:

#NormalityWasTheProblem

#LaNormalidadEraElProblema

El contexto de pandemia que se está viviendo globalmente ha amplificado todas las desigualdades de las que se alimenta el sistema de acumulación de capital: las desigualdades de género (más violencia en los hogares a puerta cerrada, más carga de trabajo de cuidados para las mujeres sin escuelas ni centros de mayores, más acoso en los canales on line…); las desigualdades de los regímenes de frontera; las desigualdades de la división internacional del trabajo, entre muchas otras. Al mismo tiempo se han erosionado todos los bienes públicos, como lo muestra el estado de los sistemas de salud en todo el mundo. Esa era y es nuestra normalidad.

Frente a esta situación, los gobiernos de diferentes lugares del mundo promueven de distintas maneras una suerte de vuelta a la normalidad basada en la coerción de los cuerpos, las restricciones, la continuidad de procesos de empobrecimiento y las lógicas necropolíticas.

Es por ello que hacemos una llamada internacionalista a dar cuerpo, palabras, respiración a #NormalityWastheProblem proponiendo, desde las perspectivas concretas que habitamos, reflexiones, preguntas y respuestas, en forma de palabras, de clips audiovisuales, de fotos, de collages, de sonidos… sobre la vida que queremos.

Podéis subir todas vuestras aportaciones aquí: 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1C8HyScMdxBkIByu-5hkQmA4ZUgiOhsYl?usp=sharing

O enviarlas a normalitywastheproblem@gmail.com 

Y serán compartidas en esta cuenta https://www.instagram.com/normalitywastheproblem/ 

Los microscopios de los estudios de virología han trabajado duro estos últimos meses para hallar el origen, las formas de contagio y las maneras de enfrentarnos al Covid19. Aún queda camino por recorrer, pero no cabe duda de que encontrarán respuestas a buena parte de las preguntas y necesidades.

Mientras tanto, las lupas de los espacios activistas y militantes, de las clases populares empobrecidas y de los espíritus inquietos, incómodos y críticos con el status quo han observado el aumento dramático del efecto implacable de un virus previamente conocido del que aún no hemos sabido vacunarnos: el virus de un sistema económico y social incluso más letal al que identificábamos con la normalidad.

En efecto, en estos tiempos de pandemia se han visibilizado y ampliado hasta dimensiones insostenibles todas las desigualdades de las que se alimenta el sistema de acumulación de capital: las desigualdades de género (más violencia en los hogares a puerta cerrada, más carga de trabajo de cuidados para las mujeres sin escuelas ni centros de mayores, más acoso en los canales on line…); las desigualdades de los regímenes de frontera (las personas sin papeles no pueden acceder a las medidas de urgencia desplegadas por las instituciones); las desigualdes de la división internacional del trabajo (los diferentes países se enfrentan al mismo virus con muy diferentes recursos, sistemas de salud, condiciones materiales de la población…). Y muchas otras.

Eso que llamábamos normalidad se ha revelado como una auténtica distopía.

Por eso, mientras los gobiernos hablan de volver a la normalidad, o de alcanzar una nueva normalidad,las miradas, cuerpos y empeños de quienes buscamos una transformación emancipadora de esa monstruosa realidad normalizada, construimos paradigmas, alianzas y prácticas que nos orienten hacia otros horizontes.

¿Pero cómo traducir ese deseo potente en pasos concretos, aterrizados, situados? ¿Cómo vacunarnos contra los efectos de una crisis económica mayor que la del 2008 y con unas fuerzas políticas de ultraderecha que pugnan por capitalizar el malestar generado por los estragos materiales causados por la pandemia?

¿Cómo desviarnos de un regreso a las peligrosas promesas de salvación de los Estados nación para buscar nuevas alianzas y formas de cooperación de escala internacional?

¿Cómo seguir cortocircuitando los espacios de acumulación de capital a costa de nuestros recursos de vida? ¿Cómo sustraer de la mercantilización nuestras casas, barrios, ciudades, pueblos; el agua, el aire, el espacio púbblico, el medioambiente natural y urbano? ¿Cómo hacemos del cuidado una política colectiva y tranformadora que interviene en los horizontes transfronterizos?

¿Cómo sostener la posibilidad abierta de estallidos y revueltas que se han levantado en distintas latitudes contra la normalidad precaria? ¿Qué hacemos para que la distancia física no devenga aislamiento social? ¿Cómo se transforman los repertorios de acción de protesta y articulación en el confinamiento y posterior a este?

¿Cómo defender y proteger bienes públicos (sistemas educativos, instituciones culturales, sistemas de seguridad social, sistemas de salud) y crear otros nuevos, bajo regímenes de administración del común capaces de superar los peligros de sectores “públicos” cada vez más amenazados por las garras de las élites financieras?

¿Cómo salir de una economía financiarizada que pone en el centro la acumulación para articular la organización social en torno a las necesidades y deseos de unas vidas dignas, autónomas, emancipadas?

Esta campaña invita a proponer (en forma de palabras, de clips audiovisuales, de fotos, de collages, de sonidos, … ) desde nuestro específico rincón del mundo, desde la perspectiva concreta que habitamos, más preguntas y más respuestas para abonar el reto colosal de un deseo globalmente compartido:

#NormalityWasTheProblem

#LaNormalidadEraElProblema