Tag: Massimiliano Mao Mollona

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Art for UBI Terraforming, courtesy of Emanuele Braga
Presentation

L’ARTE DEI COMMONS | Panel

Campo di Basket, Piazza Selinunte Milano

30 Settembre 2022 ore 18:00

Accesso libero

MODERA

Emanuele Braga

CON

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

Saranno presentate recenti pubblicazioni intorno al tema della precarietà e del reddito: 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.

BIO

Emanuele Braga co-fondatore del Macao center, artista, ricercatore e attivista. Oltre al suo lavoro a Macao, ha co-fondato la compagnia di danza e teatro Balletto Civile (2003), il progetto di arte contemporanea Rhaze (2011) e Landscape Choreography (2012), una piattaforma artistica che mette in discussione il ruolo del corpo sotto il capitalismo. La sua ricerca verte sui modelli di produzione culturale, sui processi di trasformazione sociale, sull’economia politica, sui diritti del lavoro e sull’istituzione dei beni comuni.

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La pagina è in costruzione….

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

Future of Art & Cultural Institutions

UNCOMMON GROUND: ART ECOLOGY AND DE-COLONIAL FREEDOM | T. J. Demos in conversation with Mao Mollona
School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Film Archive and Militant Cinema. The online meeting is on Tuesday, June 15th at 20:00 CET; 11:00 PTS.  Join us on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85226477196  Meeting ID: 852 2647 7196 – Streaming online on IRI YouTube Channel – Share the FB event

Having worked for more than two decades at the intersection of art, de-colonial politics and ecological justice, art historian T. J. Demos has consistently theorized and written about art as an experimental practice of “world making”, based on speculative knowledge creation and posed against racial and colonial capitalism, emerging in the dialogical encounter between artists and various communities of action and social movements. Demos’ vision of “ecology as intersectionality” locates revolutionary agency at the crossroad, and, as an articulation, of different, socio-political, and economic fields, and out of the labour of connection, mediation, and recuperation of shifting and diverse “uncommon grounds”. In conversation with Mao Mollona, Demos will discuss contemporary practices of de-colonial and anti-capitalist artistic engagement, particularly resurgent forms of black and indigenous activism. Besides, in line with recent IRI’s iterations, he will also discuss his involvement with the Zapatista political experiment in Chiapas, considered as a form of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist socio-political experiment, a revolutionary indigenous aesthetics and an experiential practice of land-based autonomy and self-determination. 

ph Abolitionist study an Invitation
Future of Art & Cultural Institutions

ABOLITIONISM: TOWARDS ALTERNATIVE MODES OF STUDY | Mao Mollona & Eli Meyerhoff, Max Haiven, Abigail Boggs, Nick Mitchell, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein
The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Future of Art & Cultural Institution, holds this online meeting on Monday 12 OCTOBER at 20:30 CET, 19:30 London, 2:30 EST. Facilitated by Mao Mollona, with Eli Meyerhoff, Max Haiven, Abigail Boggs, Nick Mitchell, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

Abolitionism in university follows the movement to abolish prisons and police, seeing these violent institutions as continuations of slavery by another name. Left abolitionism is both destructive—dismantling racial capitalism—and constructive, building alternatives, seeking to replace the prison-industrial complex which is the foundation of our capitalist system with alternative practices of community accountability, safety, and transformative justice. The Left abolitionist approach to universities also brings these two paths at once: reckoning with universities’ complicity with a carceral, racial-capitalist society while creating an alternative, mode of study and enquiry. 

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Future of Art & Cultural Institutions

POPULAR EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE IN COMMONS | Mao Mollona & Rebecca Tarlau, Lea Ana Blaustein, Zeynep Tul Sualp, Alessandro Mariano
School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Future of Art & Cultural Institution. The online meeting is on Tuesday, July 21 at 16:00 CET; 10:00 US; 11:00 Argentina & Brasil; 18:00 Istanbul. Facilitated by Mao Mollona, with Rebecca Tarlau, Lea Ana Blaustein, Zeynep Tul Sualp, Alessandro Mariano
register here

This session will bring in conversation the radical pedagogies of the Bachilleratos Populares in Argentina, the Landless Movement in Brazil and the Academic Without Campus (Kampussuzler) in Istanbul for the construction of a common imaginary of horizontal, grassroots, post-capitalist and non-Eurocentric practices of learning and study. 

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Presentation

IRI AT INTEGRATED 2019 | THE END OF HISTORY COMES AT THE END OF RADICAL IMAGINATION

Integrated 2019 Thursday November 5th, 15:30,  St Lukas School of Arts Antwerp, room K02.10 Discussion group / Workshop / Master Class Max. 30 persons Duration: 120′, full program below

IRI is taking part to INTEGRATED 2019 a biennial international conference organised by St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp (Karel de Grote University College), ARIA/UA- Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (University of Antwerp) and the Royal Conservatoire (Artesis Plantijn University College Antwerp) in collaboration with deSingel international arts campus, FWO (The Research Foundation, Flanders) and Valiz Amsterdam.

The “end of History” comes at the end of the Radical Imagination. A polyphonic reflection on Action-Research.

To think different, we must act different, but without critical thinking, actions are meaningless and easily subsumed to capitalism. We are proposing to reflect on what E.Bloch called as “concrete utopia”, questioning how unfolding radical theories we are able to sustain radical practices. We want to propose a panel to share ideas, acts, and methodologies on how academic, activist and artist can share action-research projects.

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Areas of Intervention, IRI Meetings

IRI MEETING #4 ATHENS | MILITANT RESEARCH

October 31st, November 1st and 2nd at Athens School of Fine Art (ASFA) > full programme below

OPEN SCHOOL OF MILITANT RESEARCH

We are a group of artists, curators, scholars and activists who work together to develop research, enquires, knowledge and practices – decolonised, anti-capitalist and non-anthropocentric –  with the aim of prefiguring and enacting life after capitalism because

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Articles, IRI

A COMMON VOCABULARY FOR IRI

THREE PARAGRAPHS for THE INSTITUTE

by Massimiliano Mollona

Growing up in the 1980s (I was 10 in 1980) my politics has been a minor form of resistance – a militant self-reflection, a plural mode of articulation – against the immaterial violence of finance; the molecular capture of late capitalism; the ghostly superficiality of the neoliberal person and the grand narratives of the male, bourgeois, white civilization that (re)emerged at the end of history.

Today I face a different history. Capitalist institutions have reorganised themselves following the old predatory and monopolistic logic. In 2011 and 2013 I did not understand that the young comrades who were out in the street with me were fighting a different war – a war against their physical and political annihilation – and moved in a different existential space – a space of immense material and imaginative desolation. I could not fathom that their future would arch back into the folds of totalitarianism as witnessed by our ancestors.  Now it is clear. We live in a time of radical enclosures. People everywhere are being jailed, expelled, stigmatized and confined in intellectual, moral and physical enclosures put up by capitalist markets and absolutist states operating in tandem. It is not only about the “excluded.” The condition of refugees and exiles represent us all.

To be radical today means to claim the gestures of commoning, culture of solidarity and determination to exist in common back from the history of anti-totalitarian and anti-capitalist struggles and to bring these histories and practices to bear onto our future. I see culture, art and imagination as forces that can both freeze the flow of life (in a movement of institutionalization) and put life in motion (in moments of radical opening). Culture is radical (anti-capitalist and decolonised) when it goes beyond the enclosures of the “usual people” and builds connections across socio-economic divides; challenges the cynical language of the master and the exclusionary logics of difference,

negative freedoms, boycotts and art occupations that mirror the occupations of capital (it’s impossible to beat the master on his own turf) and embarks in empathic and sensuous journeys outside of the capitalist “self.” As we enter into a new era of primitive accumulation, the virtuoso skills of the baroque intellectual have become obsolete. We need a light and portable weapon stripped down to its very core (Susan Sontag – the radical intellectual as ascetic and destroyer).

For me radical imagination stems from a double movement of anti-capitalist critique and of epistemological and discursive construction of a new post-capitalist imaginary, including new forms of production and representation in which art and politics inform each other. But this radical imagination is risky. It needs a safe space and a long-term horizon to be cultivated.  The Institute wants to be such safe space – an alter-institution, both inside (because of where we come from) and outside (because of what we are aiming for) the hegemonic institutions of capitalism (museums, universities and institutional politics) and “the west” intended as a mental and a geopolitical space. The Institute wants to be a space of freedom, an exilic space turned into commons – not as act of survival but as “communal luxury.”

I see the institute as a research-curatorial-activist group engaged in research interventions (starting from the 5 we highlighted in Naples) and working with a methodology that combines pragmatic and tactical actions with an ongoing reflection on how, as a culturally diverse and geographically dispersed collective, we can institute otherwise.

The call from the projects comes from a specific urgency and the institute becomes a structure also for archive (memory and documentation). Became a repository. A specific methodology, and conceptual framework.

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.
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