15.30–16.00 hrs:
Welcome and opening remarks
Sebastian Cichocki
(chief curator, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw) and Maria Hlavajova (artistic
director, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht).
16.00–18.00 hrs:
Public Workshop
Techniques of Labor Struggles in the
Field of Art
This session involves the participants who participated in the activist workshop session and takes the form of a
public seminar with the aim to discuss the particular problems related to the
conditions of labor in the field of art and the techniques of art-related
activism.
Participants: Gigi Argyropoulou (writer and activist, Athens); Marsha Bradfield (artist and researcher, London); Claudia Bernardi (researcher, and activist, ESC atelier, Rome); Paolo Do (researcher, and activist, ESC atelier, Rome); Carl Martin Faurby (curator, writer Danish Art Union (UKK), Copenhagen); Kasia Górna (artist, initiator, Citizens’ Forum of Contemporary Art / OFSW, Warsaw); Héctor Huerga (writer and activist from @15MBcn_int, Barcelona); Vladan Jeremić (artist, curator, and co-editor Art Leaks, Belgrade); pantxo ramas (activist and researcher, Barcelona); Igor Stokfiszewski (writer and activist, Krytyka Polityczna, Warsaw); Airi Triisberg (arts worker and activist, Tallinn/Leipzig). Moderated by Joanna Figiel (researcher and activist, member of Free/Slow University of Warsaw, Warsaw/London).
18.00–18.30 hrs:
Break
18.30–19.45 hrs:
Keynote by Isabell Lorey (political theorist, Berlin), followed by a conversation moderated by Simon Sheikh (curator, writer, and FORMER WEST editor, Berlin/London).
Autonomy and Precarization. (Neo)Liberal Entanglements of Labor and Care
The
former western idea of the autonomous individual is a basic pillar of
liberal-capitalist democracies and its concept of free labour. In this deeply
racialized, gendered, and heterosexualized entanglement, the needs of
protection and care are warded off, devalued, domesticated, feminizised. It is
a logic, that in spite of its modifications, we continue to face today. When we
think of current forms of precarization this has to be the background to
understanding the politico-economic crisis we are now experiencing. On a
multi-dimensional level, the regime of precarization constitutes the different
entanglements of labor, independency, and care in capitalism and their function
within governmentality. When subjectification has become capitalizable,
autonomy turned into an instrument of government, and emancipation is trapped
in neoliberal ideas of health, the challenge today is not just to invent new
forms of organization and new strategies of resistance. More than that, we have
to invent a fundamentally new way of how our living together can be organized
and institutionalized. That is, how could a living together look like, based on
a commonly shared precariousness, on relationality, and on care rights? It would,
imagined this way, be an exodus out of the nation state, out of citizenship as
we know it, and out of “immigration” as well.
19.45–21.00 hrs:
Keynote by Brian Holmes (cultural critic and political activist, Chicago), followed by a conversation moderated by Simon Sheikh (curator, writer, and FORMER WEST editor, Berlin/London).
Live Your Models: Self-orientation and urban form in the next “spirit of capitalism”
Every
forty years or so, capitalist society undergoes a decisive metamorphosis. After
those in the 1940s and the 1970s, it appears to be once again time for such a
disorienting shift in our most basic coordinates, how then to move through the
present crisis? How to face the triple spectre of economic decline,
geopolitical conflict, and climate chaos? How to set a course for the unknown
future? This talk is about self-orientation within changing urban forms.
Drawing on the concrete experience of race, class, and real-estate in the
Chicago megalopolis, Brian Holmes analyzes the possibilities and dangers of the
next phase or so-called “spirit” of global capitalism.
12.00–14.30 hrs:
Panel
Division of Labor and Class (Re)Composition in
the Arts
Taking the Free/Slow University of
Warsaw’s report, The Art Factory (2014), as a case study, this panel focuses on the notion of labor and
distribution within the artworld from a number of perspectives, such as the
organization of labor, and the politics of art and work. Looking at notions of
affective and invisible labor—drawing upon the lessons of feminism, and also
taking into consideration the structuring device of precarity itself, and its
historical role within the arts—this session considers if these features
provide a “political economy of the former West,” and following this, show how
the ways of production and division of labor within the artworld can be said to
be indicative of the proposed “former-ness” of the West and its institutions.
Panelists: Free/Slow University of Warsaw (Warsaw); Corina L. Apostol (art historian, curator and artist, Bucharest/New York); Angela Dimitrakaki (writer and lecturer, Edinburgh/Athens); and Ewa Majewska (philosopher, Berlin/Warsaw). Moderated by Kuba Szreder (curator, writer, and an initiator of Free/Slow University of Warsaw, Warsaw/London).
14.30–16.00 hrs:
Lunch Break
16.00–18.30 hrs:
Panel
Organization of Labor from the Global
Perspective. Illusions of the Model of Catch-up
Modernization
During this session, the discussion
of political economy of creative labor and precarity is situated within the wider
mechanisms of global and post-colonial class (re)composition. Departing with
what the “post-Fordist” condition entails for Poland and other countries of the
“semi-peripheries”—with their reliance on foreign investment and industrial
labor, and the continued
positioning of Poland as a production-based economy rather than a creative
economy—the session investigates the illusion of catch-up modernization as an
economic, political, and cultural project.
Panelists: Sami Khatib (writer and lecturer, Berlin); Małgorzata Maciejewska (researcher and activist, Wrocław); Sandro Mezzadra (political philosopher, Bologna); and Gerald Raunig (philosopher, Zurich). Moderated by Boris Buden (writer, cultural critic, translator, and FORMER WEST editor, Berlin).
18.30–19.00 hrs:
Break
19.00–19.30 hrs:
Lecture
The Terror of
Total Dasein
Hito Steyerl (film
maker, artist, and writer, Berlin). Followed with a response by
Simon Sheikh (curator, writer, and
FORMER WEST editor, Berlin/London).