Under the title Other Survivalisms, on 16 and 17 May 2014 BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht hosts the second installment of its public editorial meetings geared towards the realization of the forthcoming FORMER WEST publication. These gatherings take the editorial meeting as their model for informal (re)negotiations of the living knowledge brought together through the course of the project. The public exchanges take place in cultural and geopolitical contexts both within and outside of the so-called “former West” and bring together a great number of collaborators from the project’s past and current investigations, including artists, writers, theorists, curators, activists, and students, as well as our various publics. The series is developed and curated by writer, cultural critic, and translator Boris Buden, curator, organizer, and artistic director of BAK, Maria Hlavajova, and curator and writer Simon Sheikh.
Following the initial
Berlin public editorial meeting at FORMER
WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects at the Haus der Kulturen der
Welt in 2013, the Utrecht edition coincides with BAK’s current research inquiry
into Future Vocabularies and its
opening entry on conceptual itineraries of “survival.” One strand of inquiry
explores the question of the commons as a mode of ensuring the survival of the
notion of the public. Taking as its example the so-called “public” institution
of art and culture, which seems to have lost its emancipatory potential at the
present moment as state and private interests reveal themselves to be
conditioned by the same (market) forces, this trajectory looks at modes of
instituting-in-common, examining not only how they place pressure on dominant
forms of ownership and governance, but how the art institution itself might be
transformed into an agent of political action. The second current within this
gathering tackles the prospects of survival through economic and environmental
perspectives and catastrophes, asking, amidst the rupture within the present
interregnum (much in the Gramscian sense of a period in which “the old is dying
and the new cannot be born”), how do we survive “otherwise?” The third
trajectory deliberates upon survival through the notion of “afterlife,” which
evokes a temporality different than the logic of “post-ism” that has long
monopolized our historical imagination, be they concepts of the post-political,
the post-utopian, or post-history. Beyond a perpetual repetition of
“post-isms,” this last trajectory gestures towards a critique of the ideologies
behind them.