IETM Belgrade Plenary Meeting 2022

IETM presented the IETM Belgrade Plenary Meeting 2022 livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Thursday 29 September and Saturday 1 October 2022.

For the first time in over two years, IETM is organizing a large-scale, physical IETM Plenary Meeting; this time in collaboration with Bitef. Organized within the frame of the Bitef festival 2022 in Belgrade, Serbia, the IETM Belgrade Plenary Meeting will be a vibrant 4-day event with over 500 participants, full of artistic works to explore, talks and participatory discussions, a pre-meeting excursion and plenty of training, pitching and networking opportunities.

What is the state of the labor market in today’s late capitalism? Where has neoliberal exploitation left us? What is happening with workers’ rights regulation and working conditions after the pandemic? How is labor transforming in the performing arts and theatre? How can the arts field embrace care, friendship, solidarity and find the feeling of stability in a dramatically changing world?

Thursday 29 September

Dance Against Labour - Welcome Word & Opening Keynote
17:00 CEST (Belgrade, UTC +2) / 16:00 BST (London, UTC +1) / 11 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 8 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7)

Dance as a modern art form emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, against the backdrop of consolidating industrial capitalism.

Just as the body and movement of masses were becoming subjected to the dictate of backbreaking machines, modern dance constituted itself around the choreographic exploration of body and movement, liberated from that machinic coercion. The history of modern dance can thus be read as a dialectical opposite of the transformation of commodified labor. Over the last hundred years, that opposition between the coercive and the liberated has crumbled and transformed by the growing flexibilization and precarisation of labor relations.

The laboring body is increasingly enjoined to be free and enterprising, while the dancing body is increasingly demanded to show itself laboring to justify its privilege to free artistic exploration.

Our opening keynote will retrace the entwined historical trajectories of dance and labor and speculate on what dance portends for the understanding of the contemporary, algorithmically-commanded, on-demand forms of labor.

Speakers
Tomislav Medak, BADco., Croatia
Ása Richardsdóttir, IETM, Belgium
Ivan Medenica, Bitef Festival, Serbia

Saturday 1 October

‘Your Money or your life!’ by Jelena Vesić: Talk of the day
11 a.m. CEST ( (Belgrade, UTC +2) / 10 a.m. BST (London, UTC +1) / 5 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)

“Today a true artist is only the artist who can say, ‘for everything else, please address my manager’.

In such contrasting, antagonistic, and variable attempts to remove money, labour, and labour relations from the stage of art representation, there are obvious consensual efforts to explain that art cannot be understood as business as usual, as labour or work – but rather as something completely different. At this point, money appears as creative shame. [...]

However, [...] what will we find if we try to get closer to economic reality of ‘workers’ active in the ever expanding ‘world of art’ in all its domains of (self-)critical negations, transformations, excesses, inclusions, and exclusions only to focus on the very moment when projects and collaborations come to life? How does art-as-ideology inhabit speech used on such occasions?”

Vesić, J. (2016, September 29). »Administration of Aesthetics« or: On Underground Currents of Negotiating Artistic Jobs; Between Love and Money, Money and Love. Retrieved from schloss-post.com.

Join us for our Saturday keynote speech, where we will reflect on the discourse around love and money in the arts.

Speakers
Jelena Vesić, Independent Curator, Writer, Editor and Lecturer, Serbia

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing-arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.