(Canceled) Reshape Intensive Zagreb

Unfortunately, we are canceling the public programme of the Reshape Intensive Zagreb that includes lectures by Renata Salecl, Vincent Liegey, Juliette Hennequin and Pascal Gielen, as well as announced walks and talks. The programme of the Intensive was primarily aimed to the participants of the Reshape project that are coming from various countries across EuroMed region. Due to the current situation with Coronavirus across Europe, traveling and larger meetings represent an additional threat for the spreading of the virus. Although we wish not to contribute to the panic presented in some media, we are convinced that we should take the responsibility to prevent the further spreading of the infection. We apologise to all of those who planned to attend the Reshape Intensive Zagreb programme and announce that the lectures will be held as a part of other Reshape activities.

RESHAPE presents the Intensive Zagreb meeting livestreaming from Zagreb, Croatia on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv Monday 9 March to Wednesday 11 March 2020.

Reshape Intensive Zagreb is a meeting of art practitioners actively rethinking and reshaping organisational models for the arts sector in the EuroMed region. 

The meeting is organised within the RESHAPE project, a research and development project that brings together artists and art workers from Europe and the South Mediterranean to jointly imagine how arts will be created, accessed and experienced in the future. RESHAPE relies on the collective intelligence and creativity of the cultural workers on the ground. A bottom-up process, it gathers artists and activists who already have experience and expertise in imagining alternative practices and transforming them into concrete actions and policy recommendations.

Zagreb Intensive will take place at a crucial moment of the process, when 5 groups are already deep in the producing, selecting and fine-tuning their ideas. Two rounds of workshops already delved deeper into the five major topics the project is researching: the connections and spaces between art and citizenship; how to collectively design fairer governance models; what value the art can bring to the social fabric; how to fund art on the principles of solidarity; how to tackle inequalities when practicing art transnationally. This will be the chance to bring those discussions together and further design overarching alternatives for the improvement of the art sector.

Zagreb Intensive will bring into the discussion perspectives from social, historical, environmental, philosophical and economic fields, as well as examples of some alternative practices from the Croatian context that are already put into practice.

Let us use the Zagreb Intensive to jointly share and reflect what future artistic practices would be better adjusted to the values of the sector and the evolution of society. The future is ours to imagine!

Monday 9 March

Renata Salecl: Big Data, Art and the Reshaping of Subjectivity
12 p.m. EST (New York, UTC-5) / 5 p.m. GMT (London, UTC+0) / 18:00 CET (Zagreb, UTC+1)

In the world of big data, we must not only deal with potential computer failures, but also a high level of opacity related to how this data is collected, how it is interpreted, who has access to it, and how it can be manipulated. We also deal with sample bias, as well as an increased desire to see in data what we want to see in the first place. In addition, the way companies use algorithms to comb through data is usually secret.

It is thus not surprising that big data is opening new avenues of blindness. Paradoxically, when we collect a great amount of data, suddenly people start seeing patterns in random data. Researchers of big data thus point out that we are experiencing apophenia: seeing patterns where none actually exist, simply because enormous quantities of data can offer connections that radiate in all directions.

One of the ways we often deal with blind spots is by trying to visualise them. ‘Gaps’, cracks in knowledge, are in a particular way linked to the fantasies we create around them. Art provides one way to look at these gaps. Contemporary art has been fascinated with the new developments in science. We can thus find numerous artists who use brain images, genetic code, and knowledge from the fields of astrophysics and physics in general in their art. Not surprisingly, big data has also found its place in the domain of art. The lecture will look at the way we can conceptualise the social change and the change in our perception of subjectivity that is happening as a result of big data and how art can help us understand these changes.

Renata Salecl is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics, lecturing on the topic of emotions and law. Every year she lectures at Southern Cross University in Australia on Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Law. In 2017, she was elected as a member of the Slovene Academy of Science. Her last book Tyranny of Choice have been translated into fifteen languages. Her book A Passion for Ignorance will be published in 2020 by Princeton University Press.

Tuesday 10 March

Juliette Hennequin: R-Urban - A Commons-Based Network of Civic Resilience
12 p.m. EST (New York, UTC-5) / 5 p.m. GMT (London, UTC+0) / 18:00 CET (Zagreb, UTC+1)

R-Urban is a project initiated by Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée as a commons-based network of civic resilience in Parisian suburbs. The network consists of civic hubs located in social housing estates, which are collectively managed by inhabitants. They offer opportunities (space, infrastructure, training, etc.) for citizens to develop collective resilience practices. This example illustrates one possible type of involvement architects can have in the process of transition to commons. However it is extremely challenging to set-up and sustain this transition in a capitalist society which has been developed specifically on principles of privatization and unrestricted exploitation of the planet’s resources. It is also challenging to fight against institutional blockages, individualistic mentalities, legal and economic limitations. The role of architects is therefore not only to design, but also to sustain and actively defend the existing and emerging commons together with all those who are involved. In this presentation, Juliette Hennequin will go into details with the implementation of the network, and specific aspects related to it.

Juliette is a young French architect, member of AAA’s team since 2018, specialised in participation processes, in the design and construction phases. She mostly works with non-professional builders and vulnerable populations, trying to define a more welcoming and inclusive way of building our cities. Very interested and sensitive to the ecological footprint of constructions and their durability, she tends to work with reused, reemployed and bio-sourced materials, as well as traditional and accessible building techniques.

Wednesday 11 March

Pascal Gielen: Commonism – Organizing Artistic Life Beyond Creative Industry Policies
12:30 p.m. EST (New York, UTC-5) / 5:30 p.m. GMT (London, UTC+0) / 18:30 CET (Zagreb, UTC+1)

Since the financial crisis started at the end of 2007 a lot of governments do budget cuts in the cultural and artistic field. Inspired by the critical social theory of Herbert Marcuse (1964), these policy decisions are understood within an ideological framework as ‘repressive liberalism’. That is a (cultural) politics that on the one hand proclaims individual freedom, stimulates cultural entrepreneurship and embraces the creative city, but on the other hand develops a large-scale decentralized control apparatus that strongly restricts individual and artistic freedom. Within this cultural policy creative labor itself can also be ‘instrumentalized’ as a repressive tool. In his lecture Pascal Gielen analyses the relationship between art, politics and the public space in the creative city. He also looks how activists and creative ‘workers’ respond to this policy by organizing themselves in alternative ways, inspired by what Gielen defines as the ideology of the commons. This ideology has its own aesthetics to (re)present ‘reality’, an artistic way to construct a new meta-ideology beyond neoliberalism with its neo-management rhetoric of realism.

Pascal Gielen (1970) is professor of sociology of culture and politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University - Belgium) where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor of the international book series Antennae - Arts in Society (Valiz). In 2016 he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. Gielen has published many books which are translated in Chinese, English, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. His research focuses on creative labour, the common, urban and cultural politics. Gielen works and lives in Antwerp, Belgium.

Vincent Liegey: To Reshape Well, Let's Degrowth
Tuesday 10 March: 12 p.m. EST (New York, UTC-5) / 5 p.m. GMT (London, UTC+0) / 18:00 CET (Zagreb, UTC+1)
This event will not be livestreamed. A video archive will be made available after the event.

"Degrowth" has emerged over the last 15 years. This "bomb-word" has been used to open in-depth debates about whether infinite growth in a finite world is desirable or even possible. Degrowth first deconstructs the myth that growth is the central solution for the impasse our that capitalist, productivist and consumerist societies have led us to. The movement tries to understand the convergence of the crises we are experiencing and argues that energetic and various environmental, political and existential, economic and social crises are interconnected. Our society's "more and more" attitude and the push towards increased production and consumption is not sustainable as we are now facing global warming, biodiversity loss, and the end of the cheap and easy extraction and production of raw materials such as fossil fuels and metals – in particular the ones used in "renewable" energies. Our model of development has not been able to respond to rising inequalities and unemployment. GDP growth or just a quantitative reading is far from implementing a meaningful and emancipating life for all.

Degrowth and other related movements propose democratic transition pathways towards new socially just and ecologically sustainable models. They ask which social, economic, institutional and cultural tools would help such a serene transformation. They are experimenting with new local, sustainable, and fair economic and production systems like community gardens, do-it-yourself epair cafés (e.g. for bikes and the repair of household items), community supportive agricultural initiatives and alternative local currency and exchange systems, which promote sustainable local production practices.

So degrowth warns about a potential crisis in civilization and answers this by exploring alternative and coherent solutions on different levels. With a multidimensional understanding of the interconnected challenges we face, degrowth questions how could we implement democratic and serene transitions toward new relocalised but connected models of society based on social and environmental justice.

Vincent Liegey is a co-author of “A Degrowth Project”, Éditions Utopia, 2013, spokesperson of the French Degrowth movement, an engineer and interdisciplinary researcher and coordinator of the Degrowth inspired Cargonomia social cooperative, centre for sustainable logistical solutions and local food distribution by cargobikes in Budapest. He is also one of the coordinators of the support group for the international Degrowth conference.

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 to develop our knowledge commons collectively. 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/WhatsApp. View the video archive of past events.