IV International Symposium
Barcelona, April 28th, 2020
MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Coordinated by Christian Alonso (University of Barcelona)
Keynoted by Gerald Raunig (Zürich University of the Arts, eipcp European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies)
Deadline for submissions: February 28th, 2020, 8pm GMT

A new monograph on neoliberalism, the state and affective labour by Otto Penz and Birgit Sauer. The book Governing affects explores the neoliberal transformation of state governance in Europe towards affective forms of dominance, exercised by customer oriented neo-bureaucracies and public service providers.

Oliver Ressler is one of 90 people who participated at a blockade of Bílina coal mine in Northern Bohemia in the Czech Republic in June 2018, against who the company Severočeské doly (“North Bohemian Coal Mines”) filed a lawsuit at the City Court in Chomutov. With legal repression, they think they can silence protests against coal mining.
There is a fundraising campaign running to cover the cost of the court case and attorneys, so please feel free to share and donate:
https://www.darujme.cz/projekt/1201737?locale=en

Am sagenumwobenen 31. Dezember 1999 soll an mehreren Orten zugleich ein Institut gegründet worden sein, das nie Institution werden wollte. Mitten aus der entstehenden Bewegung, die sich im „Feber Null“ zu Gegenschwarzblau und den Donnerstagsdemos ausweiten sollte, entstand das European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. 56 Ausgaben des multilingualen Webjournals transversal, 30 Bücher von transversal books, an die 20 Konferenzen und Workshops, 11 mehrjährige und unzählige kleine Projekte in verschiedenen Teilen Europas später ist es Zeit für ein Fest. Zum 20-jährigen Jubiläum des eipcp feiern wir am 14. Dezember in der Kunsthalle Exnergasse im WUK „Party like its 1999“.

This special issue is interested to map the ways that repair can contribute to organisational models alternative to those centered around growth.

The English version of Die schönen Kriegerinnen, which was published by transversal texts, has now been released by Minor Compositions.

When right-wing politicians increasingly use populist strategies and social media as a platform, seeking to discredit established researchers, scientists, and journalists in order to shake the public's belief in media content, many people end up relying on dubious information sources and no longer know how to distinguish the difference. Facebook and Twitter are viewed by many as legitimate news platforms, whereas news sources that were trusted for decades are being viewed as “fake news” when they do not support populist ideals.

Vom Leben der Kritik ist der Versuch, kritische Theorien und Praktiken in einer Zeit zu sammeln und weiterzudenken, in der einerseits der Tod der Kritik beschworen wird und andererseits die Transformation von (Selbst-)Kritik in Disziplinierungstechniken der neoliberalen Evaluations- und Professionalisierungskultur zu beobachten ist.
Eingedenk der zu Recht vielfach hervorgehobenen Probleme von traditionellen Verständnissen der Kritik – u. a. ihres belehrenden, elitären, autoritären, paternalistischen oder heroischen Charakters – legt dieses Buch den Akzent auf erfinderische Alltagspraktiken der Kritik. Ebenso wichtig wie die Diskussion gewaltvoller Dimensionen von Herrschaftskritik ist dabei die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Superioritätsanspruch westlicher Kritikbegriffe, welcher sich schon darin zeigt, dass die Linie von Sokrates über Kant zu Foucault meist nicht als lediglich ein Verständnis von Kritik adressiert wird, sondern als das, was Kritik nun einmal sei.

Über 40 Jahre nach dem französischen Original erscheint im Herbst Pierre Machereys Klassiker „Hegel oder Spinoza“ in deutscher Übersetzung. transversal veröffentlicht das 2007 erschienene Vorwort für die argentinische Ausgabe von Michael Hardt und Colectivo Situaciones.

¿Así acaba la experimentación municipalista abierta tras el 15M? Una vez apaciguada su virulencia y monstruosidad inicial y después de un lento proceso de degradación y descomposición paulatina, la disolución de los últimos resquicios de lo que en 2011 fue una explosión sin precedentes de deseo revolucionario autoorganizado de forma radicalmente democrática parece clara. Los resultados electorales no son más que la foto fija de la crisis de imaginación política por un lado y de la restauración del juego electoral clásico por otro. Puede que su disolución electoral y su degradación general nos hagan pensar que la experimentación acaba aquí. Pero la monstruosidad de los municipalismos iba mucho más allá del asalto institucional, por eso la experimentación debe continuar inventando nuevos mecanismos para transformar radicalmente las ciudades y nuestras formas de vivir juntxs.

A nivel social existen al menos dos grandes tipos de comunicación: una vertical, concentrada en minorías y caracterizada por el monólogo, que responde al ideal de preeminencia del emisor sobre el receptor y ofrece pocas o nulas oportunidades de diálogo y respuesta crítica. Es la comunicación que ejercen políticos corruptos, empresarios antidemocráticos, medios de comunicación corporativos y hegemónicos, voceros de grandes potencias frente los países pobres, etcétera. Por otro lado está la comunicación participativa e incluyente, que reconoce las diferencias, favorece el diálogo, la construcción de consensos y los procesos de cambio en favor del bien común. Es una comunicación horizontal, donde los emisores y los receptores sostienen una relación de reciprocidad.

This texts relates to the exhibition Rogelio López Cuenca: Yendo leyendo, dando lugar, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Edificio Sabatini, Planta 3), 3 April - 26 August 2019, https://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/rogelio-lopez-cuenca.

The coexistence of art and philosophy, the concatenation of social and conceptual machines, the combination of art and thought that operated and still operates in and around Bert Theis is not limited to a practice of speaking, discussing, and philosophizing as communication, or to the artist’s more or less obvious knowledge of philosophy, ancient or current. Rather, it is a mode of subjectivation that also has to do with invention and disobedience. (See also the exhibition Arcipelago Bert Theis: https://www.mudam.lu/en/expositions/details/exposition/arcipelago-bert-theis/.)

“Stand up and walk around your desk. And go out of your office, and feel the fresh air of the city.” Gardener, psychiatric nurse, artist, long-time social co-operator, and president of the Trieste Association of Artisans Giancarlo Carena is often theatrical when he tries to explain the singularity of Trieste’s social cooperatives movement. He starts by arranging the narrative around your perceptions, to make you settle in the analytical journey that he asks you to undertake with him. “How can a place where such horrible things happened in the past today be a space that triggers beautiful projects?” he asked me in 2014 when we first met walking in the blossoming gardens of the former asylum.

From the book Facebook entkommen transversal texts publishes here the English translation of the introduction.

Am 14. September 2018 wurde eine Zelle des Polizeianhaltezentrum (PAZ) Hernals in Wien in Brand gesetzt. Am 15. und 22. März 2019 wird über die Strafe für das in der versperrten Zelle gelegte Feuer verhandelt.

Isabell Lorey’s introduction to the book 8M - Der große feministische Streik. Konstellationen des 8. März connects the Latin American feminist strikes with the actual feminist movements in Europe.

FIELD, the "Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism", announces the launch of a special double issue (winter and spring 2019) focusing on new forms of cultural and artistic activism that have emerged in response to the global rise of right wing populist and authoritarian forms of government. http://field-journal.com/issue-12?cat=30

“If you are a nurse, we can understand each other, not like with these sociologists!” Federico jokes (or not?) with Irene. In their conversations, there is a shared set of knowledge and competencies, not only linguistic, but, more importantly, in the concrete experience of modes of action and logics that govern the ecology of care. We are in the core of the caring ecologies of Trieste, the Distretto Sanitario (Healthcare District) located in the old general hospital, now almost dismantled (another, more modern one is up the hill, in a less central area).

Avery F. Gordon’s The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (2018) is an impressively kaleidoscopic and genre bending book based on Gordon’s more than two decades of research into utopian traditions that have been systematically excluded from the Western canon. Organized in the form of an archive of actual and fictional experiences of living and working together differently, Gordon’s book makes a vast array of “subjugated knowledge” (Foucault) visible and available for appropriation. “The Hawthorn Archive” unearths neglected utopian traditions that are less about some distant future place that would have to be built according to people’s ideals and more about living and working differently in the here and now of the communal. Here, those who were struggling for the Commons (and against enclosures) in 17th-century England are a major reference point for a variety of other movements, including those who struggled for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Americas and those who struggled for decolonization in the Global South.

Veronica Gago, argentinische Sozialwissenschafterin, Autorin von La razón neoliberal und Aktivistin des NiUnaMenos-Kollektivs diskutiert zentrale Aspekte der Konsolidierung der aktuellen feministischen Netzwerke auf globaler Ebene.

In the last few decades, violence against women* has been escalating into a "war on women," as Rita Laura Segato calls it: all kinds of structural and sexual violence, including feminicide, brutal discursive tendencies of misogyny and transphobia, the devaluation of care and reproduction, and "anti-genderism". Since 2017, a movement has spread outwards from Latin America that builds on the 8th of March, the day of women's struggle, as the turning and boiling point of an intersectional and transversal struggle.

What runs through the text, or so I hope, is an investigation of the ambivalences of a more than institutional ecology of practices, knowledges, objects, and relations. An ecology that lives along the limits between society and the state, that sits on the edges and connects different modes and experiences of institutional care, but also an ecology that makes it a practice to stay with the trouble, in the middle of the complexities and difficulties of social reproduction.

If it weren't so long, this text would (like to) be a manifesto. It is not an analytical essay that interprets a site or a critical history of the movement lead by Franco Basaglia. Rather it is a deriva, an unplanned itinerary through and with a number of reflections, events, and objects I have encountered in my relationship with the contemporary healthcare system of Trieste. It is a result of a long engagement with the agents that inhabit and build this system every day, with the memories of a collective practice of care, the artefacts and places that constitute the material possibility of a practice of caring with each other, an engagement with what Franco Rotelli (2013, Cogliati 2018), one of the protagonists of the Trieste's trajectory and director of the Mental Health Department of Trieste during the 1980s and the 1990s, has called una città che cura, a city that heals, a city that cares.

Gerald Raunig's introduction to the Russian translation of «Les trois écologies» by Félix Guattari published online by the independent platform syg.ma

Climate change, migration and digitalization: these are the greatest challenges in the current phase of globalization. How can we meet them? In its 20th year, the Berliner Gazette, under the motto MORE WORLD, is highlighting communal practices that confront these planetary challenges. In this text, Berliner Gazette founding editor Krystian Woznicki describes the ideas of the project and how you as readers can contribute.

From the book They'll Never Walk Alone. The Life and Afterlife of Gastarbeiters transversal texts publishes here the introduction.

From the German book Die schönen Kriegerinnen. Technofeministische Praxis im 21. Jahrhundert, transversal texts publishes the English translation of Cornelia Sollfrank’s preface.

An interview with Max Haiven on agency, derivative sociality and the common in the age of self-learning algorithms.

MACAO, an autonomous center for art, culture and research is now in danger.
In recent days the alt-right Salvini government decided to foster the repression against migrants and squatters with a new extremely fascist decree.
Meanwhile the local government of Milano is going to vote in the municipal council to privatize the building in which Macao is based, conferring the property to BNL, a real estate fund. The bank will auction the building, resulting in the eviction of Macao.

After thousands demonstrated against the ÖVP-FPÖ government, we are back on the street: Every Thursday since October 4 we have met in a different place in Vienna to protest this neoliberal right-wing extremist government, but above all we assemble to exchange and to show: yes, there are alternatives, and yes, there are ways of doing things better for everyone.
Rubia Salgado was one of many who spoke at Ballhausplatz on the October 4 in front of thousands of people. Here is her speech.

One after another the names resound, names without bodies that tell of a multitude of lives and histories shattered on the borders of Europe: Asmat – Names is the title Dagmawi Yimer gave to his short film, one of the most powerful and evocative portrayals of the shipwreck of October 3, 2013. Anonymity is, after all, one of the defining characteristics of the women, men and children in transit on the Mediterranean, as is also the case in many other border zones. Recovering the irreducible singularity of an existence is the extreme gesture of resistance to which Asmat – Names challenges us.

A dramatic political shift is taking place: racism and discrimination are becoming socially acceptable. What yesterday was considered unthinkable and unutterable has today become a reality. Humanity and human rights, religious freedom, and the rule of law are being openly attacked. This is an attack on all of us.

The last few days, we have been witnessing with emotion and rage the developments in relation to the violent, unexpected, and unjust death of queer activist and drag performer Zak Kostopoulos in the centre of Athens.

Focusing on contemporary perspectives of media, tech and data activism, the interview with Stefania Milan discusses their roles within social movement ecologies, the political positions between prefigurative radical activism and reformist participation in ‘multi-stakeholder decision-making’ processes, and the broader question concerning the relationship between social media and protest against the backdrop of the rising critique of commercial platforms.

For over eleven years Casa Invisible has been a guarantor of alternative cultures and ecologies of care in Málaga, and it has also been a social machine for everything that is incompliant in the middle of the compliant city. Last week Málaga’s city administration ordered its eviction within 15 days. But: La Invi se queda …

Während in der Presse sowie in der Pariser Innenstadt – vor allem im touristischen und wohlhabenden Viertel Quartier Latin, das 1968 einer der Austragungsorte der studentischen Proteste war – im Mai 2018 eine teils nostalgische Erinnerungskultur zelebriert wird, sind seit mehreren Wochen zahlreiche französische Universitäten besetzt und wird der Bahnverkehr teilweise bestreikt.

Progetto 20k invites all the realities, the associations, the indipendent unions, the groups and every single person that deals with themes regarding immigration policies or that believes in solidarity, to participate in the organization of the 14th of July mobilisation in Ventimiglia.

Daily Resistance is looking for distributors. Daily Resistance is a periodical newspaper on actual paper written by activists with and without migration experience aimed to reach people in refugee camps (https://dailyresistance.oplatz.net).

Das Radio befindet sich, mit Rosalind Krauss gesprochen, in einer Post-Medium Condition, sagte Bernhard Siegert an dem Roundtable zum Ende der Konferenz Radiophonic Cultures – Sonic Environments and Archives in Hybrid Media Systems in Basel. Daraufhin fragte Colin Lang: Wenn das Radio sich in seiner Post-Medium Condition befände, was war es davor, also bevor es in diesen Post-Zustand geraten ist?

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze states: “there are images of thought that impede us from thinking.” That is, we have images of what it means to think (a force of will, an academic work) that block thought. Could we also say that there are “images of change” that impede us from changing? Images of what change is supposed to be (in this case, social or political) that block the practice of change itself.

Mit / with Manuel Borja-Villel (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), Christoph Brunner (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg), Boris Buden (eipcp permanent fellow), Lucie Kolb (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basel), Solvita Krese (Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art Riga), Brigitta Kuster (Humboldt-Universität Berlin), Isabell Lorey (Universität Kassel), Kelly Mulvaney (University of Chicago), Stefan Nowotny (Goldsmiths, University of London), Gerald Raunig (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste), Stella Rollig (Belvedere Wien), Ruth Sonderegger (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien). Moderation: Monika Mokre (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Luisa Ziaja (Belvedere Wien)

What is the significance of ‘68 in the revolutionary history of the 20th century? We could say that it is the beginning of a crisis and decline: the decline of the hypothesis of revolution through the seizure of power, which had been hegemonic since the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Almost ten years after it's initial release in January 2009, Bitcoin has generated two influential strands of traditions: the field of cryptocurrencies with a burgeoning number of very different kinds of projects ranging from ruthless speculation to grassroots economic experiments, and the technology of the blockchain, a decentralized database-system which was invented as a means for recording all Bitcoin-transactions that has since been developed far beyond the field of cryptocurrencies. It is used as an immutable storage for ‘contracts’, apps, organizational processes, etc. Both traditions are highly contested. Hopes for new emancipatory technological contexts stand vis-à-vis concerns regarding a possible neoliberal, right-wing and property-related bias and the evidently enormous environmental costs.

We are writing with the smell of tear gas rising from our fingers. The springtime symphony of birdsong is punctuated by the explosive echo of concussion grenades. Our eyes are watering, less from the gas than the sadness; because our friends’ homes, barns and organic farms are being destroyed. Bulldozers, supported by 2500 riot police, armored vehicles, helicopters and drones, are rampaging through these forests, pastures and wetlands to crush the future we are building here on the to the zad (The zone à defendre).

The interview departs from SHARE Lab’s “investigations on Facebook and the various algorithms that shape our reality through the moderation of information feeds, on the processes of how we are transformed from users to products, and how they basically transform our online behavior into power and profit.” It discusses various aspects of the resulting reports and their meaning during a time when the critique of major Internet platforms has hit the mainstream.

It has been a long and intense morning with hundreds of demonstrating on the streets of Kreuzberg to protest against the eviction of the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Schule, against German racist and neocolonial asylum and migration policies, Fortress Europe, and deportations.

Stellungnahme zur Ablehnung der Förderansuchen für die Frauen*beratungsstellen maiz, FIFTITU% und Arge SIE durch das Frauenreferat des Landes Oberösterreich mit der Begründung, die Tätigkeit der Frauen*beratungsstellen gehöre nach den „neuen Förderkriterien“ nicht mehr zum Kerngeschäft des Frauenreferats.

The GHS is supposed to be evicted on the 11th of january, 8 o’clock in the morning. The only offer made to the inhabitants was somewhat questionable and stands in the tradition of the so-called‚'Oplatz agreement'. This is another attempt by the Berlin senate and the district government to divide and conquer the refugee movement.
7:45 rally: Ohlauer Straße /Gerhart-Hauptmann-Schule
8:30 demo

This is the third and last part of a longer conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche. By discussing Black Studies in Germany and the US, the consumption of Blackness and the reproduction of exclusionary settings, they aim at opening up a critical transnational debate on forging strategies to create im-pertinent epistemologies and inter/personal politics of doing, both inside and beyond academia. The first and the second parts were published over the last weeks on transversal.at.