I will give a talk on the 8th of May in Venice part of this series of event organised by SALE Docks in Venice and Macao in Milan. More info soon.
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1 -9 may 2015
Milan/Venice
The work of the artist has no defined boundaries, nonetheless it became paradigmatic within a productive model increasingly oriented to linguistic, relational and performative skills in which creativity became an essential managerial skill and terms like innovation and culture attract each other like magnets. The artist and the cultural worker have interrogated their own role in the light of Postfordism, Neoliberalism, cognitive capitalism and so on. Often they work for free, someone says that they are always working, even when they read a book, visit an exhibition, chat at the bar and use social networks. For them, like for many others, the word strike sounds like an enigma. How do you block the factory of culture? How do you damage the event economy? How do you overthrow finance and its algorithms that produced the crisis, impoverishing the workers and enriching the lobbies of speculators? The control over big data allows a massive archiving of social behaviours: collective intelligence is the newest and more important commodity for the capital. With algorithms richness is produced through a daily biopolitical control. Is it possible to oppose to the financial abstraction an abstract strike?
AB-STRIKE is a platform prepared by S.a.L.E.-Docks and Macao, an exercise of subversive imagination, a laboratory of commons, a forge of actions, artworks and dialogues that will come into being from the 1st to the 9th of May 2015, in Milan and Venice.
In tune with the international mobilisations against the “EXPO Milano 2015”, the platform tackles two different urban dimensions but both characterised by the same primacy of the so called event economy. It is not by chance that this year the Venice Biennale choses an early opening and will run parallel to the Expo in Milan.
Let’s re-imagine the concepts of festival and artistic event. If creativity is the new appearance of capital, let’s invent new forms of artists organisations that challenge the power through new languages and new forms of self-governance.
