Weaving Dreams into Realities

Public Talk and Workshop by the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI)

On the 22 nd of October the artsprogram of Zeppelin University is inviting to a public talk and workshop with the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), an alter-institution operating on the threshold between art, radical pedagogy and activism, with the aim of imagining, and implementing practices of solidarity and commoning across Europe and the Mediterranean. As part of the interdisciplinary programme Weaving Dreams into Realities, IRI members Massimiliano Mollona, who is an anthropologist, curator and author of the book Art/Commons, Turkish activist and artist Zeyno Pekünlü and internationally renowned artist and activist Dmitry Vilensky will host a public talk and workshop, in which they will introduce the work of the Institute of Radical Imagination, invite the public to reflect on the political potential of dreams and imaginaries, and encourage a conversation on international solidarity in times of global conflicts and authoritarianism.

Info

www.instituteofradicalimagination.org

Programme 

22.10.2022 | 11.30-13.00 Public Talk | Buchhornplatz 6, 88045 Friedrichshafen

22.10.2022 | 14.00 -17.00 Workshop | Fallenbrunnen 3, 88045 Friedrichshafen

Public Talk and Brunch | 22.10.2022 | 11.30-13.00

In the public talk Zeyno Pekünlü, Dmitry Vilensky and Massimiliano Mollona will introduce the work of the Institute of Radical Imagination in a casual and convivial setting in a student-run space in Friedrichshafen. The talk will give insights on the initial ideas that led to the founding of the Institute and present its manifold activities. IRI was founded at a time of transnational convergence between the so-called movements of the square in the MENA region, Occupy London, and Wall Street, and the experiments of progressive municipalism in Italy, Spain, and Greece. But the global COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine have highlighted an emerging divide, between the Mediterranean and Europe. The talk unfolds how IRI is addressing this divide, through relocating the political imaginary and activist practices of the members closer to these conflict zones. In the conversation Mollona, Pekünlü and Vilensky ask whether internationalism and solidarity can be reimagined through learning from the grassroots practices of support and care that were implemented during the Ukrainian war. Particular attention is paid to diasporic artistic communities from Russia and Belarus and other conflict zones that practice forms of commonality and mutual aid that challenge the dominant violent politics.

Workshop | 22.10.2022 | 14.00-17.00

The Workshop will focus in more detail on the possibilities of international solidarity. Pekünlü, Vilensky and Mollona will discuss concrete forms of commoning and mutual support that challenge the violent politics and economies that characterize the current global scenario. The workshop will be set up as a common study space, very practical and hands-on, in which the participants will reflect together on some political terms- such as solidarity, grassroots activism, internationalism, and commoning.

Pekünlü, Vilensky and Mollona will present in turn, a case study drawn from their own experience of research/activism which tackles key dimensions of political solidarity. Pekünlü will discuss the social construction of narratives around Erdogan’s regime, specifically the framing of the regime’s authoritarianism as “fascism” and how the art world normalised unexpected coalitions fed by such narratives. Vilenski will discuss his involvement in militant research, through his involvement in the Narva Emergency School, a transdisciplinary research platform and shelter for artists, writers, researchers, activists, and others, which was created in response to war in Ukraine and growing repression in Russia, Belarus and in other countries where the possibilities of independent critical research are severely limited. Mollona will discuss the solidarity between the labour movement and black and decolonial activism in Brazil, both in the history of slaves’ rebellions and of the anti-dictatorship movement of the 1980s, and through his own experience of ten-years long fieldwork in a Brazilian industrial town, and reflect on the broader implications of such intersectionalism.

Through engaging with these different cases the participants are invited to contest the vast material as well as imaginative desolation and weave alternative political imaginaries that oppose to the current regime of patriarchal and racial capitalism.

The number of participants for the workshop is limited!

For registration, please write to rahel.spoehrer@zu.de | Deadline for registration 17.09.2022

Public Presentation and Workshop with the Centre for Plausible Economy (Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder)

One of the simplest tools we have is a pencil. With a pencil we can redraw and reorganise the way people see things. At Centre for Plausible Economies we apply this way of thinking to economy, at first glance totally disconnected from the world of art. The workshops will provide an opportunity to map the everyday economies of involved participants, visualising the diversity of economic systems that typically underpin artistic practice. The aim of the exercise is to nourish interdependent and community-based economic system, because mapping the economies that dominate us is the first step on a way to imagine the economies that we would actually want and enact them together.

The workshops will focus on the diverse economies of the collectives, projects and institutions in which workshop participants are enmeshed, that involve both symbolic and material, monetary and non-monetary resources generated in their institutional ecosystems. The emphasis will be placed on the aftermath of pandemic, framing the crisis as an opportunity to rethink the economy – not only of art institutions, but also economies at large. The redrawing exercises will be conducted with the aim of manifesting the values conjured by the mapped initiatives, by viewing their particular operations in the larger, social context. We are going to work within the diverse economic perspective to debunk capitalocentric visions of the economy. Hence, we will try to demonstrate a diversity of values that support bottom up, collective, communitarian and commons-based initiatives.

The public presentation and workshops take place in cooperation with the European training network FEINART.

Registration

The number of participants for the workshop is limited. To register, please write to rahel.spoehrer@zu.de, briefly describe your background and interest in the workshop | Registration deadline 22.11.2022