Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745335969 ISBN 13: 9780745335964

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The politics of utopia have produced a rich and varied literature, including the work of St. Simon, Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch, among many others. Utopian Pulse explores this tradition from the perspective of art practice and asks how art can engage with and contribute to utopian ideas. This book will be published alongside an exhibition of the same name and will include artwork from the exhibition itself.
The contributors to Utopian Pulse invoke utopia as an alternative to the status quo, a recognition of something missing that opens up many imaginative possibilities. International artistic researchers, artists, and artists-curators contribute diverse examples of what these possibilities may be from their own artistic practice.
More than just a theoretical treatise, this photographic and illustrative book, featuring color pages throughout, is a beautifully designed companion to the series of works and projects that Utopian Pulse documents. This book will serve not only as a contribution to the existing literature on utopia and utopian politics, but also as an inspiration to artists seeking to realize these ideas through their work.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ines Doujak is an artist working in London and Vienna, where she studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (1988–93). She was project leader of the arts based research ´Loomshuttles / Warpaths´, funded by the FWF Austrian Science Funds (2010-2014). Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. His work has been exhibited across the world including at the Berkeley Art Museum, USA, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul and the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt. He is the editor of Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies (2007).

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Utopian Pulse

Flares in the darkroom

By Ines Doujak, Oliver Ressler

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2017 Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3596-4

Contents

Foreword Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler, 10, 
Urgent Alternatives: Utopian Moments, 16, 
Fluchthilfe & Du? Katarzyna Winiecka, 18, 
Driven into Conflict by Utopia Antke Engel, 22, 
Salon Fluchthilfe / Unthinking Utopia – Borderlessness as Method Zanny Begg, 32, 
The World is Flooding Oreet Ashery, 50, 
Out of the Salon – Female counter-spaces, anti-colonial struggles and transversal politics Sophie Schasiepen, 54, 
Salon Public Happiness Christoph Schafer, 62, 
Please Take Generously Wealth of Negations, 74, 
Self-Insufficiency Matthew Hyland, 78, 
Salon Orrizonti Occupati / Occupied Horizons Bert Theis, 94, 
Known Nowheres: Some Short Thoughts on Going Beyond Marina Vishmidt, 110, 
MogokNasional Nobodycorp. Internationale Unlimited, 126, 
A Preview of the Future: Workers' Control in the Context of a Global Systemic Crisis Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, 130, 
Salons, the Utopian Salon and Substantial Shops Alice Creischer, 146, 
B.A.N.G. Etcétera, 152, 
Salon DADADA AND AND AND, 156, 
Salon-e-Girdbad/ Salon of the Whirlwind Mariam Ghani, 172, 
Taksim Square, June 2013 Halil Altindere, 184, 
Queering utopia in the darkroom Fernanda Nogueira, 190, 
Cuartos de Utopía / Wittgenstein and the Gypsies Pedro G. Romero / Maquina P.H., 196, 
El Espacio del Inmigrante Daniela Ortiz, 214, 
Salón de Belleza Miguel A. López, 218, 
A Mask is Always Active Ines Doujak and John Barker, 234, 
Salon Klimbim Ines Doujak and Fahim Amir, 250, 
Biographies, 275, 
Imprint, 283, 

CHAPTER 1

Urgent Alternatives

Utopian Moments

Between February and September 2014 a series of seven large-scale banners (9 x 3.4 metres) were presented on the façade of the Secession, the exhibition hall for contemporary art in Vienna. They related to the uprisings, occupations and social movements that have emerged in recent years. The artists were invited to focus on the utopian pulse in these actions and movements. This is most clearly manifested in the integration of how and what was being fought for. During the period when Syntagma Square in Athens was occupied in active opposition to the self-defeating austerity policies, the principles of true democracy were evident throughout. Debates as to actions, methods and alternatives were open and respectful, and decisions were made on this basis. They included who would speak and what would be spoken about to a wider public. In Tahrir Square, Cairo in 2011 a determination that the machinery of state violence could be overcome by surrounding tanks was crucial in the early victories of the movement. This should not be forgotten in its defeat by rival forms of authoritarian politics. Part of the failure by the initial movement was its incapacity to build durable democratic structures. In Istanbul the determination was to hold the common property of a park that made life bearable in the city, an action with a global resonance of defending the commons against the many forms of predatory enclosure. All the artists in the Urgent Alternatives: Utopian Moments had in common that they were directly involved in the protests which they had focused on in their banner, or that they talked from a clear, unequivocal position of solidarity with the protests. This series of banners can be seen as symptomatic of how utopian thinking, which seemed to have been buried for years, has revived with a sense of urgency. It is the idea that things can carry on as they are which is really just wishful thinking.

CHAPTER 2

Fluchthilfe & Du?

Katarzyna Winiecka

Fluchthilfe & Du addresses the critique of the EU border regime and its migration policies expressed by the self-organised refugee protest movement in Vienna. The design of the banner, titled Fluchthilfe & Du? (Escape Aid & You?), echoes a current campaign by Caritas, an organisation which collects donations with an appeal to charity while distancing itself from those it denounces as 'human smugglers': people whose assistance to refugees made it possible for them to come to Austria and apply for asylum in the first place. Fluchthilfe & Du envisions aid to refugees as a service and publicly solicits support for their struggle for freedom of movement.

The work was created as an act of solidarity with those eight activists of the refugee movement who were held in custody from July 2013 to January-March 2014 and accused of being members of an international human smuggling organisation. The charges – they supposedly made millions and endangered the lives of refugees in transit – were rebutted immediately, but the Austrian state continued to criminalise them.

On 4 December 2014, after 43 days of trial in Wiener Neustadt, under media attention as well as being monitoring by civil society, seven of the eight defendants were found guilty under paragraph 114 FPG 'human smuggling – within a criminal association'. The judgement is not final; the decision was appealed by all the accused. Paragraph 114 FPG, which is in dire need of reform, criminalises help (food, shelter, information, buying a ticket) given to undocumented refugees/to be asylum seekers, who try to come to, pass, or leave Austria, with the aim of arriving to ask for protection in a destination of choice within the alleged border-free European Union – as is clearly shown in this so called Fluchthilfeprozess.

www.fluchthilfe.at

CHAPTER 3

DRIVEN INTO CONFLICT BY UTOPIA

Antke Engel

Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom offered a programme of confrontation with utopian pleasure, pain, handicraft and brain, a variety show of utopian visions. Yet, what if utopia prefers to unfold in the untimely 'Not Now! Now!'. The not-moment of midnights, which is neither today nor tomorrow, may activate the conflicts that are implied by the different, contradictory and competing visions. What is utopia in a geo-historical-political constellation that presumably strives to acknowledge the interplay of a complexity of relations of power and domination – not in order to affirm, but to transform the asymmetries, injustices and violences that organise it?

'Utopia is ... the assertion of the unrealized in and against the real,' declares the announcement of Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom, 'the invocation within the given world of something incompatible with, and hostile to, given conditions.' While philosophers like Ernst Bloch or Michel Foucault, and feminist theoreticians like Barbara Holland-Cunz, María do Mar Castro Varela or Karin Schonpflug point out the impact of utopia as a form of critique, the above formulations signal something like an open conflict between the utopian and the existing, a conflict, which is by no means virtual, but unfolds within the existing, the real or reality. It produces what Helga Haberler calls a lived dissent with the hegemonic order. For her, the utopian vision lies in learning to enjoy and gain pleasure from experiences of disintegration, thus overcoming the longing for recognition and integration.

Yet, a couple of questions are left open by pushing utopia into an antagonistic relationship with reality: Can one still...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745335969
• ISBN 13: 9780745335964
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 285
• Herausgeber: Doujak Ines, Ressler Oliver
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar