correspondence

14 09 08
Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray (eds)
New publication with texts from the project transform. Contributors: Boris Buden, Rosalyn Deutsche, Marcelo Expósito, Marina Garcés, Brian Holmes, Jens Kastner, Maurizio Lazzarato, Isabell Lorey, Nina Möntmann, Stefan Nowotny, Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray, Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Simon Sheikh, Hito Steyerl, Universidad Nómada, Paolo Virno
14 09 08 - Tom Waibel
In her DVD-project “Antonio Negri. The Cell” (Actor Publisher, Barcelona/New York 2008) Angela Melitopoulos presents an arrangement of more than two hours of video-material based on three interviews with the famous Italian philosopher focusing on problems of exile, imprisonment, freedom and the construction of personal joy and community.
14 09 08 - Amira Gad
Amira Gad's dissertation from 2009 investigates the notion of
institutional critique defined as an art practice that questions, comments
and criticizes the very institutions involved in the production, display and
commerce of art. [added to the archive after end of the project]
13 09 08
The spanish autonomous publisher Traficantes de Sueños announces a reader including 12 out of more than 100 transversal-texts published during the transform project. Those 12 texts have been articulated so that the book consists in a choral critical work around the axis: cultural production / creative class/ institutional critique.
13 09 08
Gerald Raunig / Stefan Nowotny | Wien: Turia + Kant 2008
In their new book, philosophers Stefan Nowotny and Gerald
Raunig include theoretical lines of rupture around the incipient
question "What is institutional critique?", develop thoughts on new
forms of institution and introduce neologisms as "monster institutions"
or "instituent practices".
12 09 08 - Martin Büsser
Der bei Unrast erschienene Reader "nicht alles tun", herausgegeben von Jens Kastner und Bettina Spörr, erforscht zivilen und sozialen Ungehorsam an den Schnittstellen von Kunst, radikaler Politik und Technologie.
03 09 08
Artist Oliver Ressler curates a section on the counter-globalisation movement for the Taipei Biennial 2008, featuring works by Christopher DeLaurenti, Etcétera, Petra Gerschner, John Jordan, Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, RTMark, Allan Sekula, Gregory Sholette, Nuria Vila & Marcelo Expósito, Dmitry Vilensky.
29 08 08
On the evening of August 27, the new issue of the Russian art&politics-newspaper Chto Delat (No. 19: What does it mean to lose?) was confiscated at a militia raid at the printers in Petersburg.
28 07 08
Now available for private purchase: the DVD edition of "First of May (the City-Factory)", first video of "Between Dreams", a video-series by Marcelo Expósito. The video opens a dialogue with the concept of "virtuosity" used by the political philosopher Paolo Virno to describe new figures of labour as well as certain emergent trends of political action.
18 06 08 - Rodrigo Nunes
Félix Guattari's and Suely Rolnik's book Micropolitical Revolution in Brazil, only recently published in English by Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, gives us a glimpse into both the activist and the thinker Guattari.
11 06 08
Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal. Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal
Buffalo, NY--Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud.
03 06 08 - Branka Ćurčić
Review of the latest book by Boris Groys - “Art Power”. The book reveals some of the contradictions of modern art, where the lines to today's power assigned to art - exclusively based on the existing free market, the art market – could be drawn from.
16 05 08 - Gene Ray
A response to eipcp's conference "The Art of Critique", held in April 2008. The texts of the conference themselves will be published in two upcoming issues of the web journal transversal in August and November 2008.
02 05 08 - Gerald Raunig
In Artforum's new issue on '68 as "the great refusal" Gerald Raunig discusses the twofold meaning of "la brèche": This expression, attributed to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was used around '68 to refer to the breach that rebellious students and workers were able to force in French universities, factories, and streets. Significantly, it also appears in the title of a remarkable book by Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and Edgar Morin - Mai 1968: La Brèche. Premières Réflexions sur les événements.
25 04 08 - Bert Theis
Isola district in Milano is struggling hard to survive in a difficult political and cultural context, being the target of capitalist and neo-nazi aggressions. Two days after the victory of right wing parties at the Italian elections, the Isola Art Project has once again been aggressed.
21 04 08
Buffalo, NY—A process that has taken nearly four years may be coming to an end. On Monday, April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara ruled to dismiss the indictment against University at Buffalo Professor of Visual Studies Dr. Steven Kurtz.

02 04 08 - Federico Geller
During his stay in Buenos Aires, where he had been invited by Tinta Limón to present the book Generación Post Alfa , Franco Berardi, alias Bifo, made a series of therapeutic suggestions that were closely followed by a myriad of media activists, university students and more ore less flexible culture workers. To our surprise, at the last moment there were signs he had been co-opted by the Errorist International.
24 03 08
Diverse cultural, political and university networks in Europe appeal to the mayor of Ljubljana, Slovenia, not to sell and evict the lively social center ROG.
20 03 08 - Chto Delat
In cooperation with transform.eipcp.net the Russian-English language magazine Chto Delat (based in Petersburg and Moscow) has published a new issue entitled Critique and Truth. It could be seen as a set of theoretical texts regarding the recent issue Basta on local pre-electorial protests in Russia, and concerns the "critical class" and its conditions of production. In how far can this class and its criticality claim to produce the truth?
19 03 08 - Ines Doujak und Luisa Ziaja
Im Zuge der Politisierung um 1968 kam es einerseits zu einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit institutionellen Logiken. Institutionen wurden mit aktivistischen und künstlerischen Mitteln sowohl radikal in Frage gestellt wie strategisch unterwandert, ebenso verlassen und durchbrochen wie verändert und neu gegründet. Im Anschluss daran wurde andererseits der „Marsch durch die Institutionen“ von einer gegenhegemonialen Strategie zu einer legitimatorischen Rhetorik.
07 03 08 - Elisabeth Steger
an interim report of reading Marina Gržinić´ s book: re- politicizing art, theory, representation and new media technology, publications of the academy of fine arts Vienna, volume 6, 2008, schlebrügge.editor
05 03 08 - Maribel Casas + Sebastian Cobarrubias
Tools & Methods to Comprehend and Re-Appropriate a Global City
The promising exponential impact of this 700 pages book has just started. Since its public release in November 2007 at the headquarters of the self-managed publishing house Traficantes de Suenos, dozens of well attended public presentations of the book have taken place around different sites of Spain.
03 03 08 - Gene Ray
A talk given at the symposium “Sustainability and Contemporary Art: Exit or Activism?”, Central European University, Budapest, 29 February 2008.
15 02 08 - Chto Delat
In 2007 St. Petersburg’s European University received a grant from the European Union for monitoring the Russian elections and educating observers. On 8 February 2008, some weeks before the elections and following an order by the state fire inspector and a decision by the Dzerzhinsky court, all educational activity in the university was shut down for ninety days.
06 02 08 - Gene Ray
What no presidential candidate is talking about – but what activists need to know about a dangerous long-term tendency in US policy.
30 01 08 - Luis Miguel Selvelli
Isola Art Center / Milano has been a very original case of activist space dealing with exhibiting and research in contemporary art, capable to reach international recognition without ever losing connection with the struggles of its neighborhood.
07 01 08 - elisabeth steger
a bookreview of ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS, ALTERNATIVE SOCIETIES (English/Polish)
editors: Aneta Szyłak & Oliver
Printed in Poland 2007
07 01 08 - Gerald Raunig
For the post-Operaist philosopher Paolo Virno, exodus transforms the context in which a problem has emerged, instead of treating the problem by deciding between given alternatives. As joke and as innovative action, exodus opens up a side road, uncharted on political maps, “to modify the very ‘grammar’ which determines the selection of all possible choices.”
12 12 07 - Branka Ćurčić
The exhibition “TV Gallery” and public discussion “Art and Public Television” has been opened and held in Zagreb in Gallery Nova, on the 6th of December 2007, and it has raised debate about conditions of art and cultural production, public television and broadcasting of video art in territory of former Yugoslavia, followed by reflections on today's mass media conformism, commercialization and homogenization.
03 12 07 - Branka Ćurčić
A short report on British Council's meeting in Istanbul, November 2007. on “Creative Collaboration in Europe and Beyond”, as a preface of future project depicted throughout imperative of networking, flexibility and individual/collective empowerment.
29 11 07 - Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC)
Now that these debates are winding down and their shape becomes clearer, we can ask what was occluded and think about where these discussions could go.
27 11 07 - edu-factory collective
The first round of discussion on the edu-factory list showed that, despite the many differences between universities and countries, it is possible to identify a global trend and common experiences in the world of the university.
22 10 07 - elisabeth steger
some notes to the exhibition "Friends, Foes and Collaborators" at the gallery of the ig bildende kunst vienna
14 10 07
The english version of Gerald Raunig's study "Art and Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century" is out now: The book (translated by Aileen Derieg, published by Semiotext(e) and distributed by MIT Press) is an attempt to think the possibility of revolution today, as well as the possibility of transversal concatenations of art machines and revolutionary machines.
13 10 07
Scientist's Wife and Daughter Comment on Case
Buffalo, NY – Today in Federal District Court, Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, under tremendous pressure, pled guilty to lesser charges rather than facing a prolonged trial for federal charges of "mail fraud" and "wire fraud" in a surreal post-PATRIOT Act legal case that has attracted worldwide attention.
11 09 07 - elisabet steger
sometimes - if you did not get invited - you have to invite yourself!
06 09 07 - Radical Culture Research Collective
On the Functions of Documenta
From anti-communism to cultural critique to the neo-liberal 'big tent': the trajectory of the Kassel exhibition
28 07 07
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination starts its “Paths Through Utopias” project. For 7 months it will be travelling through Europe in search of Utopian ways of living despite capitalism.
26 07 07
Euromayday Hamburg invites you to the campaign ‘Enough is (not) Enough!’ around documenta12. Within the last weeks they have talked to numerous janitors, trainees, cultural workers, supervisors, securities, knowledge workers about the precarious arrangements in their everyday lives. Five Open Editing events in Kassel will follow.
25 07 07 - Marcelo Expósito
The Etcétera Collective from Buenos Aires celebrates its 10th anniversary with a retrospective exhibition at Centro Cultural Recoleta. Well known for their long-term participation in the new movements for human rights and justice (against the last argentinean military dictatorship) which emerged in the 90s after Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and also well recognizable for their po(e/li)tical surrealistic, carnivalesque public actions, Etcétera has recently turned into the Errorist International.
11 07 07
Multitudes announces the inauguration of its new website, Multitudes-Icônes, which is dedicated to contemporary art:
http://multitudes-icones.samizdat.net
07 07 07 - Gini Müller
Even if the media coverage momentarily overshadowed the contents and other forms of protest, the “Five-Finger Posse Players” prevailed on the ground. With the successful blockade tactic, which didn’t conform at all to the media hype following the demo in Rostock, the posse put into play its own poses of resistance, in acts of symbolic border crossing that go beyond the war of media images.
05 07 07
The photo series explores the phenomenon of fortification, its effect on the landscape and the sureal fear in the Village "Bad Doberan".
04 07 07 - Beat Weber, Kati Morawek
Economics of the art system: The example of Documenta
The Documenta Magazines project invited 90 independent and self organized non-profit publications from the fields of political theory and culture around the world to come together and reflect on the main topics of Documenta. A critical report from two members of the editorial collective of the Vienna based magazine MALMOE.
03 07 07 - Ben Trott
‘We Are Winning’ - the slogan famously sprayed on a wall in Seattle as thousands shut down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial in 1999; last seen on the side of a burning police van on the streets of Genoa in 2001 – when the G8 leaders last dared to meet in a European city –; and the feeling that thousands of us felt as we flowed through fields, around police lines and onto the roads leading to Kempinski Hotel, the location of this year’s G8 Summit in Heiligendamm.
28 06 07 - Tadzio Mueller & Kriss Sol
It is nice to have our victories once in a while. Sitting at the campfire in Reddelich with thousands of people after a week of protest we were not quite sure whether the collective euphoria permeating the camps was simply the result of one too many sleepless night (and day), or whether it was true that we had won once again: won as we had in Seattle, won as we had in Prague, even in Genoa.
27 06 07 - Alex Foti
Rostock: a new start for the European antiglobalization movement
The kaleidoscope of emotions and inspirations swirling in Rostock, in its demos, actions, camps, media and art centers, cannot be easily described. It was a manic rush, an incredible show of radical strength and post-national solidarity.
25 06 07 - Julia Hahn/Benjamin Seibel
Some thoughts on a collaborative project on education and institutional critique, realized by students of the Geneva University of Art and Design and students of the University of Lüneburg at Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg.
20 06 07 - Branka Ćurčić
Short review of Ned Rossiter's book “Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions”
20 06 07
The Spanish magazine Brumaria publishes its issue Nr. 8 on "Art and Revolution" / "Arte y Revolución" as a bilingual contribution to Documenta 12 Magazines. With texts by Alexander Alberro, Jane Crawford, Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann, Brian Holmes, Ana Longoni, Gerardo Mosquera, Gerald Raunig, Suely Rolnik, Gregory Sholette, Eduardo Subirats and Feng Yuan. On the same topic see also Gerald Raunig's monographic book "Art and Revolution" which will be published in English (Semiotext(e)/MIT Press) and Spanish (Traficantes de Sueños) this autumn.
19 06 07 - elisabet steger
We want to introduce an artistic labour, the installation "A contradiction - Tribute to Simone Weil" realized by the artist Gertrude Moser- Wagner - and we want to draw near it in a mimetic way.
14 06 07 - The Yes Men
Imposters posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC)
representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada's largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta.
04 06 07 - Stephen Wright
With respect to contemporary art and art-related practices, usership as a challenge to expert culture can follow two different vectors: challenging expert culture within the artworld frame itself, in the lineage of institutional critique; or lending art-derived, art-specific and art-engendered competence to other user-initiated and user-driven challenges to expert culture in other walks of life outside of the broadest possible frame of the artworld, collaborating with citizen’s initiatives, amateur scientists’ projects, and so on.
26 05 07 - HOLY DAMN IT: 50 000 posters against G8
Public Statement about "Art goes Heiligendamm" by the international art
project "HOLY DAMN IT: 50 000 posters against G8 - on the urgent need
for radical answers".
25 05 07 - Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias
The three-day long political meeting, The crisis of the welfare-state, precarity and new social rights, took place April 12-15 in an old building in downtown Sevilla occupied by aged neighbors and several community organizations.
18 05 07 - Karolis Klimka, Kasparas Pocius, Gediminas Urbonas
After months of defending the last cinema of Vilnius from being turned into “Paradise Apartments”, Lithuanian cinema-lovers are looking for international support.
07 05 07
Oleg Kireev's "Media-activist Cookbook" (Moscow-Yekaterinburg, Ultra.Culture, 2006) was awarded "Innovazia" prize at Moscow, April 28.
30 04 07
International seminary
This seminary tries to analyse how the hidden face of modernity in the occidental thinking has been constructed, which in the Western hemisphere has meant to elude the impact of colonial modalities of the excercising of European power over non-European societies power el during the emergences of historic capitalism as the dominant form of exploitation and as the decisive dynamic of subjects, spaces and the axes of problematisation in which our times are being discussed.
22 04 07 - Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias
A report about the workshop/reflection event "Machines" with different activist collectives from diverse sites along the Atlantic.
10 04 07
Meetings and workshops on the crisis of the welfare state, the new fights of precarious composition and new institutions of critique of global and cognitive capitalism.
24 03 07
Creativity is hip again. In esoterics and catholic creationism, in the hypes of creative industries and the digital boheme there is a renaissance of the creative. But in the contexts of critical art practice and collective knowledge production there has developped a broad landscape of critical approaches towards the concept of creativity, some of which are published in the new book of the eipcp series republicart at turia + kant (german language).
17 03 07 - Elisabeth Steger
To the memory of Birgit Jürgenssen
Some background information to the text "Birgit Jürgenssen or Body Art against the Semiotic of Capital" written by Peter Weibel, now published on http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Birgit-Jurgenssen-or-Body-Art.html
16 03 07
Multitudes n°28 is a cooperation with the upcoming issue of the transversal webjournal on "instituent practices" dealing with a "third phase" of institutional critique.
15 03 07 - Laila Huber
A subjective report of a4re meeting in Milano 17.February 2007
What happened at a4re for someone who didn’t quite have an idea of what should have been the outcome, someone who went there by curiosity and the explorative spirit of wanting to understand how people manage to create a space of radical alternative/otherness/openness to the dominant reality of oppression or opportunism. Therefore the following report is a subjective reflexion, but anyhow one view from inside-out.
15 03 07 - Alex Foti
Danish youth revolt and the radicalization of the European creative class
Why in Denmark? Why there such a forceful rebellion of the city's dissenting youth, promptly joined by the immigrant youth?
04 02 07 - Agent Steger
A try to answer some questions which Brian Holmes
rose and a link to my favourite art institution in Vienna.
31 01 07 - Federico Geller
Virno’s visit to Buenos Aires in September 2006, invited by Colectivo Situaciones and Tinta Limon press, brought new perspectives into a public space characterized by the lack of a radical critique to the state.
29 01 07 - Brian Holmes
After the revolt of December 20 and 21, 2001, the streets of Buenos Aires and all of Argentina became an open theater of action, even as the escrache generalized into the major form of political demonstration. Etcétera, who think of themselves less as a group of artists and more as a movement of the surrealistic imagination, fulfilled some of their wildest dreams at this time ...
28 01 07 - Gene Ray
On the fifth anniversary of Pierre Bourdieu’s death, some polemical reflections on the limits of his social field theory, recent texts by Andrea Fraser, criticality, institutions, and exit.
25 01 07 - Branka Ćurčić
First English edition of the magazine and its own prelom (break-) through on the international scene of the critique of: political constellations within social theory and political philosophy, of contemporary art and film in today's post-Yugoslav context and of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism
23 01 07
The Finnish Art Review
The sixth issue of the magazine Framework is built around the theme of the seminar A Critique of Creative Industries, co-organised by FRAME, Finnish Fund for Art Exchange and the eipcp in Helsinki, 31 August - 2 September 2006. The aim of the seminar was to analyse the instrumental use of creativity and the impact it has on public sector support for the arts and culture.
23 01 07 - Brumaria
The new edition of Brumaria invites you to explore a new territory of experimentation marked by the relation of creative practices, micropolitics and the production of subjectivity.
15 01 07 - Josip Rotar
Can Slovenia’s Presidency to the EU in 2008 be withdrawn due to the serious violations of human rights? European Caravan of Erased from Ljubljana to Brussels which happened in November 2006 is an example how the movement is using institutions as tools.
10 01 07 - Benjamin Seibel
The provocation itself is a key element of Haacke’s work, who seemingly follows a quite simple formula. Without provocation, no scandal. Without scandal, no debate. Without debate, no meaning. The more scandalous a work is, the better it functions, within and especially outside the art field.
03 01 07 - Gene Ray
On Julian Stallabrass’s ART INC
Stallabrass’s new book is more than a debunking of art world pretensions. It proposes some practical responses to the problem of what to do about an autonomy become servile.
23 12 06 - Branka Ćurčić
New publication by Center_kuda.org from Novi Sad, Serbia on how to critically read and write new history of the Yugoslav socialists times
16 12 06 - Brian Holmes
The Maghreb Connection focuses on systems and modalities of migratory movements which constitute the Maghreb and Mediterranean area. From a range of aesthetic positions, the project seeks to develop discursive and visual representations of the growing complexity of North African mobility in relation with the development of the European Union …
13 12 06 - Monika Mokre
16-18 November, 2006, Amsterdam
A summary of the conference on creative industries in Amsterdam.
17 11 06 - Jens Kastner
On "Art After Conceptual Art", Conference and book presentation, 10-11 November 2006, Generali Foundation, Vienna.
19 10 06 - Elisabeth Steger
Some remarks on Isabelle Graw´s "art, market, fashion - principle celebrity / portrait of the artist in the visual industry" and a photo of Rick Maiman ( both in Lettre 74 / pages 44-49 ).
14 10 06 - Branka Ćurčić
Barcelona seminar on networking politics gathered last weekend over twenty political theorists, activists, researchers and practitioners from Europe and South America.
05 10 06 - Brian Holmes
A question not to the art museum as a purely aesthetic or cognitive institution, but to the art museum as an economic and social institution: an institution dealing not only with cultural capital, but also with capital tout court.
04 10 06
Aesthetics and Radical Politics
A call for papers and contributions for the conference on aesthetics and radical politics in Manchester, 2 February 2007, seeking to bring radical artists, activists, theorists and academics together to discuss past and present convergences between the theories and practices of artists and writers and the theories and practices of movements for radical social change.
28 09 06
Precarity is a general term to describe the fact that large parts
of the population are being subject to flexible exploitation or
flexploitation (low and insecure pay, high blackmailability,
intermittent income etc), and existential precariousness (high risk of
social exclusion because of low wages, welfare cuts, high cost of living
etc).
23 09 06 - Magdalena Marsovszky
In the course of Monday night, Budapest, the capital of Hungary, has experienced the heaviest disturbances for decades. Amongst the sea of Hungarian flags, so called Arpad Stripes, which had once had been one of the symbols of the fashist, hungaristic movement of 1944, could also be detected.
22 09 06
"In the name of fighting clandestine immigration, governments are adopting repressive policies and are expanding the frontiers of wealthy nations through centers of detention, ejections, expulsions and selection of the labour force."
18 09 06 - Monika Mokre
A Workshop in Kiasma Museum, Helsinki, 31.8. – 1.9. 2006
The workshop provided an interesting and inspiring overview of critical positions towards the Creative Industries. Papers were devoted (1) to general problems of the concept of Creative Industries, and (2) to national and supranational case studies.
24 08 06 - Branka Ćurčić
Srđan Jovanović Weiss wrote a book on Serbian “Turbo Architecture”
By defining “Turbo Architecture” as “a post-socialist mainstream in nationalizing collective identity through architecture”, the author of the book “Almost Architecture” Srđan Jovanović Weiss is presenting his view on the complex relationships between politics, identity search, transition and war itself, all of that represented through specific historical and contemporary strategies in architecture.
18 08 06 - Gene Ray
On the Internet as a Weapon of the Multitude
Five years into the dirty little "war on terror," the Retort collective proposes that "the balance of power in the image-world is changing." Is the Internet emerging as a counter-spectacle - a radical new public sphere largely beyond the control of "administration"?
16 08 06 - Elisabeth Steger
again a child - this time it is a girl - is playing with the light signs on the walls.
04 08 06 - Branka Ćurčić
... West European official cultural institution is inviting East European independent organization, which commissions artists from its country to produce specific contemporary art, tending to activism and political engagement, followed by the statement that “there is no political art in this East European country”...
13 07 06 - Klaus Neundlinger
Trade Unions do not try to develop political strategies in order to fight against the worsening of the working conditions for migrant workers, women and other groups that are not protected by the national labour laws. In the end, they have been always hostile towards the non-representative labour subject: non-white, non-male, … so they keep removing the coloured history of labour-force.
28 06 06
... for the closure of Immigrant Detention Centers, for the freedom without charges of the Zona Franca detainees (Barcelona) of Saturday, June 24th.
12 06 06 - Gregory Sholette
Why is it, in the wake of curator Chris Gilbert's letter of resignation from the Berkeley Art Museum, has there been a divided response from within progressive art circles with many people questioning Gilbert's motivation?
10 06 06 - Martín Bergel and Julia Risler
Forms of auto-organization and communication strategies in the era of globalization
The invitation text for an encounter organized in Buenos Aires in May 2006 proposes to develop a field of interrogation common to the experiences that here "we call flights from precarity".
06 06 06 - Matteo Pasquinelli
Another Relationality Conference. Another report from Barcelona...
29 05 06 - Gregory Sholette
We however, recognize that interventionist art, politically motivated art, collectivized art is more than just another artistic genre, that its genealogy is more than a collection of curious anomalies useful for sprucing up the same old art historical canon. The phantom archive encircles mainstream institutions, invisibly altering them not unlike the way cosmic dark matter prods the path of planets, stars and galaxies.
12 05 06 - Elisabeth Steger
Let´ s start with the beginning and first cite a Hannah Arendt sentence, the philosopher of the birth- a sentence she wrote in her first book about Love: "Only the world which is loved is bad".
10 05 06 - Christoph Schäfer
... for a trip into the real life, Terence Hill can give you an advice or two: Play, first, the game following your rules, your agenda; look at the world from a different perspective; introduce a new, artistic language and invalidate the language of the ruling institution. Second: for a dialogue with civil society – do not turn up unarmed.
01 05 06
The Precarity Map is the first step of The WebRing for Communication and Militant Research on Precarity which intends to produce and share knowledge, experiences and materials among labour conflicts and life struggles around precarity.
25 04 06 - Beat Weber, Therese Kaufmann
A Journey into the Cultural Policy of a Private Institution
The overall active role of the financiers of the Küba-Project is part of a general unpleasant trend: At a time when public funding for the arts is increasingly waning, making space for alleged private sponsoring, art foundations such as T-B A21, Siemens Arts Program and even non-corporative bodies as in the case of the European Cultural Foundation increasingly turn from grant giving organizations into active players in cultural co-operation.
19 04 06
Art and its Institutions (ed. by Nina Möntmann) is a comprehensive reader on current institutional conditions and the role of institutions within artistic processes, offering insight into the diversity of art institutions and their practice today.
13 04 06 - Ned Rossiter
The social-technical dynamics of ICT-based networks constitute organisation in ways substantively different from networked organisations (unions, state, firms, universities). My interest in this paper is to say a few things about the process of scalar transformation and transdisciplinarity as they relate to the invention of new institutional forms.
13 04 06 - Franco Berardi Bifo, Marco Jacquemet, Giancarlo Vitali
On March 30, the Judge of Instruction of Padua decided the complaint presented by the president of Mediaset, Fedele Confalonieri, against the authors of “Telestreet: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine” in favor of the defendants and with this ended a libelous attempt to silence a voice of dissent.
05 04 06 - Franco Berardi "Bifo"
If the French students defeated the CPE, they would certainly not have defeated precariousness: they will only have rejected its legal formalization and initiated a new phase in European social history.
28 03 06 - Brian Holmes
The banlieue riots and the unanswered question of the welfare state
What's hidden in the blazing light of the mediated image? I want to look back on those nights of October and November, when a European society was literally "under fire."
23 03 06 - Rahel Puffert
By resolution of the Hamburg City Senate, former Axel-Springer Publishing Co. employee Peter Tamm is to have unrestricted use of an historic 12,000 square-meter building in the `Harbour City´ development zone. There, with an extra EUR 30 million in city financing, he is to open a `Peter Tamm International Maritime Museum´. There is cause to worry, not only because of the scientifically unconvincing approach of museum, or the patently right-wing orientation of the collector´s politics ...
09 03 06 - Oleg Kireev
Now Russia tries to rethink itself in conditions of a new historical convolution, and this results in a nationalist rise. Realization of deep bitterness of defeat in the Cold war is supplied by bad old pan-Slavonic fantasms, a USSR nostalgia combined with an obscure Orthodoxy. But from the classical Marxist point of view, some nationalist movements can have a certain anti-capitalist liberatory potential.
03 03 06 - Hito Steyerl
Review (Group show, foyer of the Centre Jacques Franck, Brussels)
The exhibition A(rt)ctivisme is only a small part of a three month long festival at the Centre Culturel Jacques Franck. And it tackles the question of the relation between politics and art just like the whole festival itself.
28 02 06 - Franco Berardi Bifo, Marco Jacquemet, Giancarlo Vitali
On March 8 in the city of Padua, where the book "TELESTREET: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine" was printed for its Italian edition, the authors Franco Berardi Bifo, Marco Jacquemet and Giancarlo Vitali must appear before a judge in order to respond to the accusation of defamation leveled by Federico Confalonieri, head of Mediaset.
24 02 06 - Klaus Neundlinger
academy of breadless arts
One should try to create an institution at least once a week. They can be temporary or permanent, according to the purpose they have been founded for. It's like in a museum: You have to deal (1) with a certain heritage. And you have to face (2) a certain „flow“ of temporary elements ...
20 02 06 - Branka Ćurčić
This article will examine potentness of institutional critique, having in mind strong presumption that critique has to have its specific coordinates in the specific context. It will also explore uncertainty of strength or weakness of it, which will be speculatively connected to political constructions and historical background of relationship between power structures and (delusion) of self-governance.
18 02 06 - Felix Stalder
With the netbase, one of the last 'free radicals' of the early internet culture disappears, an institution which understood art as necessarily critical, both of the commercial hype and the old and new centers of power.

10 02 06 - Marina Gržinić
Brener and Schurz at the "benevolent museum"
Brener and Schurz present themselves as visionaries, iconoclasts and vagabonds in constant troubles. We have to reflect their actions and performative histories in the only possible way: that is strictly political.
26 01 06
Tristestópicos is a critical project focusing on the process of construction and circulation of the imaginaries of the Latin America within different European geographical locations.
19 01 06 - Elisabeth Steger
So let´ s go on and leave < society and politics > or rather a view on it, which is confined to a fragmentary selection of the shown works, and look to some more performing arts.
13 01 06
La république et ses banlieues
The following is a link to the new journal ’Multitudes’, after the social crisis that followed the events in several city-banlieues. Articles and information in French only, although the website contains several translations and originals in italian, spanish, and english. Includes also a complete archive of the historical french publications Futur Antérieur and Alice.
18 12 05
Theory and politics in organization
Thoughts, antagonisms, innovations, demonstrations, elaborations, expectations and refutations. It is its conditions of impossibility that emphasize the necessity of a worthy task.
17 12 05
A virtual cartography of European migration policies
MigMap is one of the results of the transnational research project TRANSIT MIGRATION. It could be appropriated, used and further developed by migration related movements...
16 12 05
"236 pages of radicality" - a self-description
The journal, aware of the possibilities of the boundless moment, searches for ways to think through the cultural and political ramifications of representation.
16 12 05
Another framework of and for social transformation
The Action Research Network is a space for the experiment of activist research applied to the most recent confluence process of social movements at Europe and particularly to the ESF and surroundings process.
15 11 05
Prácticas artísticas, estéticas y políticas
Brumaria is an artists' project devoted to the construction of a space for study and reflection on artistic, social, and political practices, with the aim of translating, organising, editing, and circulating theoretical-practical materials which could help to reflect on contemporary experimentation in the crossroads of art, political, and social practices.
10 11 05 - International Errorists
First Declaration by the ERRORISTS
"Errorism" is a philosophically erroneous position, a ritual of negation, a disorganised organisation: failure as perfection, error as appropriate move.

09 10 05 - Elisabeth Steger
A singular point falls victim to an extremely rare disease, he reflected on himself and was so frightened at this falling that he showed peculiarities which made him contrasting with the other points on the circular line, irreparably contrasting, he was no longer able to be devoted to the circular line, points which are reflecting on themselves get hurt easily, get bumps and look like a thumb in a thumbscrew.
08 10 05 - Solvita Krese
The Project “Trajectories” is an attempt to explore the changing role of art and its institutions and their interaction both in local and global context. Four curators will develop artistic event series which will be exhibited in Riga on March – April 2006.
08 10 05 - Jorge Ribalta
The MACBA Experience
Beyond the regime of visibility, whose paradigm is the exhibition, we think it is possible to restore forms of the subjective appropriation of artistic methods in processes outside the museum.
08 10 05 - Stella Rollig
To decide what art projects to bring into the museum’s walls, we should ask, Will the intervention create a change, and if only a tiny one, will it be sustainable? Will it question the position of the institution, or will it affirm it?
07 10 05 - Katya Sander
Since the art-institution never only exists as itself, but always also through its relationship to its 'public', the art-institution as such becomes a drastically different kind of machine from context to context.