Event as Dissent in Art and Design

Description

In 2017, the city of Aarhus is European Cultural Capital. The declared aim of Aarhus 2017 is to affectively engage citizens and visitors in multiple artistic and cultural events that are promoted to increase social inclusion and sustainable ways of liveability and growth (http://www.aarhus2017.dk/en/). As such, Aarhus 2017 provides a vivid example of what we might call ‘affective urbanism’ (Anderson & Holden 2008, Pløger 2010, Amin & Thrift 2002). On the one hand, the logic of affective urbanism is to transform cities through affective and proclaimed emancipatory experiences that are for the common good. On the other hand, the same affective urbanism risks ending up reproducing representational sign economies, in which cities brand themselves as a singular cultural identity. While event cities are initially thought to produce difference and diversity, they tend to exhaust the very same as cultural events become strategic planning tools (Pløger 2010). With the seminar Events as dissent in art and design activism, we want to investigate how events in art and design activism, at one and the same time, can participate in and subvert the instrumental logic of affective urbanism. What are the possibilities for art and design activism of maintaining their power of resistance when hijacked by event economy and political agendas? During Documenta 13, for instance, activist art was celebrated as emancipatory events having the capacity to disrupt systems of authorities and global capitalism. But as art and design biennials are themselves institutionalised events staged in broader affective and networked urban culture, the question is whether art biennials as events can redistribute and change existing affective event ecologies. Does art activism at these venues simply end up replicating the very same structures it tries to unsettle? And what about design activism being exploited blatantly today by urban brand strategists in order to boost cultural diversity and DIY- culture that score high on “the creative city” and the livability index? Is it rather so, as suggested by critical geographer, Margit Mayer (2013) that art and design activism become a 1st World Activism split between the austerity urbanism of the neo-liberal city and the wish to mobilize and politicize it? These and other questions will be explored through a series of talks and interventions in public space. In particular, we are interested in how a more critical notion of event as dissent may shed light on these issues. Dissent in aesthetic practices may be understood in the sense of Rancière (2004, 2010) as the unsettling of a certain order of policing that ascribe fixed roles of identity to subjects as well as ways of living, working, and speaking deemed right and wrong. Affective urbanism represents such a policing order that favors certain ways of living and inhabiting the life world, while excluding others. This dilemma resonates with a heated debate in art theory. Here, some critics are flagging concern for art risking to sacrifice its aesthetic autonomy at ‘the altar of social change’ (Bishop, 2012), while others disagree asserting that, without loosing their integrity as aesthetic practices, art and design have a potential to re-distribute roles of identity, social inequalities and power structures (Kester, 2011, p. 37; Jackson 2011) Such disputes ask us to pay special attention to the question of whether or not art and design are soiled by instrumentalisation? However, by introducing heterogeneous events into public space, art and design activism may open up for new processes of subjectification that redistribute who has the right to speak, listen, do, make and move. This is when, according to Rancière, aesthetic practices become truly political – by contesting the policing order and consensus. We invite participants to collectively explore with us how we may account for events as dissent in art and design activism. How do art and design activism balance between an urge to foster social and political change and at the same time sustain their critical aesthetic autonomy? And not least what the differences and similarities are between dissensual events in art activism vis-à-vis design activism? The invited speakers contribute from various perspectives to answer how and if art and design can change and disrupt existing affective urbanism and event culture. Andrea Phillips Professor of Art and Head of Research at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. Erling Björgvinson, Professor, HDK - Academy of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg. Jilly Traragou, Associate Professor in Spatial Design Studies, at Parsons School of Design, New York City.

Period	6 Apr 2017
Event type	Seminar
Location	Aarhus, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International