Move…ment – on Protest Movements & Language

For this issue, released earlier in 2013, contributors were invited to formulate and re-frame the concept of resistance, particularly how it is conceived within their daily experience, resulting in the publication of a plurality of different desires stemming from the same urgencies. These include visual and inventive responses and reprints, as well as a first-hand account of the role of social media in the current protest movements in Spain, fiction that counteracts the populist-neoliberal and pervasive PRI political party in Mexico, and a report of how Internet activists offered their knowledge and technical support to reconnect protestors during the recent Egyptian revolution.

Move…ment is an issue that includes contributions from: Jan Verwoert, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, Bassam El Baroni, Rana Hamadeh, Claire Tancons, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Federica Bueti, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Kathy Acker, Federico Campagna, Gabriela Jauregui, José M. Bueso and Sally Gutierrez, Christopher Kullenberg and Dick Higgins.

The voices of these artists, writers, activists and cultural practitioners offer imaginative re-appropriations of language and its symbolic value, de-territorialising the current political rhetoric, and attempting to articulate an alternative space of critical discourse and engagement. The desire to play with reality, to make noises instead of meanings, seems to be a good way to disattend the expectations that are imposed upon us and question the legitimacy of the current mode of cultural production. This issue of …ment acts as a reminder that creativity is not only a source of capitalist production, rather it is central to any possibility of political and social transformation.

PROGRAM

7 PM: Welcome by Amira Gad (Curator of Programs & Publications, Witte de With; Rotterdam)

7.15 PM: Lecture-performance “Where does this voice come from now that you took the words out of my mouth?” by Federica Bueti and Jan Verwoert.

Federica Bueti and Jan Verwoert ruminate on the desire for emancipating the collective, the colour red, buying pricy shoes, the violent embarrassment of the ambitious pedagogue, holes that talk and the chance to start again with the voice.

8 PM: Talk Carnival Trilogy? Gwangju/Cape Town/Göteborg by Claire Tancons (Curator, writer and researcher; New Orleans)

Claire Tancons will review her current project AnarKrew: An Anti-Archives? Göteborg Carnival on Record for the Göteborg Biennial against two other past projects, Spring for the Gwangju Biennale (2008) and A Walk Into the Night for CAPE09 (2009), as part of her self-designated “carnival trilogy.” In doing so, Tancons will assess the premise of her initial near decade-old investigation about such varied issues as the curatorial potential of carnival as ritual, festival and art, indeed, the artistic nature of carnival and, the introduction of carnival within the discourse of performance art. Tancons will also draw from her two essays on carnival as resistance for e-flux journal “Occupy Wall Street: Carnival Against Capital? Carnivalesque As Protest Sensibility” (2011) and “Carnival to Commons: Pussy Riot Punk Protest and the Exercise of Democratic Culture (2012)” to address the political agency of the carnivalesque within recent protest movements.

COLOPHON

Move…ment edited by …ment, Journal for Contemporary Culture, Art and Politics is published by Book Works as part of Common Objectives, guest edited by Nina Power.

Printed in an edition of 1,000 copies; 100 pages; 10 b/w images and 10 colour images, with a soft cover, and unbound musical score insert; designed and printed by An Endless Supply.

198 x 287 mm; ISBN 978 1 906012 49 6 – Price £8.00 or 10 EUR.

Common Objectives is a series of quick-fire, rapid-response projects from artist/writer collectives or individual art practices engaged with emerging political struggles, rejecting the idea of culture as a playground for the elite, engaging in the potent mix of free discourse, solidarity and the production of new desires and prepared to break open old worlds, either in the virtual space of communication and networks, or in the concrete world of action, discourse and distribution. Guest edited by Nina Power. Other projects in the series include: Pre-enactments by Victoria Halford and Steve Beard; The Night by Michèle Bernstein; and After The Night by Everyone Agrees.