Monday
LECTURE — DVORANA OHRID / 10 – 11:30 H
PASCAL GIELEN
Commoning Politics: Art, Civil Action and the Aesthetics of Vulnerability
Since the financial crisis started at the end of 2007 a lot of governments do budget cuts in the cultural and artistic field. Inspired by the critical social theory of Herbert Marcuse (1964), these policy decisions are understood within an ideological framework as ‘repressive liberalism’. That is a (cultural) politics that on the one hand proclaims individual freedom, stimulates cultural entrepreneurship and embraces the creative city, but on the other hand develops a large-scale decentralized control apparatus that strongly restricts individual and artistic freedom. Within this cultural policy creative labor itself can also be ‘instrumentalized’ as a repressive tool. In his lecture Pascal Gielen analyses the relationship between art, politics and the public space in the creative city. He also looks at how activists and creative ‘workers’ respond to this policy by organizing themselves in alternative, ‘commoning’ ways based on an aesthetics of ambiguity and universal vulnerability. The lecture will be based on Gielen’s books ‘The Art of Civil Action’, ‘Interrupting the City’, ‘Commonism’ and ‘The Aesthetics of Ambiguity’.
LECTURE — DVORANA OHRID / 12 – 13:30 H
IVA ČUKIĆ
Democratization of cultural public infrastructures: Urban Commons
This lecture will address both the theoretical and empirical position of urban commons emphasizing the concept of democratization of cultural public infrastructures. It will put forward the theoretical and interpretive framework that stems from the critical theory of the commons, which built further on Elinor Ostrom’s work (1990), and embedded the concept of the commons into a wider socio-economic context, producing normative criteria that politicize this form of collective ownership, use and governance – fair access, sustainable use and collective control. Rather than romanticizing the concept, the presentation will address the powerful political paradigm of urban commons through the particular cases, addressing the issues of collectivity, governance, inclusion/exclusion, power and political values and principles.
LECTURE — DVORANA OHRID / 16 – 17:30 H
DEA VIDOVIĆ
Democracy and Cultural Policy
The rhetoric of contemporary cultural policy implies the role of culture as the foundation of an open and democratic society. But opposite to this proclamation, cultural policy adjustments to structurally sustaining this claim of openness and democracy are out of balance. Namely, the principles of democracy are present as a part of the horizon but they are not positioned at the centre of our cultural policy realities and policy implementation. Therefore, in cultural policy practice there is a chronic lack of absorption of a whole spectrum of voices as well as normative opportunities for anticipation of new systemic and institutional frameworks for artistic and cultural practices that can be opposed to dominant cultural development paradigm characterised by a rigid, bureaucratic and hierarchical form of organisation that are built on discrimination. This lecture will focus on the relation between democracy and cultural policy and explore cultural policy (with Croatian examples) that could sustain and support democracy through more open, flexible, socially responsive and inclusive policy structures and governance schemes in culture.
PRESENTATION — DVORANA OHRID / 17:45 – 19:15 H
MARIJA KRNIĆ ~ moderator
TIHANA PUPOVAC ~ speaker
VULLNET SANAJA ~ speaker
SOURCE BOOK I: HOW TO BUILD NETWORKS AND WHY?
From Resilience towards Sustainability
From the 1990s onwards the cultural space of the former Yugoslavia, specifically, its independent cultural sector, has been making a significant contribution to the development of collaborative practices and to the overall understanding of participation and organising. While since the 1980s there has been a strong development of networking practices in the broad European cultural space, and much has been written about this phenomenon from different perspectives, the phenomenon of networking and organising in the territory of the former Yugoslavia has remained under-researched. This summer, Koperativa has, together with partners, published the book entitled HOW TO BUILD NETWORKS AND WHY?: From Resistance to Sustainability, the publication which represents a significant contribution to the inclusion of often neglected Yugoslav experiences and practices of networking, cooperation, and horizontal organising to our knowledge of contemporary networking practices. The publication of the book is an occasion for a conversation on the networks and models of organising with Vullnet Sanaja, the member of the book’s editorial team and Tihana Pupovac, the coordinator of Kooperativa. The discussion will be moderated by Marija Krnić.