[artinfo] MULTIVERSITY, or the Art of Subversion (Venice, 16-18 May)

[Matteo Pasquinelli]

   First call

   MULTIVERSITY, or the Art of Subversion.

   16, 17 and 18 May 2008
   S.a.L.E. DOCKS
   VENICE

   www.sale-docks.org

   The event "Multiversity, or the Art of Subversion" is the fruit of a
   joint effort between Uni.Nomade and S.a.L.E. (Signs and Lyrics
   Emporium), between a trans-territorial network of militants and
   researchers carrying out a critical analysis of the themes of
   contemporaneity and a self-managed space, called S.a.L.E. docks, born
   a few months ago in Venice so as to intervene on a practical level in
   the world of cultural production. A world which, not only in Venice,
   has affirmed itself as preferred area for current capital valorisation
   processes.
   In fact, if we concentrate on contemporary art, this undoubted
   importance can be seen on at least three levels.
   The first is the central role which immaterial assets and knowledge,
   creativity and affections, relational and communicational talents
   assume for contemporary forms of production: artistic production
   cannot get away from this centrality.
   The second is the relationship between cultural production and the
   metropolis where the interlacing between town-planning and
   architecture, fashion and design, art and literature, in that
   productive social space par excellence - the urban basins - becomes on
   the one side a crucial element in the process of subjectification
   through which are built the multiplicity of forms of life which
   inhabit it, to the other decisive factor for defining the strategic
   positioning of each metropolitan area in the economic competition
   between global cities.

   The third is the relationship between the art market and the financial
   capital: at a global level, banks and multinationals are the among the
   main investors in a sector which today seems to be the only one to
   have not been even slightly touched by the crisis which has overrun
   the world system of money circulation.

   What we are now seeing is a complex capturing system, which capital
   has brought into play in the multiple flow of informal cultural
   production, from the appropriation of the ability to cooperate of
   individual intelligences and individual ways of life, to ensure the
   valorisation of what has been defined as the "symbolic collective
   capital".
   The complexity of these dynamics depends on a double mechanism of
   exploitation, where the first aspect is made up of the barriers of
   intellectual property and from each further moment of private
   appropriation of general social knowledge, while the second is the
   parasitic rapport which is established towards the creative production
   by those speculative interventions occurring in the body of the
   metropolis, there where state and private institutions, large events
   and art fairs, and cultural zones and meta-zones are established.
   Where S.a.L.E.'s experience wants to immerse itself critically, what
   the Multiversity event has decided to face, is called "culture
   factory", that is the place of valuation of cognitive capitalism, but
   it is only so in the measure in which it, before anything else, the
   place of creative subjectivity, of the expression of the multitudes,
   and consequently, the space of a face-to-face between creative freedom
   and autonomy of cooperation on the one hand, and the system of
   dominion and exploitation of this productive force on the other.

   In this light, Multiversity, will present, discuss and compare, with
   the most advanced European and global experiences, the first results,
   although partial, of an enquiry on the city's job insecurity linked to
   contemporary art and intangible work. Here the main question is to
   understand widespread behaviours and the methods of intervention which
   could change a social composition, already central in the forms of
   contemporary production, in a political composition. Examined also
   will be the core issues of the role of university training on the one
   side, and the communication network on the other side, played within
   the most complex organisation of the work of the "culture factory".

   An indispensable requisite for this discussion is the comparison
   around contemporary art understood as a "wider social institution":
   from the historical-artistic events which drove art in the post-war
   period from the transcendental space of medial specificity to the
   social space with its relationships of strength, to the relationships
   established between art, social movements and cultural activism
   outside of any avant-garde rhetoric, to the methods of capture by the
   institutional artistic system and by the financial ciruits of a vast
   heritage of critical thought and conflicting ways of life. For these
   reason, the Multiversity event will be organised into four seminar
   sessions:
   1. Art and activism
   This means problematizing historical events and contemporary forms in
   the interlacing between art and activism.
   Some of the questions to start off the discussion will be:
   Which road was travelled to reach the conception of the work as
   transcendental to a conception of the same as object, process or
   dynamic able to intervene within man's space-time and subsequently,
   within social processes?
   How did we go from a judgement of the work based on a topography of
   its material characteristics to one based, instead, on the analysis of
   its function, or even its efficiency in social terms?
   How does it function today, in this post-Ford era, activist art? What,
   once all avant-garde rhetoric is abandoned, is the position of art and
   artists with respect to movements?
   2. Art and the market: between creative freedom and financial capture
   This second point must necessarily move from gathering date on the
   size of the art market and its relationship with financial capital.
   Art is taken here as an example of paradigmatic value because of the
   extreme paradox which affects it: if artistic work expresses a maximum
   level of creative freedom, at the same time it is subject to maximum
   fixation within the financial capital.
   3. Art and metropolis
   This session will deal with the theme of the return of efficiency of
   artistic paradigm on social institutions. Naturally, it will be
   necessary to widen the spectrum of research to spheres such as design,
   fashion, graphics and architecture.
   We know how contemporary metropolises, defined by the important
   concentration of Knowledge and creative workers, feed the
   entertainment industry through a consistent substratum of informal,
   continually renewed, cultural production. On the other hand, a
   multiplicity of elements worked and re-worked by contemporary
   artistic-creative production establishes metropolitan life and its
   subjective forms.
   Using a formula, we could say that "art designs its own factory".
   And it is this continuous and irreversible cycle which we are
   interested in looking into.
   4. Art and multitude: for the enquiry into social composition,
   conflicts and organisation of live work in the "culture factory"
   This session will examine the core of the relationship between
   singularity and multitude, and between individual production and
   construction of the common.
   There are two research plans which will proceed in parallel.
   The first is historical-artistic and concerns the attempts which,
   starting in the 60s, were developed by artists in response to the
   rhetoric of the individual genius, up to the current platforms of
   collective production tied to the affirmation and diffusion of social
   hacking.
   The second plan concerns the survey into social composition of
   precarious workers which has grown around the culture industry's
   drive. From the students in the training circuits to temporary workers
   in the cooperatives for logistics and stage design, trainees,
   networkers, project consultants, freelancers, to that global class of
   artists and professionals intent on becoming an integral part of the
   international art system.
   In all this wide social galaxy, we will need to investigate the
   material conditions of life and work, needs and aspirations, desires
   and possible assertions.

   All this to get to the key point: how to transform this social
   composition into a political composition?
   Speakers: Marco Baravalle, Chiara Bersi Serlini, Antonella Corsani,
   Anna Daneri, Alberto De Nicola, Claire Fontaine, Brian Holmes,
   Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Hans
   Ulrich Obrist, Osfa, Matteo Pasquinelli, Judith Revel, Gigi Roggero,
   Devi Sacchetto, Pier Luigi Sacco, Marco Scotini, Marko Stamenkovic,
   Javier Toret Medina, Angela Vettese, Giovanna Zapperi.

   TIMES
   1) Friday 16 at 17:00 - Art and Activism

                           21:00 - Performance: Margine Operativo
   2) Saturday 17, 9:30 - Art and Activism (second session)
                            14:00 - Art and Market
                            17:30 - Art and Metropolis

                            21:00 - Performance....

   3) Sunday 18, 9:30- Art and moltitude.

   --
   S.ignsA.ndL.yricE.mporium
   Docks 187-188
   Punta della Dogana
   Venezia
   www.sale-docks.org

   www.myspace.com/saledocks187