An overview to The Geopolitical Turn: Art and the Contest of Globalisation
Conference speakers: Dario Azzellini, Bureau d’ Études (Léonore Bonaccini and XavierFourt), Ursula Biemann, Angus Cameron, Alfredo Cramerotti, T.J. Demos, Alex Farquharson, Mark Fisher, Janna Graham, Sara Motta, George Osodi, Oliver Ressler, Alex Vasudevan
Conference Schedule
10:00 – 10:10 am
Welcome
10:10 – 10:40 am
T.J. Demos
In this presentation art historian, critic, and co-curator of the exhibition T.J. Demos will explore the question of what the geography of advanced global capitalism looks like today, with reference to the work of artists included in the exhibition. He will address the notion of uneven development in geographical discourse and explore the diverse representational models--from experimental cartographies to reinvented documentary practice--put forward by artists in order to chart the processes and effects of neoliberal globalisation.
10:40 – 11:25 am
Evidence and Imagination: the urgency of geopolitics and the necessity of geopoetics
Alfredo Cramerotti
Over the past five years Alfredo Cramerotti has written about the aesthetic merger of contemporary art and the news media. By adopting the ubiquitous tropes of interviews, graphic mapping, and Magnum style photography an increasing number of artists have borrowed from these visual languages to present their work into a context closely aligned with investigative journalism. Drawing from his recent book Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009, Intellect) and select works from Uneven Geographies, Cramerotti will be speaking about the growing overlap between global news media and contemporary art. By addressing this topic Cramerotti will seek to answer a number of questions including: Does such an integration of art and journalism emancipate art from a closed sphere of discourse allowing it a more social and political dimension? Does the use of an investigative methodology within contemporary art practice shift an understanding of truth and subjectivity? By borrowing from forms of news media, what new modes of exhibition practice are artists, curators, and writers enabling to develop cultural relationships between the global relevance to local issues?
11:25 – 12:20 pm
Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler with Sara Motta
Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler have made three films in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez’s inauguration in 1999. Each of these films (Venezuela from Below, 2004; 5 Factories – Worker Control in Venezuela, 2006; Comuna Under Construction, 2010) share a consistent theme that documents the practice of self-administration. In this Venezuelan context the films chart the successful formation of consejos comunales (community councils) and the co- or self management of factory labour. In Azzellini and Ressler’s films a new and self-powered society is documented through the testimony of the organisers themselves.
Informed by an acute awareness of their own local needs these organisers are buildingforms of self-government and production whose collective aim is to unsettle the uneven economies and political class. Adopting the style of grassroots documentary, Azzellini and Ressler’s films provide a unique counterbalance to the mainstream media coverage on Venezuela in Europe and North-America. The filmmakers will be speaking about these films and the local/international political processes embedded within them to Dr. Sara Motta.
12:20 – 1:00 pm
Mark Fisher
After the dismantling of the communist Eastern Bloc in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, capitalism has constructed itself as a global force with virtually no counterpoint. This mixture of political and economic systems has been steadily empowered to control nearly every facet of our personal and private lives. The wave of privatisation that now guides health-care reform, nationality, education, and culture seems so unstoppable that imagining an end to the world is easier than foreseeing the end of capitalism. What is Britain’s role in this uneven economic development and how can international political and cultural examples be applied to mobilize an alternative? Writer, theorist, and teacher Mark Fisher will be discussing these issues through examples raised in his recent book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zer0, 2009)
1:00 – 2:30 pm
Lunch
Please take a map from the conference desk of cafes and restaurants within walking distance to Nottingham Contemporary or have lunch at our Café Contemporary.
2:30 – 3:40 pm
Ursula Biemann and George Osodi with T.J. Demos
Ursula Biemann and George Osodi will be individually introducing their artistic practices. Biemann and Osodi will then be joined in discussion with Uneven Geographies co-curator T.J. Demos.
Ursula Biemann is an artist and curator whose work explores issues of migration, mobility, technology and gender. In her work Sahara Chronicle (2006-07) –included in Uneven Geographies – Biemann employs a number of documentary techniques to empirically present the clandestine journeys and sanctioned controls of a migration from the sub- Sahara into Europe. Through interviews, overlays of data, and conventional mapping techniques, Biemann’s works disclose the complex political, economic and social mechanisms of such human migrations. Biemann will be participating in a mini-artistic residency at Nottingham Contemporary with the University of Nottingham to conduct research for a new work on water resource management.
George Osodi’s photographs come from a tradition of reportage. He is an independent photo-journalist whose works from the series Oil Rich Niger Delta - on view in Uneven Geographies- graphically depict the degradation of land and human labour at the hands of the world’s largest oil companies. Osodi’s explicit images of the extreme poverty, corruption and violence resulting from economic greed often inspire conflicted impulses of both helplessness and hope. In addition to focusing on issues of the oil trade Osodi’s work has also documented on the unhealthy conditions of illegal gold-mining in Ghana and migratory human settlements across Africa.
3:40 – 4:20 pm
Angus Cameron on Goldin+Senneby’s Headless
Goldin + Senneby are an “identity resistant ‘framework for collaboration’” who designate others to speak, investigate, and write at their behest. This global network of collaborators ranging from curators and private investigators to pulp fiction writers and theorists contribute elements to sprawling projects that often reflect the alienating conditions of globalisation. By creating works of ‘documentary fiction’ Goldin + Senneby tap into a labyrinthian tradition of cultural production shared by Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and the secret society Acéphale founded by George Bataille and others.
One of Goldin + Senneby’s designated emissaries is the human geographer Angus Cameron. Cameron will be speaking about Goldin + Senneby’s project Headless of which a component is included within Uneven Geographies. This project is comprised of numerous elements such as lectures, business documents, and a novel. Each of these components trace the outline of Headless Ltd. an offshore company located in the former British colony of the Bahamas. Cameron will be speaking about his involvement with Goldin + Senneby, and about the political, economic, and geographical structures that maintain the notion of ‘offshore’ as a space external to, yet existing to sustain, the sovereign pressures of global capitalism.
4:20 – 5:00 pm
Counter Cartography
Bureau d’ Études with Alex Vasudevan
Bureau d’ Études (meaning literally ‘office studies’) is a group of artists who, for the past three years, have been based in Saint Menoux in the countryside. This site has been intrinsic to Bureau d’ Études for the ways in which it has developed their cartographic practice both globally and socially. Since 1998 Bureau d’ Études have worked from within a self-organised space of ‘free economy’ that was, in part, created out of frustration with the institutionalised and capitalist driven concerns of the art market. Collaboratively, these artists illustrate what the writer, activist, and theoretician Brian Holmes has named ‘a cartography of excess’. Their vibrant graphics echo Öyvind Fahlström’s politicised maps from the early 1970s and are meticulously researched to depict the intricacies, nuance, and connections between a range of dissident and state systems. To create these works Bureau d’ Études draw from a number of highly specialised and technical information sources such as think tanks, weapon makers, and satellite companies. Also essential to their work is the collecting of primary research through on-going collaborations with squats and hacklabs.
For Bureau d’ Études “A map is not just a thinking map but also a willing map and a feeling map.” By citing examples of their previous and current works, Bureau d’ Études will be speaking about their political position as cartographers with geographer Alex Vasudevan. Vasudevan will be positioning Bureau d’ Études’s work within a tradition of radical cartography that has acquired a new-found urgency.
5:00 – 5:45 pm
Wrap-up panel discussion with Janna Graham, Ursula Biemann, Mark Fisher, Alfredo Cramerotti, Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini. This group conversation led by Janna Graham will draw together numerous topics raised throughout the day and answer questions from the audience.
5:45 – 6:00 pm
Closing Remarks
Drawing together remarks and questions from throughout the day will be Uneven Geographies co-curators Alex Farquharson and T.J. Demos
Biographies:
Dario Azzellini
Dario Azzellini, researcher and lecturer in sociology and political sciences, author, filmmaker and artist. He has focused his work on processes of social transformation, movements, democratic planning, participatory democracy and workers co- and self-management. He published several books about Italy, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, privatization of military services, migration and social movements translated to several languages. He also directed several documentaries about Italy, Nicaragua, Mexico and Venezuela, the latest is Comunaunder construction (2010). He is co-editor of the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present. Azzellini has participated in many exhibitions, includingthe biennials in Prague, 2005; Gwangju, 2006, and Moscow, 2007. www.azzellini.net.
Ursula Biemann
Ursula Biemann is an artist, curator and theorist who's work focuses on borders, migrationand the global economy. She exhibits her work internationally and has published books on art practice in the field, video essayism, geography and the politics of mobility. Recent art research projects include Black Sea Files on the Caspian oil politics and Sahara Chronicle on transit mobility systems. Biemann is a researcher at the Institute for Theory at the Zurich University of the Arts. www.geobodies.org
Biemann is also showing at One Thoresby Street, presenting two video esays in her exhibition Containing Mobility, coordinated by Cryptomnesia. An event entitled Art, Politics, Migration on Thurdsay 6th May at BioCity sees her in conversation with John Jordan (co-founder of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination) and Colin Wright (lecturer, Critical Theory, University of Nottingham) who will each make a fifteen minute presentation, debate topics during an inter-panel discussion then open the discussion to the floor. The discussion will introduced by Professor Roger Bromley from The University of Nottingham.
Bureau d’ Études
The collective work, founded in 2000, of the Paris-based conceptual group, Bureau d'études, knits a special path between art, theory and research, most recently realising a number of diagrammatic wall charts on the ownership ties between transnational organisations and states, and synoptic views of the world monetary game. Bureau d'Études create a unique codification that transforms information into vocabularies of action and reflection. These vocabularies constitute a powerful message which tracing the underside of capitalist, dissident and anarchist positions. Their cartographies become collaborative tools to further uncover global power relations, and act to empower greater social exchange, dialogue, education and truth. http://bureaudetudes.blogs.labomedia.org http://laboratoryplanet.org/)
Angus Cameron
Cameron’s academic career began with a BA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute (University of London), followed by a Masters in International Relations and a DPhil in International Political Economy at Sussex. His first foray into Geography came in 1997 as a research associate at Durham University. He joined University of Leicester Geography in January 2001. Cameron’s research interests centre on the dynamic and dialectic relations between state, economy and civil society and the complex, overlapping spatialities of social, political, economic and cultural life. Since 2008, Cameron has been an emissary for Swedish performance artists Goldin+Senneby’s project ‘Headless’.
Alfredo Cramerotti
Writer, curator and artist based in the UK, Cramerotti's work explores the relationship between reality and representation across TV, radio, publishing, critical writing, photography and exhibition curating. Co-curator (as Chamber of Public Secrets - CPS), Manifesta 8 European Biennial of Contemporary Art; Curator, QUAD Derby; Co-curator of the collectives CPS Chamber of Public Secrets and AGM Annual General Meeting; Editor, Critical Photography at Intellect Books. His recent publications include the books Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing (2009) and Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness (forthcoming 2010). www.alcramer.net
T.J. Demos
Based in the Department of Art History, University College London, T.J. Demos writes about modern and contemporary art, and is the author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007). Currently a research fellow at the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts in Brussels, he is working on a new book on contemporary art and globalization.
Alex Farquharson
Alex Farquharson is Director of Nottingham Contemporary. Prior to this he was an independent curator and critic and a tutor and Research Fellow in the Curating Contemporary Art MA programme at the Royal College of Art in London.
Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2009) and the editor of The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (Zer0, 2009). His work appears regularly in New Statesman, frieze, Sight & Sound and The Wire. He teaches at the City Literary Institute and the University of East London and he is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre For Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His weblog is at k-punk.abstractdynamics.org.
Janna Graham
Janna Graham is Projects Curator at Serpentine Gallery where she oversees The Edgware Road Project, an international artist in residence programme in a London neighbourhood. Based at the recently invented Centre for Possible Studies, the Edgware Road Project invites collaborations between local and visiting artists and the people who live and work in the area. Collaborators create 'studies of the possible' which take the form of art projects, study groups, exchanges, performances, discussions and an ongoing free cinema school. In past lives, Graham has initiated a number of radical pedagogy projects combining popular education, participatory research and the arts. Graham is one of nine members of the international sound art collective Ultra-red and works with the Micropolitics Research Group in London. She is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Knowledge at Goldsmith's University.
Sara Motta
Sara Motta is a lecturer in Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations,University of Nottingham. She is also Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global and Social Justice. Dr Motta’s research focus is the politics of subaltern resistance, with particular reference to Latin America. She has researched social movements in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela, with the institutional left in Chile and Brazil and research with local community and movements in Nottingham.
George Osodi
George Osodi is a Nigerian photographer from Lagos, Nigeria. He studied Business Administration at the Yaba College of Technology in Lagos, before working as a photo journalist for the Comet Newspaper in Lagos from 1999-2001. In 2001, he joined the Associated Press News Agency in Lagos, and worked as their man in Nigeria for a number of years. In 2007 his project "OIL Rich Niger Delta" was invited to be in Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany.
Oliver Ressler
Oliver Ressler produces exhibitions, projects in the public space and videos which blur the boundaries between art and activism. His projects have been exhibited in solo-exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, Germany and Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; and in the biennials in Prague, 2005; Seville, 2006; Moscow, 2007, Taipei, 2008 and Lyon, 2009. www.ressler.at
Alex Vasudevan
Alex Vasudevan is a Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Geography at University of Nottingham. He is currently working on a book manuscript, Metropolitan Theatrics: Performing the Modern in Weimar Berlin in which he explores the relevance of historical performance studies to our understanding of the modern city. He is also working on a new project which seeks to retrace the historical and political geography of the German Hausbesetzer Bewegung (squatter movement) from the 1960s onwards.
