Parallel to the political and economic tensions occurring across the globe, there has emerged a new sense for informal, makeshift, and minor economic and pedagogical structures, supporting aspects of direct democracy, shared economies, and commonwealth. These can be appreciated as countermeasures to the major structures of national governance, and open the way for new types of political subjectivity – a rethinking of the logics of agency and what constitutes acts of resistance.
This two-day seminar addresses these topics by focusing on the relation between the political and the personal, and proposes the political imagination as a gap for triggering speculative and propositional actions. Can we approach political crisis as an opportunity for generating and fostering new forms of sharing, affiliation, and the common good? What alternative stories might be crafted within the mechanisms of media and its representations of the crisis? Is there a state of imagination to be found within the economic drives of globalism?
Through performative presentations the seminar searches for alternative understandings of the political, giving voice to the ecstatic and the itinerant, the poetic and the antagonistic, the disappointed and the hopeful. Involving international artists, the seminar seeks to stage the possibilities and problematics of political subjectivity today.
