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Events Lecture Series Participant Activities The educational program What Could/Should Curating Do is proud to announce lecture by Amelie Aranguren hosted by Kolarac Venue: Student square no 5 Date: December 13th 2022 18:00 Small Hall Between utility and emotion. Inland artistic practices. by Amelie Aranguren Amelie statement: In my talk I will talk about the Campo Adentro project that began in 2010 as an initiative about the need to think about the rural environment as a place for artistic creation and how over the years we have felt the need to face the reality and difficulty of living off the land. This is how we have our own agroecological production with a flock of sheep and the recovery of a village in the mountains that aims to be a collective agrarian and artistic production essay. But the commitment of the city is fundamental and thus arises the CAR, Centro de Acercamiento a lo Rural, our space in Madrid. This window to the rural is born with the purpose of bringing to the city the experience of self-sufficiency and sustainability of the agrarian tradition. The challenge of Campo Adentro is to create awareness of all that agricultural work and life in rural areas has to offer, an enrichment for both rural and urban areas. Inland flock in Casa de Campo, Madrid About Speaker Amelie Aranguren, head of artistic programming at INLAND’s Center for the Aproach to the Rural (CAR) in Madrid and Inland member since 2010. She has been coordinator of exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, head of Espacio Uno at the Museo Reina Sofía, a space dedicated to specific projects by emerging artists, director of Activities at the Fundación Federico García Lorca, a private foundation dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of the poet’s legacy and artistic director of the Max Estrella gallery. INLAND is a collective dedicated to agricultural, social and cultural production, and a collaborative agency. It was started in 2009 as a project about an organization that engages territories, culture, and social change, by Fernando Garcia Dory, artist and agroecologist. During its first stage (2010-2013) and taking Spain as initial case study, INLAND comprised an international conference, artistic production with 22 artists in residence in the same number of villages across the country, and nationwide exhibitions and presentations. This was followed by a period of reflection and evaluation, launching study groups on art & ecology, and series of publications. Today INLAND functions as a collective and works as a para-institution to open space for land-based collaborations, economies and communities-of-practice as a substrate for post-Contemporary Art cultural forms. Appearing in different forms in different countries, whilst dissolving individual agency in the collective, INLAND publishes books, produces shows, and makes cheese. It also advises as a consultant for the European Union Commission on the use of art for rural development policies while facilitating a shepherd and nomadic peoples movements, and is recovering an abandoned village in an undisclosed location for collective artistic and agricultural production. In 2015 it was presented at Istanbul Biennial, at Casco Art Projects in The Netherlands, PAV Torino in Italy and the Maebashi Museum of Japan. In 2017 it has been working at Contemporary Arts Glasgow, MALBA, Matadero Madrid, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, and developing field actions in Italy (TRANSART Festival Bolzano and Puglia) and at the Jeju Biennial, South Korea. Recently INLAND has been awarded the Council of Forms, Paris and the Carasso Foundation awards to finalise New Curriculum, a project devoted to training the artists and rural agents of the future. For 2019, it was presented at Serpentine London, Pompidou Paris, Savvy Berlin, Cittadelarte Milan and Casa do Povo, Sao Paulo. In 2020 is prepairing proposals for Baltic Art Centre (Newcastle, UK), Madre (Napoli), Istanbul, Urals and Kosovo Biennales and documenta fifteen. The event is free and open to the public. The WCSCD educational program and series of public lectures have been initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric. The lecture by Amelie Aranguren is supported by Embajada de España en Belgrado Project Partners We thank following partners for supporting selected participants for 2022 program: Romanian Cultural Institute. Artcom platform , Kadist Foundation, William Demant Foundation For more information about the program, please refer to www.wcscd.com Project contacts: what.could.curating.do@gmail.com Follow us: FB: @whatcscdo Instagram: @whatcouldshouldcuratingdo < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

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< Back SEEING THE INVISIBLE 5 Nov 2021 Alexey Ulko Alexey Ulko film – SEEING THE INVISIBLE Alexey Ulko , born in Samarkand (Uzbekistan) in 1969. Previous Next

< Back Virtually Driving Back in Time? 10 Sept 2021 Sinkneh Eshetu In May 2021 I Joined the Astrobus Ethiopia, on a driving trip across different regions in the country, on a project aiming to empower and connect young learners with science, art, and technology. This marked the third trip for Astrobus Ethiopia, and we journeyed to my home town – giving me the opportunity to rediscover cultural landscapes and reconnect to my fond childhood memories. All the three places targeted were special to me: Konso is my birthplace, Jinka is where my early childhood memories were moulded, and Arbaminch is a place I spent my junior and high school times. screenshot, May 14 2021 This is southern Ethiopia. This is a place of natural and cultural diversity. It is called by some a mosaic of culture for housing about 25 of the 81 ethnic groups in Ethiopia. That implies so much diversity in the ways of exploring and knowing, perceiving and expressing, valuing and living our shared reality. Here, one feels, time is not flat but as ragged as its landscapes. Some live on the hilltops, others at the hill bottom, still others in the valleys, the forests, the prairies, or deserts of the landscape of time, where times past, present, and future are superimposed. See there? An earth-bound-looking bushman, apparently alien to the whims and fancies of modernity, is talking to someone with a mobile phone. Did this mobile influence the way he sees the world? Does he know how his voice travels in space and time to link him with his distant friend? Very unlikely. I read somewhere what an anthropologist did a few years back at this very place. He showed the community a picture of their late relative. Everyone was excited to find a ‘proof’ that their late father or friend is invisible but still in existence. ‘This is his shadow;’ they reasoned. ‘If the shadow exists, the person responsible for the appearance of the shadow must also exist.’ The technology only served to reinforce their traditional belief in the existence of the soul after death. With the mobile, they might have found a proof for the way a human spirit transcends space-time boundaries, who knows. Among the central objectives of Astrobus are fostering critical thinking and exchange of worldviews. What does that mean? I was wondering how each member of the Astrobus team might be seeing these people and places. These are favourite destinations of cultural tourists and anthropologists. That makes you wonder why tourists, most of whom are from technologically advanced societies, are attracted to these communities. Could it be that they consider their coming here as going back in time to their origins as homo sapiens? Probably they have read the works of the historian Yuval Harari and believe in his theories: Homo Sapiens, originating in this part of the world, succeeded in conquering and ruling the globe with the strength of their stories. They may then assume that these people of the so called the Land of Origins loved the stories that showed their compatriots of 70 000 years past conquering the giants of Eurasia, the Neanderthals. So, they did not see the point in changing that story, hence their archaic-looking way of life. They may also predict, taking for granted that the coming of Harari’s Homo Deus is going to be a global phenomenon, these people may then be riding straight from the Era of crop or animal husbandry to the Era of Cyborgs, without having to traverse, like them, the twisted and tangled paths of feudalism, capitalism, socialism or a cocktail of these isms. I would not be surprised if they think so. For here, it is easy to assume that these traditions, having come thus far apparently resisting change, may continue to do so for years to come only to eventually submit to the irresistible global force. What would become of their stories and their worldviews then? Astrobus has made it clear that it is here to foster exchange of worldviews and not to change any. Still, each member of the travelling team might have his or her own view of these target communities and the aspired exchange. I did not ask, but it would be interesting if anyone of them might be thinking this trip as a virtual journey to our collective past. Our first stop was Arbaminch, a place noted for its landscape beauty, traditional weaving and music. Though things seemed to be disorganized at first, because the local volunteers who promised to help us organize were busy mobilizing people for the 6thnational election, we eventually managed to reach three schools in a day. That was a very empowering first experience for the travelling team. Next, we drove to Konso, my birthplace. This is a community of industrious people known for their terrace-building and settlement patterns that reflected their social organization, registered as UNESCO’s Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site for that reason. My fascination with the folktale of the Konsos gave birth to my first anthropological novel, Searching for Ella: Crocodile College , that explores how folktales, indigenous belief systems, and rituals could help ensure the resilience of people at the face of disruptive changes. Here, some of the travelling team members were hoping to stop by one of the traditional villages to get a glimpse of the highly esteemed traditional culture. With the interest of time, however, that idea had to be dropped. Where the Astrobus team had its event, the school’s science club also demonstrated its works – some herbal medicine and models of machines. That was underlined as a form of the aspired give-and-take. screenshot on may 15, 2021 Our last stop was Jinka. It was here that I had a hilarious childhood experience about film. It was a dark countryside evening. There was no power then. Except probably for the flickering stars and the distant glows of moonlight, all was dark. Once in a while, a strong light is turned on and off from a truck standing with its rear end facing an eager crowd of kids like me and no-less-eager adults. Three or four people, carrying a feeble flashlight, were struggling with a strange object on the truck, which I later learned to be a film projector. I was 9 or 10. That day in school, we were told that a film would be shown at the town’s marketplace at night and we should all be there. A film! I had no idea what that was. I do not remember even hearing the word before that day. Being a loner, I did not ask anyone what was going on. I strained my eyes staring on the truck and on the wheeled machine the people were fumbling with, hoping to see something interesting. I now guess the people had difficulty making the projector run. But then I thought that object, the projector, was ‘the film’ we were supposed to enjoy. My interest faded away quickly and I returned home soon not to anger my mom by staying out too late watching that boring staff. Later that night, my siblings who stayed behind spoke excitedly about the amazing things they saw in the film. I was mad to have missed the opportunity by mistaking the projector for the film. When that same film, which was on wildlife, was shown again six or so months later, I was awestruck. I thought film was some kind of magic. That experience was so enduring that it found its way to my latest novel, Catch Your Thunder: Rendezvous with the End – the film as a modern miracle local magicians must beat in order to keep on holding the upper hand in the market of miracle-making. Jinka did not change much from those old days. Yes, a few modern-looking buildings have made their appearance in town. TV and mobiles have long been commonplace and the internet is accessible for those interested and are cyber-literate. Certainly, there is no magic in films and pictures anymore. Though the workings of the technology might still be mysterious for many, nearly everyone knows that one can make his or her own ‘film’ or picture with a mobile. Jinka even boasts its own university now. However, if one drives a few kilometres to any direction from the town, one will find people living the most natural way, some even walking naked, apparently keeping their promise to their ancestors who went away eons ago to conquer the globe. This is the background that formed the student body Astrobus engaged with in Jinka. I was thinking of my first experience with film in this very town when a group of students talked about the films they were trying to make at the booth the filmmaker among us made them try their hand on a professional film production. I can only imagine what an impression this engagement might have created on the young learners privileged to attend the event. Exchange of worldviews? I am not sure how much of that happened. Generally speaking, most of us, even artists, went there with thoughts and tools refined at the background of a worldview that compartmentalizes reality with its fast-changing knowledge system. And these indigenous cultures see reality holistically with the lens of their slowly accumulated, millennia-long experience. If worldviews were demonstrable like paintings or telescopes, the difference would have been stunning. This would have been especially so if we had the opportunity to go to local communities with our high-tech tools and arts, as many of the team members wished to do. Unfortunately, however, that was not possible mainly because of financial constraints. In our preliminary survey tour, we managed to visit half a dozen indigenous communities. After visiting the Dorze and the Konso villages well known for their art of weaving, construction, and social organization, one team member asked, ‘why did they stop here instead of pushing boundaries to propagate their amazing ways of life?’ And one of us answered, ‘maybe they didn’t see the need to do that.’ That may not be a choice in this era of rapid globalization. It seems every indigenous culture must strive to be heard telling its own stories in order to survive as a culture and identity. Otherwise, its age-old stories would be lost for good in the noisy tale of money, science, and technology. Sinkneh Eshetu (penname: O’Tam Pulto) is a published author and landscape architect. Previous Next

< Back “Bor is burning” [1]: the political economy of IT in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia 20 Dec 2020 Robert Bobnič and Kaja Kraner Back to the future! At the entrance to the Bor copper mining complex (RTB Bor) where one of the pits is situated, a large board reads, “Politics of security and protection of the environment: life first, we have to care for our environment.” The signage is in Chinese and Serbian (though not its Cyrillic script). Nearby lies a monument to the victims of a labor camp in the Bor mine during World War II. The Third Reich was one of many who had dug a mine at this location within the past 7, 000 years, and when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia capitulated in 1941, they took over the mine shortly after, establishing around twenty labor camps known for a special kind of torture. People had to work barefoot and naked – some were executed: hung with their heads towards the ground as if to be some kind of monument. It is very quiet – almost too quiet – for a mine. As we look at the empty halls (which in the socialist heyday would have been filled with workers dining and changing clothes), two young engineers – one of them emphasizing that nowadays more female engineers work at the mine – ironically say, “we are going back to the eighties. ” After the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia, during the isolation of Serbia (owing to the international sanctions during the 1990s) and their period of privatization, RTB Bor was sold to the Chinese state-owned Zinjin corporation in 2017. Bor mining facilities is now under the process of reconstruction and automation as a part of Chinese investment in the Balkan region. Is this the coming of another wave of modernization, another acceleration – another colonization – as suggested by the vague perception of a Chinese techno-capitalist entry (through the Balkans) into Europe? Discussing the question of Sinofuturism, Chinese philosopher of technology, Yuk Hui, claims it “runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical thinking – ultimately, it is only an acceleration of the European modern project.” [2] It is therefore a project, which according to the moral attitude in the current age of ecological thinking, cares neither for life nor for the environment. Monument of the victims of labor camp at the entrance in Bor mine (left). Zinjin headquarter in Bor (right). One mine, 7, 000 years of cosmos A penetrated surface – the hole in the earth. Mankind not only got to his feet and looked up to the sky where he was blinded by the sun, but also began to dig into the earth’s past to exploit it for his own (re)production and preservation . We could say that to enter the mine is to enter geological and cosmological deep time – [the] accumulated dead labor of the cosmic economy, accessible only by the technics of mining conducted by the living labor of humans, tools, science, and machines. The latter is quite clear in the case of RTB Bor, where copper and gold mining dates back to at least 5000 BC. Nowadays, we can only imagine the importance of mining in the formation of different cosmologies from surrounding cultures during the prehistoric and historic, or premodern and modern, periods. During the modern era, the technics of mining not only became industrialized, but functioned as the basis for industrial technological development – mining, and nature in general, is a standing reserve for energetic and infrastructural potential. The latter holds true both for the heavily industrialized 19th century and heavily informationalized 21stcentury, where mining and data mining came to form a particular synthesis. Strictly speaking, mining could be understood as one of the most fundamental practices underpinning cosmotechnics. The concept of cosmotechnics was coined by Yuk Hui as a departure from the epistemological, social, and material framework of the European project of modernization. The latter was based on the ontological difference between nature and culture by means of modern technological development and its corresponding way of technological thinking, in which technics is understood as a mediation tool between the order of nature and order of culture. In this regard, it is important to note that cosmotechnics (as a concept and methodology) emphasizes a cosmological understanding of technology, not an anthropological one. This fundamental change in conceptualization – the elimination of the basic human-centricity, characteristic of Western modernity – became possible when the whole world (nature and cosmos included) began to function as a giant computational machine. For this reason, Hui is not conducting a backdoor exit through some nontechnological return, but rather, suggests an exit through technics itself. In the middle of technological geneses – as is modern technology – lies an entire cosmos of the totality of nature and technics: a particular technological genesis as well as a particular cosmology, i.e., the way different cultures understand the universe and comprehend the order of things, be it in the form of myth, magic, or science. In the specific case of Europe, the entire cosmic totality of nature and technics includes understanding the technology which endowed particular nation states with their competitive advantage in the colonial and economic subjection of the rest of the world. These are indistinguishable from capitalist modes of production. While developing the concept of cosmotechnics, Hui’s initial question asks why there was no technological development in China as it happened in the West, given that China had material conditions for such a development. In embarking on an answer, he suggests that the reason lies in the different cosmology of Chinese culture. It is devoid of the concept of technology as operated and understood in the West (beginning with the famous Greek techne , until its synthetic finalization at the start of the 20th Century with the end of metaphysics by cybernetics, as understood by philosopher Martin Heidegger). In this sense, China’s current technocapital power, and corresponding Sinofuturism, is therefore based on the appropriation and acceleration of the Western concept of technology after the Opium wars and late socialist modernization. Cosmotechnics encapsulates diversity, however not in the form of cultural diversity (the idea of multiculturalism itself being the product of modernization and colonialism), but in the form of technological diversity. Thus, the question of locality is wedged open (again, not locality as a result of cultural identity, but locality as the product of technical means). However, Hui states: “Cosmotechnics is not simply about different ways of making things, for example, different techniques of knitting or dying,” it is above all, “the unification of the moral and the cosmic through technical activities. […] This cosmological specificity must be rethought beyond astral physics, beyond the conceptualization of the universe as a thermodynamic system; it also reopens the question of morality beyond ethical rules, which are added posteriorly as constraints to new technologies. Technical activities unify the moral order and the cosmic order; and by unification, I mean reciprocal processes which constantly enforce each other to acquire new meanings.” [3] This is one way to say that technology is not neutral – not only in the sense of its use but also its existence. Perhaps this also means that cosmotechnics functions more as a perspective and less as a concept, and for that reason cannot be transmitted from one place or history to another without alteration. Prehistoric mining tools in Museum of mining and metallurgy Bor (left). Zinjin flag at the entrance to the mining hole (right). Balkan, time and (deep) time again This is where our initial question comes in: can we reconstruct a specific Balkan cosmotechnics? The formulation of this question emerged precisely from the specific case of RTB Bor and is of particular importance when considering at least two distinct elements: (1) the extreme duration of mining activities and natural resource exploitation ranging through many different cosmologies, cultures, politics, and economies; (2) the period of modernization, which unfolded during the existence of socialist Yugoslavia. The latter is the focus of the current stage of our research. The modern history of mining in Bor started in the late 19th century, when a rich Serbian industrialist, Djordje Vajfert, was looking for gold. He [mostly] found copper, though some gold as well. French capital soon entered and the French Company of the Bor Mines, the Concession St. George, began mining in 1904. In Bor you can still see the old flamboyant French houses where French management lived. In comparison, workers were all living in wooden housing. But technological development and modernization in Bor came with the birth of socialist Yugoslavia. The mine was nationalized in 1945, and the industrial town was gradually built around it. Due to the importance of mining in modern industry and the resulting “cult of work”, Bor attained a special status within Yugoslav culture and its collective imagination. It is this status, and subsequent turbulence of the postsocialist period, that now leads it to face Chinese technological investment as the inscription of Bor in global technocapitalistic unification (which rejects cosmotechnical difference). This is the starting point for opening an inquiry of whether we can speak of a specific Balkan socialist cosmotechnics, i.e., a specific local understanding of technology. The question is important because it transcends the entrapment of Balkan and socialist Yugoslavia tradition in the form of cultural curiosity (from being part of the globalized multicultural world in which socialism ceased to represent a threat to the Western capitalist – and from the start, a technocapitalist – project). Still, Balkans is the name of a specific cultural and political locality where mainly South Slavs have resided for centuries under distinct mythological traditions and religious cultures. Due to its geographical position (and resulting unique political and economic position), the Balkans has been of special importance for many imperialist powers. The region as a whole also holds the position of the Other to either/both the West or the East, and besides that, has always been “out[side] of the world”: free-floating in space, endowed with a nonhuman and noncivilized imaginary. After the period of political unification in the 19th century and the consequently established Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the early 20th century, the region fully integrated under the banner of [a] socialist project, which in case of Yugoslavia acquired a specific positionality between the Western and Eastern bloc – clear in the fact that they implemented a Western technoscientific (cosmotechnical) projection in a supposedly socialist way. If we propose the idea in this way, we must differentiate the alleged unity of the European modern objective based on a specific unifying concept of technology. In other words: we must consider – and question – the difference between the capitalist and socialist objective of modernization. The key question is therefore: are there any differences in how socialist projects enacted an understanding of cosmos and nature through technical means? Since there exists an overlapping sphere of technological thinking between capitalist and socialist alternatives – materialized especially in the totalizing science of cybernetics, which functions as an epistemic unified cosmotechnics without a specific locality – we can also pose an additional question: did socialism enact specific cosmotechnics when it implemented technological and cybernetic thinking? Since [the] Bor mine was one of the first industries in Yugoslavia where cybernetic thinking and computer technology had been installed (the earliest example of Yugoslav computational modernization), we can lay the basic methodological groundwork: contrasting Heidegger’s understanding of technology (which already totalizes the concept of technology on a philosophical level) with Marx’s understanding of technology. From this, and by referring to the implementation of computer technology and management automatization in the industry when examining the Bor mine, we can pose the following question: why did technological progress in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia slow down at some point? Components from Univac computer, installed in Bor mine in late 1950s. Source: Visa Tasič, Principal Research Fellow of Mining and Metallurgy Institute Bor. Why did technological progress in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia slow down at some point? By posing this question, we are directly referring to the development of computer technology at RTB Bor as explained by one of our colleagues, a researcher and a former employee at the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, dr. Dragan R. Milivojević: When I wrote the article “Half a Century of Computing in the Serbian Copper Mining and Metallurgy Industry” [4] for a very reputable American journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computering… and – when you write such an article, you send it and it is reviewed by the peer reviewers [who] demand you correct something, etc. – the thing they asked me the most was to explain where this interruption of our development occurred. They remembered us in the rank of Finland and Czechoslovakia, because from 1946 to 1950 those three countries – Yugoslavia, Finland and Czechoslovakia – were technologically at the same level. This is what they were most interested in, and of course I had to explain it a little bit, I had to find the literature on what was in those other countries, and I found out we really haven’t lagged behind at all. We are suggesting that the answer to this question can present a good starting point to emphasize specific understandings of science and technology within the framework of Marxism – the official ideologic, economic and political basis of “real existing socialism”. In the first phase, Marx’s, or more broadly, Marxist understanding of technology (from which the socialist policies regarding technological development in Yugoslavia stemmed) must be differentiated from Heidegger’s (who is predominantly considered the key philosophical representative of the modern Western understanding of technology). The main difference emerges from the fact that Marxism perceives science and technology in its indistinguishable relation to the capitalist mode of production, marked with the broader move from the perception of natural resources as the main source of value towards human resources as the main source of value . Science and technology in Marxism are therefore not so much understood in its relation to nature, but in relation to human nature, whereby presupposing the context of (in Foucauldian terms) governmentality and biopolitics – characteristic of the (Western) modern period. The latter can be understood as a condition of the possibility for Marx’s labor theory of value; Marxist perception of science-technology relation; the linkage of scientific-technological development with the problem of alienation; and especially the ‘institutionalization’ of the split between the manual and intellectual labor – broadly speaking: class perspective on technological development. The establishment of “human capital” (if we would use the classic neoliberal term) as a fundamental of Marxist understanding of technology and technology-nature relations, inevitably led to the (self)limitation of potentially exponential, technological socialist progress. Socialist technological “catching up” since the mid-20th century, driven by the logic of economic rationality, at some point clashed with the logic of the development of social relations. In the specific case of self-governing, socialist Yugoslavia, the latter can be especially seen in the formal equalization of IT experts with all other employees, which led to difficulties implementing critical technological innovation on a micro social level. Dragan R. Milivojević explains this as: […] It was a time of socialist self-management. That period was very interesting. I am not qualified to talk about it, but I can talk about my experience of that period because I’ve lived and worked in [it]: we had terrible difficulty putting an expert idea into practice because at [the] time it was ideologically necessary for all the working people to agree with that idea – all those employed in [the] particular organization. […] The complex organization of the joint work RTB Bor had 23,000 employees, in each relatively autonomous unit of RTB Bor, an assembly of working people had to happen – an assembly of all of the employees – and more than 50% of them [must] vote for this idea. The voice of the lady who [made] coffee and my voice were considered equal. It’s funny but it was a reality. [5] The Socialist “monopole” of state politics/party over the economy, or more specifically, workers’ involvement in the management of factories and their development, in its first phase (at least in theory) tried to reduce established differentiation between intellectual and manual labor by including workers in the decision-making processes. In the case of RTB Bor, the latter can be explicitly perceived by (in all the big factories in Yugoslavia) the mandatory worker’s magazine which shared all crucial information regarding the company’s leadership; investments; its annual loses and profits, etc. The transparency of the factory’s management established this as a common matter, which effectively activated [the] worker’s sense of responsibility (worker’s self-management goes hand in hand with the production of their responsibility [i.e., moral training], which is specific to the socialization rather than individualization of responsibility), and presented that company or factory as a collective. Worker’s magazine “Rudar” (“The Miner”). Source: Bor Library (Bor, Serbia). Did socialism enact specific cosmotechnics when it implemented technological and cybernetic thinking? And could a Marxist understanding of scientific and technological development be the starting point to answer this question? At current stage of our research, we cannot fully answer to the complexities these questions unravel, and in general we see our outlined inquiry as relatively modest: primarily questioning the unification of modern Western cosmotechnics. However, we can further emphasize the Marxist determination of scientific and technological progress in four main goals and its consequences (consequences that can be also seen in specific case of RTB Bor’s socialist period). Those goals are: (1) joint control, (2) rational regulation, (3) minimum power consumption, (4) conditions that are most worthy of human nature and are best suited to it (i.e. demand creative work). [6] Technology itself is largely understood as a synonym for material production (and the opposite of a spiritual one), whereby the main idea is that a society’s material foundations (technical included) are closely related to social change. Technological and scientific development and progress are therefore potential tools for social development and progress; they are seen as a moving force of history, rather than mere liberation of humankind from nature. The industrial revolution of the 19th century, which established the idea of nature as a form of energy in service to the needs of humankind, is defined as a condition for the possibility of a higher form of society, i.e. communist society based on the ideal of creative work (for instance, as manifested in arts). Technology in Marxism is therefore not so much understood within the framework of the Greek techne (an activity that does not satisfy in itself and is, above all, the means of developing other activities. [7] For instance, ars as an activity where human freedom is manifested and this freedom is understood as freedom from the natural laws of necessity , or human’s general susceptibility to nature – including his own). Marxist understanding of technics and technology is not strictly instrumental, objectivist (nature as a means of supply for humans), or idealist. Namely, at least in principle and programmatic terms, Marxism eliminated the differentiation between techne and physis . Technology is therefore a means of human expression, a channel where human activity comes within proximity to the autopoietic creativity of nature, characterized by the merging of techne, poiesis and physis . Since the concept of cosmotechnics encapsulates the nature-technics relation, in this regard we could add that in a socialist society, the ideal of nature’s productivity is established as the very basis for [a] communist society ideal. Naturally, this is all theory, though it does prompt us to think on (socialist) practice or – better yet – real, existing socialist technics? Robert Bobnič is a Ph.D. Kaja Kraner is an independent researcher, lecturer, and curator. [1] The phrase is a reference to the Serbian alternative rock band, Goribor (literally translates to: Burning Bor ) originating from the town of Bor. The band got its name based on the impression of a large fire over the town due to the process of copper smelting slag being separated from copper. [2] Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics , Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018, p. 297. [3] Yuk Hui, Machine and Ecology, Angelaki 25:4, 2020, p. 54-66. [4] The article “Half a Century of Computing in the Serbian Copper Mining and Metallurgy Industry” was published in co-authorship with Dragan R. Milivojević, Marijana Pavlov (Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia), Vladimir Despotović (University of Belgrade, Serbia) and Visa Tasić (Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia) in IEEE Annals of the History of Computering in 2012. [5] From the interview with Dragan R. Milivojević, retired researcher of Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia conducted in Belgrade (Serbia) on 22th of October 2020. [6] Andrej Kirn, Marxovo razumevanje znanosti in tehnike (Marx’s understanding of science and technology) , Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1978, p. 226. [7] It is quite evident, Greek understanding of technics follows an already established class division of labor as the basis of antient Greek society: among others, the division between the free citizens and the enslaved ones executing manual labor. Previous Next

WCSCD 2023/2024 Educational Program Participants Anna Ilchenko (b. 1987, Sri Lanka) is a curator based in Belgrade. She holds MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London and MA in Art History from the Russian State University for the Humanities. Her curatorial practice is inextricably linked to visual culture studies, and implements interdisciplinary and transhistorical approaches. Over the years her line of work has been related to institutional critique, politics of memory and amnesia, notions of public space, and questions around image production and distribution. Her current interests also include the exploration of a large spectrum of performativity, body and gender issues in the age of Big Tech and queer practice. Recent residency projects and exhibitions include: In their own words: The Next Generation Women Artists Residency(2021–2022); General Rehearsal. A show in three acts from the collections of V-A-C, MMOMA and KADIST (Moscow, 2018); Vladislav Shapovalov. Image Diplomacy (Moscow, 2017); Space Force Construction (Venice, 2017); Process. Case Studies at the Museum. (Moscow, 2016–2017). Anna has lectured on methodologies of art history and artistic practices in museums and contributed articles to several art journals and online platforms. In 2019 she became a research fellow at Delfina Foundation where she further studied various residency programmes and cultural initiatives in London. Based on this research in 2021 she launched a residency programme for artists working at the intersection of theatre, music, dance and video. Asida Butba is co-founder of and a curator at SKLAD, the first contemporary art space in Abkhazia. SKLAD is a self-organized initiative, working at the conjunction of art, education and international cooperation with the aim of providing the best structure to support the capital Sukhum/i’s creative minds in the context of scarce resources and international isolation. Since it’s opening in late 2015 it has been home to 30 local and international art exhibitions and more than 250 public events such as film screenings, artist talks, lectures and workshops. These include In the shade of Big Trees (2022), Back to the Archives (2018), Deletion Marks (2017) and Games in the Open Air (2016). SKLAD has hosted 25 artists from across the globe and from 2016 has worked in partnership with the Swiss Artas Foundation. In the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, SKLAD now has to deal with a much harsher isolation and look for new ways to keep up the exchange. Laura Rositani is an art writer and independent curator from Vicenza, Italy. After a degree in foreign languages and literature, she attended a master in economics and management of art and cultural events at Cà Foscari University in Venice. She collaborated with several galleries, museums and foundations in Paris, Amsterdam, Bologna, Milan and Venice. After her experience at Fondazione Bonotto, she specialized in Fluxus and Experimental Poetry. She is co-founder of the art platform Contemporary Caring and art writer for the independent magazine Mulieris. Mirjana Savic is an artist working within the spaces of sculptural and installation practice. Attending to materials and material determination. Shifting, transforming, sliding. Contained and coming undone. Un-restricting materials and re-contextualising through transformative processes. Materials existing as themselves. Bringing attention to, observing; transformations. Revealing the materiality of materials. Focusing on potentials, on marks, columns, walls, weight, on dust, cracks, expansion, tension, space, bodies moving. Actions and reactions. Actions that ask questions. Stacking, folding, compressing. Interrogating the space. Waiting for what will happen. Transformations, whether they are physically visible or not. What happens when you construct an action (visible or invisible) to be open to the effects of chance? Actions: waiting to happen, in motion, on the verge but never arrive, eventual. Limits that reveal uncertainty, chance. Following a path of resistance. Mirjana has completed her undergraduate degree in Fine Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Her Honours research project at RMIT, 2022, considered a deep material investigation,focusing on actions that question and reveal potentials within structured spaces. I live and create on the unceded sovereign land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging. Andrey Parshikov (b. 1985, Podolsk, Moscow region) is a curator and art-critic, curator in V-A-C foundation, Moscow. He has made numerous (around 30) exhibitions in Russia, US and Europe, including General Rehearsal (in collaboration with curatorial group of V-A-C, KADIST and MMOMA, Moscow, 2018), A Rose Has Teeth in a Mouth of a Beast (APALAZZO Gallery, Brescia, 2015), Underneath the Street, the Beach (Fondazione Sandretto Re-Rebaudengo, Turin, 2015), We Have Nothing that is Ours Except Time (Central Park, Vienna), I Remember It Differently from You (MUZEON park of Arts, Moscow, 2013), Great Repression (White Box gallery, New York, and SB gallery, Paris, 2008), Ultra-New Materiality (MMOMA, Moscow, 2009). He has been a teacher in British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow School of Gender Studies, Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Russian State University for the Humanities. His texts were published in Springerin magazine, Manifesta Journal, Moscow Art Magazine, Art Chronicles magazine, Openspace.ru web-site. He made residencies in Fondazione Sandretto Re-Rebaudengo in Turin. He also made a class of Maria Lind and Juan A. Gaitan in Salzburg Academy. Сurator’s career of Andrey Parshikov began from the keen interest to the systems of creative industries and relations within them (Ultra-New Materiality project). Now, for a few years already, he has been involved in the issues of non-materialistic knowledge and options of its re-appropriation at right-hand discourse. This was the topic of the large exhibition in an ancient castle in Italy — A Rose Has Teeth in a Mouth of a Beast. Within investigation of everything magic and weird in art he also distinguishes the queer-theory issue as the last bulwark of the system as it is (capitalist, androcentric, religious) and post-internet practices which the curator directly relates to sealed knowledge, for ‘telepathy is just the well-developed peer-to-peer technology. < About Educational Program Alumni >

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities Lecture by Antariksa / KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Cross-disciplinary encounters Saša Tkačenko, Flags from the WCSCD series, 2018 * Cover photo: courtesy of Leiden University Libraries THE CURATORIAL COURSE WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? IS GLAD TO ANNOUNCE A PUBLIC TALK BY ANTARIKSA KUNCI CULTURAL STUDIES CENTER Cross-disciplinary encounters MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART BELGRADE WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2018, AT 6 PM In collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, the third lecture within the series of public programs organized by WCSCD will be presented by Antariksa—a historian and co-founding member of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The series is designed to offer new and different perspectives on the theories and practices of exhibition-making, as well as to discuss the existing disciplinary boundaries and ways to expand them. Antariksa will present on his research collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Since its founding in 1999, KUNCI has been deeply preoccupied with critical knowledge production and the sharing of this knowledge through the means of media publication, cross-disciplinary encounters, action-research, artistic interventions, and vernacular forms of education within and across community spaces. Antariksa will also address the precarious position that KUNCI inhabits, belonging to neither this nor that within the existing disciplinary boundaries while simultaneously attempting to expand them. The collective’s membership is open and voluntary, and is based on an affinity to creative experimentation and speculative inquiry with a focus on the intersections between theory and practice. ABOUT THE LECTURER: Antariksa is a historian and co-founding member of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center. He is the author of Tuan Tanah KawinMuda: HubunganSeniRupa-LEKRA 1950–1965 (The Relation Between Art and the Institute of People’s Culture in Indonesia 1950–1965) (2005). Antariksa is the 2017 laureate of Global South(s) du Collèged’étudesmondiales/FondationMaison des sciences de l’homme fellowship. His primary research is on art and the mobility of ideas in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia. His upcoming book is 日本占領期のインドネシアにおけるアート集団主義 (Art collectivism in Japanese-occupied Indonesia) (Kyushu University Press, 2018). http://kunci.or.id The WCSCD curatorial course and series of public lectures are initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric together with Supervizuelna. The lecture by Niels Van Tomme is made possible with the help of MoCAB and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with the additional support of Zepter Museum and Zepter Hotel. Project partners: The Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; GRAD—European Center for Culture and Debate; EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial, ’Novi Sad 2021 – European Capital of Culture’ Foundation and Zepter Museum. The project is supported by: the Goethe Institute in Belgrade; Istituto Italiano di Cultura Belgrado; the Embassy of Sweden; the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; the Embassy of Ireland in Greece; the Embassy of Indonesia; the EU Info Centre; Pro Helvetia – Swiss Art Council; and galleries Eugster || Belgrade, HESTIA Art Residency & Exhibitions Bureau, and Zepter Hotel, Royal Inn Hotel and CAR:GO. Media partners: EUNIC Serbia, RTS3. < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

< Back Art in Central Asia during the quarantine Nellya Dzhamanbaeva I went through several stages when the quarantine was announced. The first stage was an observation. Being far from the crisis, without full information about the virus, I was a bit skeptical about it. The next stage I faced, being closed at home was “okay, now I’ll have more time to do what I haven’t had time to do before.” After that came a realization of the situation, and I was scared of what would be tomorrow. How will I survive? After the acceptance of the inability to change the situation came recognition. That led me to desire to do something and continue to work in the frames of the current circumstances. I feel that this emotional portrait could be applied to the art institutions as well. On the last stage, there are two variations: one is a desire to move forward, another is anger and the inability to be flexible. It all depends on the management and creativity. Some institutions could change and adapt to the situation, even taking advantage of it; another couldn’t and will be stuck even though the current time shows an inability to avoid digitalization. This situation also applies to the art market and artists in general. One will find ways to extend their influence and gather more attention; others will die or, with time, will follow the path of those who invented new forms. In general, this is an entire period of being creative, finding new ways of collaboration and forming digital strategies towards sustainability. Currently, I am happy to see that now it is a time of art blossoming. Being isolated, people watch films, listen to music, draw, craft, play on musical instruments or learn to do it, read books (even online), take part in art challenges, etc. Art institutions are available as they never were before. They organize virtual tours, show exhibitions online, guide, show ballets, performances, hold live translations, and FREE! It is the right time to recruit people to art, teaching them about it, allowing them to try it, being accessible, and creating loyalty. This time should be considered as an asset and investment to the future bigger auditorium. When the crisis ends, they need to adapt and maintain attention, finding new ways to attract people to their events. What I see now is that every day there are new situations. Announcements appear from the governments, and it is a time of being fully conscious. In some countries, because of the quarantine and curfew (as in Kyrgyzstan), there is a lack of media information as they are limited in movements. This leads to misinformation, which is very dangerous. Politics tries to use this time to take more power and influence. Lack of education and knowledge leads to acceptance of everything they say. It is crucial to keep track of pulse and not allow overusing of power and strangling of freedom. People are unusually adaptive, and I see how those in power use this period to promote their draft laws that could be harmful. That is why I think it is essential to be actively involved in the situation and use art to talk about it. It is essential to inform people in a more understandable and accessible method for them – art. During the period of quarantine, I’ve created several artworks dedicated to isolation and how the government doesn’t do much for people. They keep them at home without support and lobby state legislations. One of the works called “How I see the government/ How government (doesn’t) see me” is about the isolation both for the government and for the citizens. It seemed that government doesn’t see the problems of the people left without work or any financial support. There are volunteer groups that have formed and support those in need, providing food, essentials, medicine, sewing protection costumes for doctors and face masks. Sympathetic people in diasporas from abroad have donated money to support those needing it. How government (doesn’t) sees me, Nellya Dzhamanabaeva How I see the government, Nellya Dzhamanbaeva At the same time, government initiates a draft law about the referendum to reform the government – parliamentary or presidential. That is definitely not an important topic today for the country, but somehow important for certain individuals. For example, those who are on the front line today – doctors and medical personnel don’t have enough equipment to protect themselves and still haven’t received promised increase in salary due to increased working hours. I’ve made a contribution to the doctors with public art installation “Crane” by placing it on the gates of the National Hospital. I’ve also made an art intervention to the pharmacies with the free distribution of self-made facemasks “Maska bar” (we have masks). It was a reaction to the lack of facemasks in the pharmacies after the quarantine declaration. They placed a sign “No masks. Maska jok,” and it was said that people flocked to buy masks. Often those in need don’t have an opportunity to buy it. There are already many mistakes that have terrible consequences. For example, raising nationalism towards Asian people. I see art institutions as influencers that build such cases to talk with their audience. My point of view is that they need to be socially involved; this is when they cannot ignore problems anymore and need to take a position and raise questions. A few Central Asian countries, artists, curators, and art managers have united and created a group where they could sell their artworks to each other for the available price. It is excellent, because they support each other. Another thing that some people find perspective to do in the current moment is invest in art as it is always an asset. I would say that we live in a strange time whereas usually there are pros and cons, but the most important aspect to remember is that tomorrow will be a new day and we could do something we have not done today. It is always possible to find the solution and do something meaningful to influence the future sustainability of art institutions (as well as personal). Nellya is an artist, art manager, and curator from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Previous Next

< Back Untitled 10 July 2021 Naol Befkadu Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba, Burtukan’s Coffee, 4-Kilo, July 2021 Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba, July 2021 Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba, Lime Tree Cafe, Kazanchis, July 2021 Stories form the Room, Addis Abeba, Enetewawek Cafe, Olympia, July 2021 In 2020 at the brunt of the lockdown Jasphy Zheng, an interdisciplinary artist living between Brooklyn and China, initiated a public art project, “Stories from the Room” exploring new modes of connecting people amidst pandemic induced isolations. Stories from the Room, writes Jasphy, is a participatory long-term project that collects personal writings about the shared experience of living through this “new normal” and builds a living archive that could be reproduced in different localities. An ongoing open call accepts submissions from all over the globe, unrestrained by language, form, or geographic location. In an experiment that pushes the boundaries of traditional archive, Stories from the Room adopts to the contexts of its host city as a living, malleable “Structural Monument”. Thus far, iterations of this project are held in Japan, Australia, China, Serbia, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia. The latest iteration in Addis Abeba, which began at the end of June 2021 takes an analog form, with writing stations installed in 3 selected cafes across the city. Story submissions were made with handwritten notes and voice recordings. Naol Befkadu who visited the project in Addis writes his reflection in free form, sharing his inner dialogue that unfurls in unexpected directions, from the significance of coffee culture in the city to the current temperament of people living in Addis – suspended between a raging war in the North of the country and a pretense of normalcy by the government. His musings offer an analytical reading of the project, and slowly combs through the ease and discomforts of public interactions in the current climate. Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba is presented by As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future together with Curtain project by Rockbund Art Museum and Contemporary nights. This edition took place between June 29 – July 5 in 3 Cafes, Burtukan’s Coffee in 4 kilo, Lime Tree in Kazanchis, and Enetewawek Cafe in Bole Olympia. Naol Befkadu , MD, is a physician based in Addis Ababa. Previous Next

< Back A disturbing Chinese dream: scattered thoughts on the cultures of involution and art institution in China 18 Feb 2022 Zian Chen 1. Just as Chinese social media widely popularized the notion of involution, or neijuan, literally “curling inward,” as a term critically reflecting the collective feeling of burnout, quite ironically, its Politburo policy makers has been promoting the concept of domestic circulation, nei xunhuan, as a response to their ongoing economic warfare with the United States and their sustained zero-tolerance policy towards Covid-19. There has been criticism of China’s apparent political seclusionism, although quite a few developmental economists supported its anti-liberalist spirit by connecting it to the dependency theory of the third world. 2. Lately, I’ve found that Chinese contemporary art practitioners actually relate to the feeling of involution in ways that exceed the presupposed instant lifespan of the term. For one, quite a few artists still remember the heyday of the worldwide “fever” for Chinese contemporary art when their studios were visited by international visitors on a weekly basis. They brought funding to China, be it private or public. Back then, Beijing was known as a mutational cosmopolitan city where everything can happen. The fever reached its height before the opening of Beijing Olympics in the summer of 2008, until an (un)timely financial crisis hit and suddenly burst the neoliberal bubble of immaterial wealth. By the time I relocated to Beijing in 2017, the city felt like an entirely different one from what I have heard. On top of the air pollusion and rising living expenses, the city government even attempted to wipe out the artists’ studios on the urban fringe, studio visits by occasional international visitors were often done with the intention to woo funding from Chinese collectors. For another, since Chinese authority rarely exercises its soft power by allocating government funding to its own contemporary art, the marketing strategies of the domestic private art institutions can only be involutional. https://www.bilibili.com/s/video/BV19a4y1577F A video documenting a cycling laptop user in Beijing’s top university. The original post was called “Tsinghua’s Involuted King” and was about those who code on bicycles. 3. It’s worth to note that it is the advent of memes in an internet environment that actively reshaped the term into a netizen’s glossary in September 2021––the highly restricted nature of Chinese internet against access to overseas networks might be seen as an infrastructural attribute of involution. If we look way back into the prehistory of the word, involution––following the sinologist Prasenjit Duara’s adaptation of Clifford Geertz’s term in the 1980s––was merely an academic definition denoting ever-intensifying labor practices in rice farming resulting from a rise in population. Involution is a process that can only result in fierce social competition without relevant technological breakthroughs that increase productive outcomes. The haunted metaphor of agriculture behind today’s all-too-informationalized signification of involution symptomatically suggests its ontological hindsight: it’s been definitive of the nation who once proclaimed its existence being “rooted in the countryside and agriculture” (yinong liguo), and young Chinese programmers have coined a new, self-deprecating term: “code farmer” (manong). Indonesian version of Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia by Clifford Geertz. 4. Prima facie, people seem to be celebrating the astonishing rate of growth in terms of contemporary art infrastructure outside of the nation’s traditional cultural center over the past decade. One can perhaps attribute this Chinese museum dream entirely to the worldwide notoriety of Chinese collectors active today, some of whom perform the dual role of both museum director and curator. A prototypical private museum in Shanghai in the recent years has employed a laissez-faire directorship and a part-time-based staff structure. Nosy media reports portray the museum boom as some kind of gold rush, with blue-chip artists (mostly white) as the gold diggers seeking to get their pricey works into the Chinese market. Their enormous bodies of work make it very easy to churn out proposals for retrospectives in those program-free private museums, tailor-made by the Chinese representative of their international gallery. With its blatant pragmatism emphasizing its efficacy in the dissemination of its cultural capital over critical insight, we can fairly proclaim a new genre of mediocre curating: the instant retrospective. Fortunately, many local veterans are aware that these are just what Eileen Chang called a “gorgeous robe, only infested with fleas on closer inspection.” Privately they all gasp at the unexpected change of the art scene in Shanghai, infested with such tasteless exhibitions in the course of a mere decade. Local veterans never die. They fight back with the eternal picture of the past by mounting exhibitions such as “The History of Chinese Contemporary Art: 40 Years”; some other newly founded museums have revisited the exhibition history of a city as its strategic “salute to the key stakeholders” (bai matou). As for me, I don’t believe these historicisms are really looking for any sort of answer in history; in fact, if there were any artistic movements today capable of propelling a historical moment like the Chinese avant-garde artists once did in the 1980s, perhaps we wouldn’t be dwelling so relentlessly on the past to begin with. 5. Some museums with real-estate backgrounds allocated their museum’s operation costs in their annual promotion budget. Surely, the city government would be delighted to brand your museum a local cultural cluster. That will be very creditable for the municipal cultural officers to boast as their outstanding achivements. In turn, the “philanthropic” investiment can be rewarded with a favor deal in acquiring lands. Another newly opened museum in a second-tier city enjoyed the support from their parent company, a developer whose investment primarily focused on lower-tier Chinese cities. Their staff once characterized such a marketing strategy as “xiachen shichang, or sinking market”: they hosted municipal officials to their art museum which was constructed at the top of a high-rise shopping mall, whose panoramic window provided a bird’s-eye view of the cityscape. How can an elevated view possibly lead to a sinking market strategy? The municipal officials would be very flattered to see the developer’s capacity to bring a Mori Art Museum to their city’s skyline. Now, a popular marketing strategy applied by the nation’s e-commerce business which successfully used low-end products to explore a potential market in lower-tier cities is translated into contemporary art circulation. 6. For some pessimists of Chinese museum futures, this model is doomed, considering the recent U-turn of the nation’s ever-tightening real estate policy, in response to its rising infertility rate. However, another case would point out quite an opposite tendency, considering that the venerable UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, after changing hands to a domestic private-equity firm, has now brought this sinking market strategy back on track. In less than five years, they have opened two other franchises with more to come in quite a few other lower-tier Chinese cities. Arguably, a leading museum has now transformed into one that is also conglomerated with professional museum management business. 7. In the latest managerial involution of the Chinese art philanthropy, what used to be a tight salary expense in securing an exhibition team has now been dissolved into temporary scholarships for recruiting a handful of talented Chinese curators-to-be. It might not be a coincidence that, in this scene, the word “neoliberalism” can rarely be seen in the exhibition press releases and critical essays. To put it in Brian Holmes’s terms for further analysis, the key to the culture of involution (as an extended manifestation of evolution) is its rendering of a “flexible personality” back to an “authoritarian” framework. And neoliberalism, the idea that has historically mediated the transition from authoritarianism to flexibility, has gone undetected by Chinese critics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLBkXYAB-lg Ryuichi Sakamoto at the UCCA Sonic Cure Concert 8. In a time of rising infertility rate of cultural reflexivity and criticality, what kind of culture does such involution grow? Perhaps we should consider a peculiar case from UCCA in a time of emergency and crisis. The pandemic had rendered online public events as a norm. But what marks the genesis of those online events? Back in the days when the pandemic was just beginning, UCCA actually organized the first online event of its kind, entitled “Sonic Cure,” at the end of February, 2020, on a live stream APP Kuaishou, a software with a particularly strong user base outside of China’s first-tier cities (thus bespoke the Chinese culture of involution par excellence). The livestream features, amongst others, the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto experimenting with an almost soundless vibration of a cymbal at his home in New York, and later, we got a glimpse of the instrument’s label in Chinese, “Made in Wuhan.” This sentiment mobilized netizens to project Sakamoto’s gesture as one of solidarity with the virus-affected city. He drew their attention to Wuhan as a major center of manufacturing for musical instruments, a fact which might have remained unknown to wider Chinese audiences. Now labeling as a “cymbal of unity,” the music clip facilitated re-imagining a place away from perceptions of hell. To us this viral image serves as an example of good contamination; it also demonstrates that, under Covid-19, there has been a considerable change in approaches to art making, from an emphasis on production to one on sustained practice. Previous Next