ArtSpaceCity researchers from the Centre for Postdigital Cultures are hosting a new online seminar series. The series which is centred around the theme of ‘agency’ and includes presentations, discussions, film screenings and provocations will run from April 2024 to January 2025. Please join us online on 22 August 2024 at 14:30 BST for the second session.
This second session presents a conversation with Ryan Hughes (Coventry Biennial, Coventry UK) and Andri Christofides (Home for Cooperation, Nicosia, Cyprus) chaired by Marley Treloar (Centre for Postdigital Cultures) discussing how reflexivity within arts organisations creates processes of social, political and structural change.
AGENCY explores political autonomy in relation to the multifaceted ways that the city and urban space come into being. Given the depoliticization processes of neoliberal governments, exacerbated by divisions in the UK and the ascent of populist ideologies, and amidst ongoing culture wars, we ask what can we do to support democratic processes of city making?
The disruption created by deindustrialisation, the financial crisis, austerity, Trump, Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, and wars in Ukraine and recently in Palestine, is an opportunity to rethink the city beyond existing paradigms. The city needs a multiplicity of actors—independent of the usual suspects of professional politicians, bureaucrats, auditors, councillors, think-tanks, landowners, investors and retired middle-class professionals with experience in local and third sector politics—to participate in the (re)making of cities according to the specific needs and requirements of each situation. [1]
At a time when we are disillusioned about the power of our individual actions we want to question, what can be done and, how can we maintain hope for change towards more inclusive and equitable cities for all? We will explore the paradoxes of action and engagement given our own bodies which are those of artists, researchers, and academics. When thinking about agency we utilise Judith Butler’s [2] thinking in relation to performativity. Agency here is about embodying the autonomy to resist and/or subvert predefined social and political norms. Our hope is that it can lead to the repetition of actions in such a way that they contribute to the development of new ways of living together.
We envisage a more-than human perspective towards our world-making. We favour emergent assemblages of agents instead of autonomous and individual assets. In claiming this we are close to Karen Barad’s agential realism [3], where intra-activity and entangling of agency performs spatial and material practices.
Join the conversation at:
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Meeting ID: 379 775 844 683
Passcode: 3464ki
[1] How to Practice Culture-led Recommoning (2022). Partisan Social Club for Talk to the Land exhibition at Sirius, Cobh, Cork. [2] Judith Butler (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. [3] Karen Barad (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.