Commons / Solidarity
Seminar
For safety reasons related to the prevention of the spread of Covid-19 the seminar will take place online.
PUBLIC EVENT
Access link / Password: 798039 / Capacity: 500
Keynote lecture by Yayo Herrero
Antigones against the monsters of heartbreak. Imagine everyday utopias in times of pandemics
Monday, 22 June 2020, at 6 p.m. live streaming / Zoom platform
Language: Spanish with simultaneous translation to English
COVID-19 arrives riding on a crisis of multiple interconnected dimensions that place humanity in a civilizing emergency. At the heart of the problem is a way of conceiving the economy, politics and culture at war with life. The magnitude of the problem is such that we are at a crossroads where the options that are taken determine the decent survival of most human beings and many other living beings. Imagining horizons of desire that may be compatible with the material conditions that make them possible is an urgent task. Ecofeminisms, decoloniality and the gaze of those that have historically been subjugated can make this imagination possible.
All the sessions of the seminar will be recorded and published on the Glossary of Common Knowledge website.
The Glossary of Common Knowledge is a project of the European confederation of museums L’Internationale initiated by Moderna galerija in 2014 and organised cross-sectionally from working seminars and public conferences. The goal of the project is twofold: to compile a glossary of art terminology that differs substantially from what is found in the existing literature on art, and to do so in collaboration with institutions and individuals from Europe and other parts of the world who will propose terms relating to their own practices and contexts, to share them and put them into a collective discussion.
Each edition begins with a public conference, followed by several working days, in which a group of invited participants who act as "narrators" proposing new terms around a given "referential field”. On this occasion, the conference will be given by the anthropologist, social educator and ecofeminist activist Yayo Herrero, and the seminar intends to deepen the field dedicated to the commons, focusing this time on the notion of “solidarity” as a practice but also as a political position to be problematised.
In times of war, economic collapse, natural disasters or pandemics like the current one, calls are made for solidarity, which, however, should help us respond to the current state of emergency through the creation of alliances to face the times to come. People unite through solidarity in repressive or violent political contexts, economic conditions of exploitation, or to overcome grief after natural disasters. But calls for solidarity do not only appear as a reaction in times of exceptional difficulties. Solidarity is at the heart of our project as a society, as the labor movement, feminisms and decolonisation processes have shown throughout the world.
The current Covid19 situation invokes the need for concrete solutions (basic income, universal healthcare, regularisation of migrants and refugees, right to housing, redistribution of reproductive and care work, etc.) that oppose the reduction of aid to individual acts of charity that have no systemic consequences. Individual acts can mitigate part of the problem while perpetuating the cause of social upheaval — global inequality in late capitalism.
Curators:
Zdenka Badovinac (Moderna galerija), Jesús Carrillo, Ida Hiršenfelder (Moderna galerija), Bojana Piškur (Moderna galerija)
Participating narrators:
Zdenka Badovinac (Moderna galerija), Miha Blažič - N'toko, Jesús Carrillo, Kike España (NMCARS), Magdalena Fragnito, Jennifer Hayashida (Valand), Yolande van der Heide (Vanabbe), Yayo Herrero, Gal Kirn, Javiera Manzi, Pablo Martínez (MACBA), Bojana Piškur (Moderna galerija), Theo Prodromidis, Rasha Salti, Natalia Sielewicz (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw), Onur Yıldız (SALT), Joanna Zielińska (M HKA)
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía organisational team:
Manuel Borja-Villel, Sara Buraya Boned, Mabel Tapia
Organised by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), Moderna galerija (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and the L'Internationale confederation.
The Glossary of Common Knowledge is a part of a four-year programme Our Many Europes led by L'Internationale confederation of museums with its partners Valand Academy (University of Gothenburg) and National College of Art and Design Dublin. Supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory.
