Fri.Sat.Monday — Geo-aesthetics and politics
Comments Off on Fri.Sat.Monday — Geo-aesthetics and politicsFri.Sat.Monday — 07.21.14 — Geo-aesthetics and politics
CONTENTS:
0. Friday
1. Saturday
2. About Monday
3. About ‘le peuple qui manque’
4. Links and readings
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0. Friday
We will be meeting at 16Beaver tomorrow afternoon at 2pm if anyone would like to join
for an informal conversation with Stefan Cristoff. Stefan is visiting from Montreal and
has previously been in New York to share experiences from the Quebec student uprising.
He also was involved in presenting a booklet which included reports written on
experienes during the street protests as well as longer texts that gave background /
context to the student strike. This is an opportunity to just meet and discuss in an
informal manner. He will be hosting an event later in the evening at Interference
Archive on graphic art and Palestine.
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1. Saturday
This Saturday, for those of you who were part of the meeting a few weeks ago regarding
the attempts to make New York more dependent on Fracked Gas by bringing it through a
planned Rockaway pipeline … or for those who are interested in the antagonistic
processes necessary in reclaiming a common(s)….
Saturday, July 19th
Meet at 3 PM at Jacob Riis Beach and B. 169th St.
Tell neighbors, friends, family
The power is in our hands, not the regulators’, the corporations’, or the
politicians’!
Construction won’t be done until the fall, according to the company’s own
estimates. We can still stop the pipeline!
This Saturday, Rockaways residents, beach-goers, artists, anyone
concerned about the well-being of New York and the planet will gather
to demonstrate that we, not FERC or Williams Co., are the decision-makers on
the Rockaway Pipeline. We pledge to resist the construction of new
environmentally destructive infrastructure that threatens communities still
recovering from one of the worst urban natural disasters caused by climate
change to date, as well as the beach and nearby wildlife. Alongside this
looming monstrosity, we’ll create a space that gestures at the possibility of
a world other than the pipeline’s-a world in which self-sustaining
communities, not private corporations or rubber stamp agencies, determine the
use of land and space. This new world is already being built in the Rockaways
through the creation of workers’ co-operatives, urban farming projects, and a
community benefits agreement on new development. Resisting the pipeline is
about complementing/expanding this emerging zone of community autonomy, in
direct defiance of an attempt to use the crisis as an opportunity to push
through dangerous and unnecessary new infrastructure for the sake of corporate
profit margins and the United States’ jingoistic foreign policy objectives.
See you at the beach!
Info on the pipeline and its dangers that folks can put in flier format and
distribute:
https://textb.org/t/rockawayinfoforjuly19th/
Recent media coverage:
http://gothamist.com/2014/06/19/rockaway_beach_gas_pipeline.php
Queens residents fighting construction of Rockaway Pipeline
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2. About Monday
What: Meeting / Presentation / Conversation with’le peuple qui manque’
When: Monday July 21, 7pm
Where: 16 Beaver St., 4th Floor
Who: Free and Open to all
This Monday, we will have a conversation with Kantuta Quiros and Aliocha Imhoff from the
Paris-based curatorial collective ‘le peuple qui manque.’ This conversation will bridge
their ongoing concerns with art, border thinking, critical cartography, decolonial
processes, and the geopolitics of knowledge, with our current ongoing inquiry at 16
beaver into global networks of resistance, collective cultural production, and various
forms of the common(s) and commoning the city.
The following quote by Gilles Deleuze may best express these overlapping concerns, just
as it has served as inspiration for the very name of this collective:
“This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political
cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded, in the third world and
for minorities. Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task:
not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing
to the invention of a people. The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There
have never been people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves,
in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a
necessarily political art must contribute. (…) The cinema author finds himself before a
people which, from the point of view of culture, is doubly colonized: colonized by
stories that have come from elsewhere, but also by their own myths become impersonal
entities at the service of the colonizer. The author must not, then, make himself into
the ethnologist of his people, nor himself invent a fiction which would be one more
private story: for every personal fiction, like every impersonal myth, is on the side of
the ‘masters’. (…) There remains the possibility of the author providing himself with
‘intercessors’, that is, of taking real and not fictional characters, but putting these
very characters in the condition of ‘making up fiction’, of ‘making legends’, of
‘story-telling’. The author takes a step towards his characters, but the characters take
a step towards the author: double becoming. Story-telling is not an impersonal myth, but
neither is it a personal fiction: it is a word in act, a speech-act through which the
character continually crosses the boundary which would separate his private business
from politics, and which itself produces collective utterances.”
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image – Editions de Minuit, 1985. University of
Minnesota Press
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3. About ‘le peuple qui manque’
Le peuple qui manque (A people is missing) is a curatorial platform based in Paris,
France. It was created by Kantuta Quiros and Aliocha Imhoff in 2005, and operates at the
intersection of contemporary art and research. A people is missing was at the initiative
of numerous projects, such as events, exhibitions, publications, international
symposiums, film screenings and so on. Among their recent projects (2010-2014):
Afropolitan Histories of Art (Review Multitudes, issue 53-54, Spring 2014),
Géoesthétique (collective book, 2014, B42); and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
(2013, Centre Pompidou). A people is missing also edits and distributes artists’ films.
Since 2010, le peuple qui manque has engaged a series of projects dedicated to
geo-aesthetics, or the idea of contemporary art as a site of global knowledge
production. Accompanying a postmodern turn in social sciences, this focus sees
contemporary art as a laboratory for the renewal of scientific paradigms, technologies
of writings, sometimes capable of challenging forms of authority and regimes of
veridiction within scientific fields (such as Ethnography, History or Geography). It can
also overcome the difficulties of scientific disciplines in rendering certain archives
and so-called ‘minor knowledge’ intelligible and legible. The voices and presence of
minorities as political subjects acquire, in art, a heuristic and political value,
capable of reformulating a new “ecology of knowledges”.
The recent book they edited Géoesthétique emerged from these thoughts and looks back at
the spatial turn in contemporary art, both within cartographic and geographic artistic
practices today and spatialization of art history. Pursuing these thoughts, they are
presently developing a new series of projects, in the form of scenographies of recent
aesthetic controversies, considering curatorial practice as a display of theory, as well
as fictional diplomacy, a diplomacy between antagonistic fields of knowledge and
politics.
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4. Links and readings:
http://www.lepeuplequimanque.org/
Most of ‘le people qui manque’s texts and publications exist in French, but we include
here a few links with short descriptions and information on a few relevant works:
Symposium « Art et mondialisation. Transferts, catégories, archives et récits »
Entretien avec Joaquín Barriendos par Kantuta Quirós et Aliocha Imhoff