Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Franco Berardi Bifo

Exhaustion has no place in Western culture, and this has become a problem, for exhaustion now needs to be understood and accepted as a new paradigm for social life. Its cultural and psychic articulation will open the door to a new conception of prosperity and happiness. The coming European insurrection will not be driven by energy, but by slowness, withdrawal, and exhaustion. It will be the autonomization of the collective body and soul from exploitation by means of speed and competition.

Ekaterina Degot

Ivan Mikhailov is quite upset by this turn of events. It is something incomprehensible to him that his factory, which had always fulfilled its production quotas for mineral wool, must now for some reason be turned into a museum, when it could just as well have gone on fulfilling quotas. At the opening of ISOLYATZIA, people consoled him by telling him that the factory’s new life was not a revocation of the past, but a continuation in a new form, because culture and contemporary art are in fact the new guise of industrial production. The head of the city’s Budyonny District went so far as to say that the advent of art at the factory was akin to Christ driving the moneychangers out of the Temple.

Liam Gillick

Politics and biography have merged. We are all tolerant of art that is rooted in specific stories. This is the inclusive zone where the artist plays his or her own perspective for a collective purpose. The drive is towards unhooking from who you are while simultaneously becoming only yourself. Some people can sleep with their eyes open. What does this process of constantly discovering yourself actually do? Is it a push for recognition?

Hans Ulrich Obrist

For some reason, most people have to believe that what they’re doing is going to last forever in order to find the enthusiasm to do anything at all. The only thing that changed was thinking of the temporary itself as a possible good, instead of an obstacle. A good dinner party is a Temporary Autonomous Zone. Nobody tells you what to do at a good dinner party. Nobody gives orders. Nobody collects taxes. It’s an experience of giving and being given to, of filling the body and emptying the mind. Having good conversation and good wine and so forth. This is already a TAZ, but you have to conceptualize it that way to be that way. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. But once you find that consciousness, the forms of organization begin to open up.

Martha Rosler

In her book Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, published in 1982, Zukin writes about the role of artists in making “loft living” comprehensible, even desirable. She focuses on the transformation, beginning in the mid-1960s, of New York’s cast-iron district into an “artist district” that was eventually dubbed Soho. In this remarkable book, Zukin lays out a theory of urban change in which artists and the entire visual art sector—especially commercial galleries, artist-run spaces, and museums—are a main engine for the repurposing of the post-industrial city and the renegotiation of real estate for the benefit of elites.

Hito Steyerl

We have to face up to the fact that there is no automatically available road to resistance and organization for artistic labor. That opportunism and competition are not a deviation of this form of labor but its inherent structure. That this workforce is not ever going to march in unison, except perhaps while dancing to a viral Lady Gaga imitation video. The international is over. Now let’s get on with the global.