Join us at e-flux for a new season of lectures and other events, featuring Tavi Meraud and David Kim, Eyal Weizman and Malachy Browne, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and Nina Rappaport, Jack Self, and Marco Bavaralle.
Program
What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It?
New York book launch with a response by David Kim and a performance by Tavi Meraud
Thursday, September 14, 7pm
Since 2009, need and care and desire and admiration—and love—have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, and made the subject of inquiry by e-flux journal authors. Join us to celebrate the New York launch of What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It, the eleventh title in the e-flux journal reader series with Sternberg Press—featuring contributions by Paul Chan, Keti Chukhrov, Cluster, Antke Engel, Hu Fang, Brian Kuan Wood, Lee Mackinnon, Chus Martínez, Tavi Meraud, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Kim Turcot DiFruscia, Paul B. Preciado, Martha Rosler, Virginia Solomon, Jalal Toufic, Jan Verwoert, and Slavoj Žižek.
Following a response to the book by David Kim, contributing author Tavi Meraud will present the performance Cor Chor Core, which takes as its starting point Julia Kristeva’s suggestion that “… a narrative is, all in all, the most elaborate attempt, next to syntactic competence, to situate a speaking being between his desires and their prohibitions… ”
“Investigative Aesthetics in Architecture and Journalism”
Eyal Weizman in conversation with Malachy Browne
Friday, September 15, 7pm
This evening marks the publication of Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, an in-depth introduction into the group and its practice. Founded in 2010, Forensic Architecture has developed a new practice for undertaking investigations into political controversies and human rights abuses. Using architecture, media, and algorithmic analysis, Forensic Architecture assembles complex evidence files from a variety of disparate sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. The group’s work has already exposed state violence and cover-ups in many places worldwide.
The evening will start with Weizman presenting the group’s most recent investigative work on enforced disappearance in Mexico, after which he will be joined by Malachy Browne of the New York Times and moderator Nick Axel to discuss new techniques in open source investigations and civil society forensics, and the impact they are having on investigative journalism.
Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss in discussion with Nina Rappaport
Monday, September 18, 7pm
Join us to celebrate the New York launch of Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act (The Green Box, 2017), a book by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss with a series of photographs by Armin Linke. The evening features a discusiion with author Jovanovic Weiss and architecture critic and curator Nina Rappaport, moderated by Nick Axel.
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disappeared in the early 1990s, to be Balkanized since under various new democracies. Each of these new democracies or states inherited monuments, buildings, and infrastructures that were tailored to the earlier socialist society. Having once been built in the name of inclusion of Yugoslavia’s soft socialism, today these buildings find a new life and a success more open-ended than ever intended by the offical view of traditional socialist rule.
“The Agony of Power”
Lecture by Jack Self
Wednesday, September 20, 7pm
What is the relevance of architecture to contemporary life? And what can it offer as a framework for how we think about the future of space, time, work and our relations with each other?
In The Agony of Power, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard spoke about our transition from a system of “domination” (based on alienation, revolt, revolution) to a world of generalized “hegemony” (in which everyone becomes both hostage and accomplice of the global market). The intense political instability, social anxiety, and economic uncertainty that has come to characterize our era is a product of this transition.
In an era when revolution is no longer possible, notions of incremental struggle through material change become once again relevant. Architecture offers a distinctive method for structural critique and positive assertion; a way of understanding how the built environment enforces and reinforces social power relations, and—crucially—how we can intervene in this process.
“Art, Populism, and the Alterinstitutional Turn”
Lecture by Marco Bavaralle
Wednesday, October 11, 7pm
What does populism mean when related to a work of art? This lecture will try to fill the “empty signifier” moving from Writers and The People, a book published in 1965 by the Italian thinker Alberto Asor Rosa. Asor Rosa was then part of the group of heretical Marxists called “Operaisti.” The goal of the book was to criticize the official leftist Italian writers (Pasolini among them) whose populist approach, dictated by the Communist Party following the Gramscian rule, was, according to the author, a cultural device that closed the path to the real revolutionary potential of the working class.
We will apply the interpretation grid of Asor Rosa to some examples taken from the art of the last twenty years, trying to analyze it under the point of view of populism. Can we define a populist approach in visual art beyond the clear and vulgar examples of propaganda? If an alternative has to be found within the contemporary art field, the term Alterinstitutional can help us define it.
e-flux lectures is a series of events dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming these still exist. Launched in February, the series has thus far included contributions by James T. Hong; Oxana Timofeeva; Suad Amiry, Thomas Keenan, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal; Rijin Sahakian; Adam Kleinman; Maria Lind; Franco “Bifo” Berardi; Sven Lütticken and Tony Wood; Ute Holl; Liam Young; Gleb Napreenko; Charles Mudede; Nora Sternfeld; Carolyn L. Kane; Ana Ofak; Vivian Ziherl and Elizabeth A. Povinelli; Gean Moreno; Jodi Dean; Andrew Herscher, Reinhold Martin, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal; Andrew Norman Wilson; Lee Mackinnon; Francesca Hughes; Masha Gesssen; Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn; Nathan K. Hensley; Ariel Goldberg; and Filipa César—available for viewing on the event pages.
Lectures will be streamed live here.
For a list of our upcoming programs, visit our website. For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.