(or How Grass-Root Organizations Intervene in Financial Affairs)
November 23, 2017
How can the use of financial tools lead to emancipation from public subsidies and private donations for small-scale organizations and networks? How can new forms of transparency and redistribution be obtained through the use of financial design?
Invited by KADIST, State of Concept in turn invites Future Climates to present its second chapter entitled Graduating to Numbers (or How Grass-Root Organizations Intervene in Financial Affairs), a day of presentations and discussions with Antonia Alampi, iLiana Fokianaki, Victoria Ivanova, Vermeir & Heiremans and also Galit Eilat, W.A.G.E. and Giulia Palomba through video contributions.
The issue of low wages, exploitation of immaterial labour and self-exploitation, the use of symbolic value as currency and its translation in terms of exclusion from institutions of visual arts, is a recurrent debate. One with little effect on a structural level, in a field that seems to have transformed only slightly in how it operates and reproduces itself.
Future Climates was founded in early 2016 by Antonia Alampi and iLiana Fokianaki to address such issues—particularly precarity and inequality within and between institutions of different sizes, and understanding how the surplus-value of small-scale initiatives, for the most part produced by voluntary labour, may be profited by larger and socio-economically stronger organizations. In this one-day meeting we present and discuss examples of grass-root organizations, collectives and artworks that are experimenting with the derivatives market so as to become self-sustainable, or use block chain technology, while committing to ethical banking, transparency, horizontal forms of decision-making, collectivization and equal distribution of funds.
Inspired by the thinking of Arjun Appadurai, Enric Duran, Victoria Ivanova, Common Practice and Andrea Philips among others, we will address the urgent need for a wide-spread financial literacy. Because we are already bearers of financial markets; the question is how do we become makers.
Contributions in order of appearance:
Future Climates discusses its research program in Athens and introduces its next step towards constituting a core group for engineering a new small-scale nor for profit model to be adapted in places with weak infrastructures for arts and culture.
W.A.G.E presents WAGENCY, a forthcoming initiative that will introduce new tools for self-regulation into both the non-profit and for-profit sectors in an effort to organize artists and institutions, along with buyers and sellers of art, around a shared politics of labor.
Giulia Palomba will present the Cultural Cooperative Network an international circuit, born through her participation in Future Climates' first chapter, designed to facilitate social and economic relations between cultural actors and provide them with a common mutual aid fund, as well as with complementary payment and credit tools for self-management, self-employment, and economic autonomy.
Galit Eilat discusses the weak points in the acceleration of “the chase for visibility,” and how these affect institutions, whilst proposing methods to maintain balance between visibility, the market and symbolic value.
Vermeir & Heiremans will present "Art House Index" and discuss fragments of their film Masquerade, a narrative on trust and confidence. The film focuses on the financialisation of the artists' house, which they have defined as an artwork in their practice which is at the intersection of contemporary art and finance markets. Masquerade is live-edited through the actual performance of the Art House Index, a financial tool that measures the value of the "art house."
Victoria Ivanova's presentation will focus on financial reorganization as a key battleground in fostering a more diverse and sustainable art ecology.
Limited seating. To secure your seat please email at assistant@kadist.org
The event is part of the programming for the exhibition State (in) Concepts at KADIST Paris.
Future Climates' will be publishing a book in 2018 with the findings of its first two chapters.
