Alla Kungens Hastar: A two-day seminar

ALLA KUNGENS HÄSTAR
Legacies of the Situationist International

A two-day seminar arranged by the Moderna Museet
With support from Allianz Kulturstiftung

December 1st and 2nd at Moderna Museet in Stockholm
4 pm to 8 pm in The Auditorium and in Pontus Hultén’s Study Gallery
Admission free

Skeppsholmen
Stockholm, Sweden

www.modernamuseet.se

Alla Kungens Hästar is a series of events, seminars and interventions that will investigate the legacies and the actuality of the Situationist movement, the most influential and, some would claim, the last of the European postwar avantgardes. A multinational project, it will attempt to trace the Situationist International and its network of associated sections and groups as they spread out across Europe.

Alla Kungens Hästar is co-organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. The project is initiated by Daniel Birnbaum and Kim West.

Avantgardes have only one sole moment; and the best thing that can happen to them is, in the fullest sense of the term, for them to have made their moment.
—Guy Debord

Often described as “the last avantgarde”, the Situationist International occupies a central place within postwar European culture. The movement articulated its position both within and in opposition to the emerging consumer society of the 50s and 60s, developing a number of highly influential artistic, philosophical, and political concepts for criticizing and subverting this society’s forms: the notion of a “society of the spectacle”, in which capital is accumulated to the point where it becomes image; the artistic method of “détournement” or “hijacking”, where elements of popular or established culture are torn from their contexts and employed in new, unsettling ways; the idea of a “dérive”, a “drifting” through the city that liberates other modes of existence within urban space—and so on. The importance of these concepts and models for contemporary art and thinking cannot be overestimated.

However, attempting to trace the different Situationist concepts and models, we soon realize that they originate from a wide range of places and contexts. In fact, rather than a movement in the singular, the Situationist International was enmeshed in a sprawling network of movements, where events occuring in the peripheries, in excluded or marginalized sections and constellations, were just as important as those taking place in the ideological center. Or, put in other words, rather than a Situationist movement, we could perhaps speak of an open, multifarious Situationist moment, whose genealogy remains largely untraced and whose virtualities remain hidden.

Alla Kungens Hästar is a series of events, seminars and interventions that will address topics such as these, with the hope that this may provide starting points for other readings, assessments and perhaps even extensions of the long moment of the Situationist International. It is conceived as a multinational project, which will attempt to trace the Situationist International and its network of associated groups, as they spread out across Europe.