Together
Organized by Afield
In a thematic statement for “Together,” the inaugural Afield Study program held in summer 2021, 2017 Afield Fellow and programmer Massimiliano Mollona (Mao) wrote:
“To a certain extent, the radical political imaginary inaugurated with the Paris Commune in March 1871, 150 years ago—based as it was on notions of solidarity, commoning, cooperativism, gender equality, and general reciprocity—turned out to be Eurocentric (reflecting the supposedly superior point of view of Europe), anthropocentric (assuming human mastery over nature), patriarchal, and heteronormative. But can its terms be revitalized from a postcapitalist, ecological, and non-heteronormative perspective?
Following the feminist economist J. K. Gibson-Graham, I propose that we consider postcapitalism as a ‘non-capitalocentric’ and non-Eurocentric understanding of the world—as differentiated, queer, and in ongoing transformation—as well as a set of tools and practices related to the ‘socialization of the economy,’ such as universal basic income (UBI), crypto-economy, peer-to-peer and gift exchange, and cooperativism.
Both art and anthropology operate at the threshold—in the ‘zone of contact’—between the human and more-than-human world, engaging in practices of dialogical interpretation, micro-encounters, political prefiguration, and practice-based theory-building and fabulation. What are the skills that artists and curators (and anthropologists) can bring to imagine and implement a postcapitalist world?”
Emerging from “Together,” this video series consists of three public talks delivered by guest speakers and three Afield Trips, virtual one-on-one exchanges in which one member of the Afield network “visits” the context of another. Afield Study emerged from a desire within the Afield network to open up the existing program to more accessible and horizontal forms of sharing resources and pooling ideas and practices. The annual program sought to nurture synergies between like-minded socially engaged practitioners, allowing for mutual exchanges of skills and knowledge around common themes. The 2021 program was divided into three strands: “Images as Assembly,” “Ethnographic Encounters and Pedagogies of Unlearning,” and “Mutual Economies.”
Featuring Sevinaz Evdike (Rojava Film Commune) and Binna Choi, Filipa César (Mediateca Onshore) and Massimiliano Mollona, Awa Konaté and Maya Claire Scherr-Willson, Caroline Woolard, Apolonija Šušteršič, and Elizabeth Povinelli (Karrabing Film Collective).
View the full series on Classroom.
Classroom is a series of video programs curated by art schools, educators, artists, and writers. Each program assembles films, interviews, lectures, panel discussions, and documentaries from a variety of sources to engage with themes relevant to contemporary art and cultural production.