Reclaim the Imagination! Aesthetic Politics in Social Movement
:: Sunday October 25th :: London :: 6:30-7:30pm :: Main Hall in the Kobi Nazrul Centre
As part of the This is Not a Gateway Festival
Autonomous politics have a long and rich relation with artistic production and movements. From Dada through Reclaim the Streets, aesthetic politics have been essential in expanding the collective imaginations of revolutionary movements, turning social resistance into joyful encounters, communicating rage at injustice with poetry and beauty. Come join us to celebrate the release of two books that explore the ongoing relation of radical aesthetics and politics:
Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today by Josh Macphee (PM Press), a major new collection of contemporary politically and socially engaged printmaking, and
Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life by Stevphen Shukaitis (Autonomedia / Minor Compositions), an philosophical inquiry into the formation of collective imagination in social movement organizing. Josh and Stevphen will present and discuss their books while engaging in a broader conversation about art and politics with Anja Kanngieser.
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Josh MacPhee is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, designer and activist currently living in Brooklyn, NY. His work often revolves around themes of radical politics, privatization and public space. He regularly produces posters and graphics for political groups and events, as well as to sell on Justseeds.org, a political art collective he helped found. He organizes the Celebrate People's History Poster Series and is often in front of his computer designing books for PM Press.
Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor. For more on his work and writing, see
http://stevphen.mahost.org.
Anja Kanngieser is a cultural geographer, who is involved in political and social collectives in Australia and Germany. She has been working on examining the intersections between aesthetics and activism, specifically German activist groups that use aesthetic techniques as a means of articulating their dissent. She is also involved in the future archives project, and works with installation and radio.
Minor Compositions:
http://www.minorcompositions.info
Autonomedia:
http://www.autonomedia.org
PM Press:
http://www.pmpress.org
