CANCELLED: Pascal Gielen: Commonism – Organizing Artistic Life Beyond Creative Industry Policies
Unfortunately, we are canceling the public programme of the Reshape Intensive Zagreb that includes lectures by Renata Salecl, Vincent Liegey, Juliette Hennequin and Pascal Gielen, as well as announced walks and talks. The programme of the Intensive was primarily aimed to the participants of the Reshape project that are coming from various countries across the EuroMed region. Due to the current situation of the spreading of Corona virus across Europ, travelling and larger meetings represent an additional threat of the spreading of the virus. Although we wish not to contribute to the panic presented in some media, we are convinced that we should take the responsibility for the prevention of the further spreading of the infection. We apologise to all of those who planned to attend the Reshape Intensive Zagreb programme and announce that the lectures will be held as a part of other Reshape activities. The working part of the Intensive will be held online.
Since the financial crisis started at the end of 2007 many governments made budget cuts in the cultural and artistic fields. Inspired by the critical social theory of Herbert Marcuse (1964), these policy decisions are understood within an ideological framework as ‘repressive liberalism’. This is a (cultural) policy that on the one hand proclaims individual freedom, stimulates cultural entrepreneurship and embraces the creative city, but on the other hand, develops a large-scale decentralized control apparatus that strongly restricts individual and artistic freedom. Within this cultural policy creative labour itself can also be ‘instrumentalised’ as a repressive tool. In his lecture Pascal Gielen analyses the relationship between art, politics and the public space in the creative city. He also looks at how activists and creative ‘workers’ respond to this policy by organising themselves in alternative ways, inspired by what Gielen defines as the ideology of the commons. This ideology has its own aesthetics to (re)present ‘reality’, an artistic way to construct a new meta-ideology beyond neoliberalism with its neo-management rhetoric of realism.
Pascal Gielen (1970) is a professor of sociology of culture and politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University - Belgium) where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is the editor of the international book series Antennae - Arts in Society (Valiz). In 2016 he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. Gielen has published many books that have been translated into Chinese, English, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. His research focuses on creative labour, the common, urban and cultural politics. Gielen works and lives in Antwerp, Belgium.
The lecture is organized in collaboration with Zagreb Architects Society as a part of Reshape Intensive Zagreb in the framewowrk of the Reshape project co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
