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Pedagogies of Care
Hosted and curated by Andris Brinkmanis, senior lecturer and the course Leader of BA in Painting and Visual Arts at NABA in Milan and Visiting Professor for the Art Academy of Latvia Curatorial Course, this series of encounters is designed around the legacies of historical figures – from Francisco Ferrer Guardia, Asja Lacis, Bertolt Brecht […]
Housekeeping Committee
This is a group of people who assist room curators in taking care of their rooms.If you have the time and interest to help someone realize their vision, their educational efforts, please join us. We will also be discussing the development of a critical project: the Mastadon server, aimed towards creating a publicly run social […]
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World Is… reading group will be meeting throughout 2024-2025, starting in September 2024. We will be joined by curators of the Museum of Care and guest speakers; and each meeting will be dedicated to one of David’s essays featured in the collection.On May 23rd, we will host a pre-launch […]
Fetish and Value
In the previous sessions we have covered the different aspects of David Graeber’s essay “Fetishism and Social Creativity“. This time we will follow David Graeber into his inquiry into “The very idea of consumption“. We will ask – how did this happen that the word used to describe the deadly disease came to be used […]
Pedagogies of Care
The third encounter of ‘Pedagogies of Care’ series will host artists and activists Mariette Schiltz and Edna Gee, both closely linked with ‘Isola Art Center’ and Isola Pepe Verde projects in Milan, Italy. ‘Isola Art Center’ was a free experimental and dynamic platform that combined internationally acclaimed contemporary art, emerging young art, and theoretical research with […]
Housekeeping Committee
This is a group of people who assist room curators in taking care of their rooms.If you have the time and interest to help someone realize their vision, their educational efforts, please join us. We will also be discussing the development of a critical project: the Mastadon server, aimed towards creating a publicly run social […]
The Virtues of Diogenes, Part 3: The Quest for Graeber's Golden Waistcoat
Building on the first two sessions, in this third session we will review what we have learnt about the world of Diogene’s philosophy, why it was rated by Graeber and focus on what it means for how we navigate theory and practice. For Diogene’s Cynics and later the Stoics, the mythical manifestation of how to […]
Fetish and Value
“When I conceived the idea of writing my own ‘Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value’ in the late 1990s, I originally … imagined its appearance would be followed by irate critiques from many of the principals insisting I had got their core arguments wrong, and a flurry of productive debates. Nothing of the sort ensued.” […]
Pedagogies of Care, Part 2
Militant Care. Pedagogies in action. A conversation with Contrafilé Group The second meeting of Pedagogies of Care project will host a conversation between Brazil based artists and activists Contrafilé Group (currently, Cibele Lucena, Joana Zatz Mussi, and Rafael Leona), Andris Brinkmanis, senior lecturer and the course Leader of BA in Painting and Visual Arts at NABA in […]
Housekeeping Committee
This is a group of people who assist room curators in taking care of their rooms.If you have the time and interest to help someone realize their vision, their educational efforts, please join us. We will also be discussing the development of a critical project: the Mastadon server, aimed towards creating a publicly run social […]
The Virtues of Diogenes, Part 2: Character Creation
In the second session, we will explore the world of Diogene’s philosophy by creatively comparing Diogenes Cynics with his contemporary Xenophon’s Cynegeticus. We will speculate on both these dog-associated philosophies and imagine what they might tell us about the worlds and the ecologies they imply. We will be supported in this by anthropologist Avi KBH, […]
Fetish and Value, Part 2
“When I conceived the idea of writing my own ‘Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value’ in the late 1990s, I originally … imagined its appearance would be followed by irate critiques from many of the principals insisting I had got their core arguments wrong, and a flurry of productive debates. Nothing of the sort ensued.” […]
Events list
Housekeeping Committee
This is a group of people who assist room curators in taking care of their rooms.If you have the time and interest to help someone realize their vision, their educational efforts, please join us. We will also be discussing the development of a critical project: the Mastadon server, aimed towards creating a publicly run social […]
Bullshit Jobs, Part 2
Is your job killing you? Do you feel the crush of spiritual violence when at work? Are you a duct-taper, box-ticker, taskmaster, flunky, or goon? We’ve got the place for you. Join us. Bullshit Jobs: A Reading Group, where your humanity will be restored. Capitalism and Communism: Where Bullshit Jobs Prevail How, in the Soviet […]
Climate Change: Is it a Beat Up?; Or Will It Beat Us Up?; And Is There a Way to Beat It? (Brain Trust lecture #2)
Economists like Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus claim that global warming of 3.8C by 2100 will reduce GDP by a mere 5 percent. Climate scientists like Tim Lenton describe 3°C of warming as “catastrophic”. Who should you trust? Come along and find out from the author of Debunking Economics, Prof Steve Keen. Also learn how […]
Roy Bhaskar’s ‘Enlightened Common Sense’ and ‘From Science to Emancipation’ / How to Take Over the “David and his Philosophers”
In the first part of this session we’ll discuss the relationship between Roy Bhaskar’s dialectics (outlined in chapter 6 of Enlightened Common Sense) and David Graeber’s discussion and use of Marx in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value (page 100, page 69, and other mentions of Bhaskar in the text). In the second part, building […]
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DEBT POLITICS IN GREECE AND ROME – READING MICHAEL HUDSON’S “THE COLLAPSE OF ANTIQUITY” PART 4
In the fourth session we look at how public finance was taken over by oligarchs and how Sparta’s last kings tried and failed at reform. This closes our discussion of Greece as the spotlight turns on a much bigger predator – Rome. Again we try to apply David Graeber’s framework from Debt – The first […]
MATERIAL PHOTOGRAPHIES READING GROUP
The Material Photographies Reading Group meets regularly online to explore critical thinking/making around the photograph in its multiple forms and dynamic manifestations—to welcome new ways of thinking and celebrate the increasingly complex photosphere we inhabit. All are warmly invited to attend! Please find all the details below. As always, do get in touch for the Meeting link and […]
Why Do We Play? The Origins of Self-Consciousness, Freedom, and Morality
‘Play as a principle of nature does not necessarily mean adopting any sort of milky utopian view. The play principle can help explain why sex is fun, but it can also explain why cruelty is fun. As anyone who has watched a cat play with a mouse can attest, a lot of animal play is […]
Housekeeping Committee / Mastodon Assembly
This is a group of people who assist room curators in taking care of their rooms.If you have the time and interest to help someone realize their vision, their educational efforts, please join us. We will also be discussing the development of a critical project: the Mastadon server, aimed towards creating a publicly run social […]
Another art world: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity
On November 28 2023 Nika Dubrovsky gave a lecture at the Staedelschule. The lecture was based on a text that Nika wrote with her late husband, David Graeber, which analyzed the current state of the Art World, where the promise of liberation is immediately replaced by a structure of exclusion. But much more importantly, this text analyzed […]
The State We’re In (Part 2): Social Progress in Chile With or Without the State?
Across the world people often try to use the powers they have been granted by the state to bring about social change. And sometimes they strive to go beyond the state to create autonomous enclaves. In this session, facilitated by Fiona Harrington, Fernando Quintana will discuss recent attempts to replace the Chilean constitution, originally imposed during the 1973 military […]