Making & Breaking, 1: Cultural Production and Social Change (2019)

“The first issue of Making & Breaking delves into questions on the role of cultural production as a contributing force for emancipatory social transformation. This is an urgent and difficult question today, given the ways through which much cultural production lubricates neoliberal operations since the 1980’s (especially it’s spurring of inequality); including the plight of critical practices whose modes of antagonism are frequently subsumed. As a result of decades-long policies, many systems of cultural production increasingly mirror or inadvertently participate in ideological machines supporting the status quo, foreclosing on just resource distribution, human well-being, not to mention our very planet.

It is against these tendencies that Making & Breaking probes modes of cultural production that engage with questions of social transformation. How can our current models for understanding art and cultural production be refashioned, and reconceived to live up to the claims of contributing to debates on social betterment? How can they help to redirect libidinal energies, that are often today co-opted by what Mark Fisher termed digital machines of “consciousness deflation”, to take on new formulations of futural desire and attachment? How does the category of human experience figure in our global plight, in view of the impersonalization that comes with increasing complexity?

In the first issue of Making & Breaking artists, curators and theorists reflect on these questions across a wide spectrum of cultural production and geographies.” (from the Introduction)

Contributions by Dulcie Abrahams Altass, Benjamin Busch, Florian Cramer, Katherine Cross, Max Dovey, Rhian E. Jones, Arjen Mulder, and Patricia Reed.

Edited by Sebastian Olma and Patricia Reed
Publisher Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt), Avans University, January 2019

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