BE.BOP: Black Europe Body Politics (2012-2018)

“Be.Bop: Black Europe Body Politics, a project of Art Labour Archives, is a decolonial transdisciplinary and indisciplinary curatorial initiative based in Berlin with an international impact through presentations in major cities across three continents.”

“Active in the international cultural arena since 1997, Art Labour Archives has been passionately involved in the production and theorization of performance and the moving image from a Black Diaspora perspective.

In the vision of its founder, Alanna Lockward, disciplines are meant to facilitate each other’s dismantling by means of constantly challenging its own claims to legitimacy. This paradigm inversion places collective knowledge creation as a central ambition. In this sense, the optic and praxis of Art Labour Archives is to surpass the expectations of the society of the spectacle and its insatiable appetite for visual and sensorial stimulation. Instead, the dozens of publications, exhibitions, screening programs, workshops and seminars conceptualized and produced by Art Labour Archives in the last seventeen years, have offered liberation, healing and redemption as a viable alternative.

In short: our journey is one of experiencing “art” as a labour of love and mutual examination and recognition beyond geographical, discursive and disciplinary thresholds. Between 2010—2018 Be.Bop has been presented in conferences, seminars and different public events in three different continents thanks to the support and faith of our partners, participants and friends.” be.bop=”” “is=”” an=”” enterprise=”” led=”” by=”” curator=”” alanna=”” lockward;=”” a=”” collective=”” of=”” artists,=”” curators,=”” artivists=”” and=”” activists,=”” social=”” theorists=”” humanists.=”” decolonial=”” project=”” healing,=”” learning=”” love.=”” network=”” with=”” the=”” middelburg=”” summer=”” school=”” aesthesis=”” in=”” bogota=”” durham=”” (duke=”” university)”=”” (walter=”” mignolo,=”” advisor).=”” curated=”” lockward=”” publisher=”” art=”” labour=”” archives,=”” berlin,=”” 2012-2018=”” Publisher

Catalogues:
The Skin Thing, 2012, event website
Decolonizing the “Cold” War, 2013, event website
Spiritual Revolutions & The “Scramble for Africa”, 2014, event website
Chronology, 2012-2015
Call & Response, 2016, event website (2)
Coalitions Facing White Innocence, 2018, event website

Near Futures Online, 1: Europe at a Crossroads (2016)

“Europe at a Crossroads, the pilot issue of Near Futures Online, examines the recent history and potential fate of the two faces of “crisis” in today’s Europe, namely: the resistance and eventual surrender of the Greek government to the dictates of its creditors, and the growing tensions regarding the reception of asylum seekers and the place of immigrants in the EU.”

“Near Futures Online, the online companion of Zone Books’ Near Futures series, is a forum dedicated to the analysis of the challenges borne out of national governments’ and international institutions’ responses to some critical events – the financial crisis of 2008, the “Arab Springs” of 2011 – as well as ongoing developments such as climate change and soaring inequalities. Organized around a specific question, each issue of NFO brings together scholars, journalists, political activists, and artists, and includes contributions belonging to different genres and using a variety of media – essays and reportages, interviews and dialogues, photo essays and videos. Contributors are invited to address questions raised by NFO through an engagement with particular debates, histories, policies, and actors as well as to examine their possible trajectories in the near future.”

Edited by Michel Feher, William Callison, Milad Odabaei, and Aurélie Windels
Publisher Zone Books, Mar 2016
Open access

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transversal, 06/13: A Communality That Cannot Speak: Europe in Translation (2013) [EN, DE, FR, ES, PL, SR, HU]

“What is at the core of the European crisis today? The trouble with the Euro, as the ruling elites want us to believe? Wrong! The crisis is not about the common currency, but about the current commonality. Europe not only lacks a common language to collectively respond to the crisis, or a common public space to mobilize joint democratic action against its disastrous social consequences. It fails, above all, to address the very commonality of today’s capitalist crisis that now returns to Europe after having long been displaced to other parts of the world, outsourced to those “others” who were not, and still are not, supposed to enter a truly shared sphere of commonality. Hence, when today, caught in crisis, the European modes of speaking and decision-making fall apart into a cacophony of national languages and a chaos of parallel political realities, they simultaneously keep silencing the very commonality of the question of commonality.

It has been claimed that translation can offer a solution to the enigma of linguistic and political commonalities. But what kind of translation? Certainly not the one that simply serves the communication between allegedly homolingual communities and thus reproduces the already existing regimes and imaginaries. So how can we think of another kind of translation, one that addresses a non-aggregate community of foreigners, migrants of all sorts, but also all those who are becoming increasingly foreign to their own “native” languages, cultures, societies and political institutions: a translation that evokes a new mode of sociality still in search of its political actualization?”

With contributions by Boris Buden, Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, Myriam Suchet, Loredana Polezzi, Peter Waterhouse, Arat, Rubia Salgado, 1. März – Transnationaler Migrant_innenstreik, Nicole Doerr.

Publisher eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna/Linz
Copyleft
ISSN 1811-1696

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