Future Climates #2

Graduating to Numbers (or How Grass-Root Organizations Intervene in Financial Affairs)

 

A symposium with Antonia Alampi, iLiana Fokianaki, Victoria Ivanova, Vermeir & Heiremans, and video contributions by Giulia Palomba, Galit Eilat and W.A.G.E.

 

Future Climates, State of Concept and KADIST come together to organize a day of presentations and discussions at KADIST, Paris.

 

Thursday, 23 November 2017, from 5.30 to 10 PM.

 

Are you interested in knowing how the use of financial tools can lead to emancipation from public subsidies and private donations for small-scale organizations and networks? Or how new forms of transparency and redistribution can be obtained through the use of financial design?

 

Invited by Kadist, Future Climates presents its second chapter titled Graduating to Numbers (or How Grass-Root Organizations Intervene in Financial Affairs), a day of presentations and discussions with Antonia Alampi, Galit Eilat, iLiana Fokianaki, Victoria Ivanova, Giulia Palomba, Vermeir & Heiremans and W.A.G.E.

 

The issue of low wages, exploitation of immaterial labour and self-exploitation, the use of symbolic value as a currency and what all of this means in terms of exclusion within the institution of the visual arts is a recurrent debate (even though more privately than publicly) with little effect on a structural level, in a field that seems to have transformed very little in the ways in which it operates and reproduces itself.

 

Future Climates was founded in early 2016 by Antonia Alampi and iLiana Fokianaki to address these matters, but particularly concerning precarity and inequality in relation to small scale not-for-profit organizations, by understanding how their surplus-value, for the most part produced by voluntary labour, may be profited by larger and socio-economically stronger organizations.

 

In this one-day symposium we will present and discuss examples of grass-root organizations, collectives and artworks that are experimenting with intervening into the derivatives market to become self-sustainable, or use block chain technology, while committing to ethical banking, transparency, horizontal forms of decision-making, collectivization and equal distribution of funds.

 

Inspired by the thinking of Arjun Appadurai, Enric Duran, Victoria Ivanova, Bonaventure Ndikung, Common Practice and Andrea Philips, among others, we will also address the urgent need for a wide-spread financial literacy – because we are bearers of financial markets already; the question is how to become makers.

 

Contributions in order of appearence:

Future Climates discusses its past research program in Athens and introduces its future plans towards constituting a core group for engineering a new small-scale nor for profit model to be adapted in places with weak infrastructures for arts and culture.

W.A.G.E presents WAGENCY, a forthcoming initiative to organize artists and institutions, along with buyers and sellers of art, around a shared politics of labor, by introducing new tools for self-regulation into both the non-profit and for-profit sectors that have international application.

Giulia Palomba will present the Cultural Cooperative Network, an international circuit designed to facilitate social and economic relations between cultural actors and to provide them with a common mutual aid fund as well as with complementary payment and credit tools for self-management, self-employment, and economic autonomy.

Galit Eilat discusses several blind-spots in the dependency between public institutions and the market.

Vermeir & Heiremans address their work at the intersection of contemporary art and finance markets, a narrative starting from the financialisation of the artists’ house and moving towards concerns over how to invest the surplus-value of art institutions.

Victoria Ivanova’s presentation will focus on financial reorganization as a key battleground in fostering a more diverse and sustainable art ecology.

 

Practical:
Kadist
19bis/21 rue des Trois Frères,
75018 Paris
+33 1 42 51 83 49
contact@kadist.org

 

More information…