Ana Vilenica: Art and the Housing Question
lecture
Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 8:00 p.m.
Zagreb Network of Antifascists, Pavla Hatza 16
Neoliberal capitalist regimes and the crisis inherent to capitalism have produced, on a global level, urban space that transforms housing, as a precondition for reproducing our everyday lives, into a target for gaining profit and practicing oppression on the basis of class, gender, and race-based. One of the symptoms of this situation in Serbia within the past years is a cultural and art practice focusing on the issue of housing. By analysing artworks produced within projects of culture-led urban regeneration, those that take over the emptied institutional shells of the social (socialist) state, artworks that function as activist or social practices, and those that generate models for “tactical urbanism”, I will focus on the question whether forms of cultural production can become an instrument for defending common interests, and under what conditions, or whether the agents and engineers of such projects must always remain a tool for further degradation of our everyday living conditions. By juxtaposing the cultural and socio-political production of modern regimes of art and culture on the one hand, and of the regimes of housing at the capitalist periphery on the other, I will address the specific effects of these practices and their often contradictory outcomes.
Ana Vilenica is a researcher, theoretician, and activist. She has graduated from the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, and obtained her doctoral degree in the Group for the Theory of Art and the Media at the Art Academy in Belgrade, with a dissertation on the “Theories and Practices of Activism in Art during the Second Half of the 20th Century.” From 2012-2014, she worked as an associate researcher at the Art Academy in Novi Sad, on the project called “Urban Regeneration and Creative Work.” Editor of the journal for art, politics, theory, and activism uz)bu))na))) – www.uzbuna.org. She has also edited the book Postajanje majkom u vreme neoliberalnog kapitalizma [Becoming a mother in the age of neoliberal capitalism] and co-edited Na ruševinama kreativnog grada [On the ruins of the creative city] (s kuda.org).
Programme editor: Vesna Vuković
Sponsors: Croatian Ministry of Culture and Municipal Office for Education, Culture, and Sports (City of Zagreb)
