[spectre] ATMOSPHERES OF PROTEST: Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art (CEU Budapest, 11 May 2012)

[Maja & Reuben Fowkes]

Atmospheres of Protest: Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art
Central European University Budapest, 11 May 2012

The upsurge of new popular movements from Egypt to Greece and Bucharest 
to New York has engendered an atmosphere of defiance and social 
creativity that has captured the global imagination. Beyond the ebb and 
flow of individual protest movements, this symposium asks whether global 
solidarity has really taken hold this time and considers the variety of 
ways in which contemporary art is embroiled through practices of 
dialogue and collaboration in the emergence of a common horizon and the 
imagining of a sustainable future. Providing a trans-disciplinary forum 
for discussion of the vital issues bridging the fields of art and 
environmental thought, the symposium sheds light on our understanding of 
the multifarious notion of sustainability, which appears by turns as a 
radical concept in global ecological thinking, can be recruited as a 
corporate strategy for green capitalism, and may act as a spur to new 
forms of social activism.

Speakers include artist-activists Noah Fischer and Maria Byck, who are 
members of the Occupy Museums Collective that protests against the 
domination of the interests of the 1% in the running of New York art 
institutions, as well as Berlin and Amsterdam-based /urbanibalists/ 
Matteo Pasquinelli and Wietske Maas, who will present a radical 
manifesto of urban cannibalism that seeks to recover the spontaneous 
living matter of the city. Curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes explore the 
creation of liberated zones and the relevance of ecological thought to 
new protest movements. Activist and writer on affective labour Emma 
Dowling will reflect on the sustainability of the protest movement in 
the light of the spread of locally-organised occupations of public and 
private space, while Tomas Rafa’s video archive of marches and 
counter-demonstrations illuminates the spectrum of contemporary protest.

The symposium is organised by curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes 
(Translocal.org) in collaboration with the Department of Environmental 
Science and Policy and the Centre for Arts and Culture at Central 
European University (CEU).

For more information see:
http://www.translocal.org/sustainability