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A WORKSHOP WITH FRANCO BERARDI (BIFO)

After the earlier two workshops in the series our starting point is in the closed reality of European crises: the entrance of the bare reality of life’s precariousness back in the social experience, the acceleration of the Infosphere and the dismantling of social welfare, the exhaustion of possible at our disposal, social life becoming-swarm, and the consequent morphostasis, loss of our singular ways of becoming.

The workshop tries to elaborate further on the breakdown of the affective relation in language, the outsourcing and automation of memory, the impossibility of creating any conscious collective subjectivity, the lack of time for attention, sensuousness and pleasure, sex without attention, virtualization of symbolic exchange and their effects on human emotionality, imagination, bodily perception and the unconscious. How to think politics when the change is already taking place in our brains and hearts and imagination?

How do you invent a way out when there is no outside? Where to start when the plasticity of the biological, emotional and social human potentiality is turning into repetition and immutable sick permanence? How does something new begin when nothing new can begin? How to disconnect from the entanglement to the compulsive spasmogenic rhythms of semiocapitalism at the root of our cognitive and emotional mutation? How to reactivate the body of general intellect?

The workshop is an experiment in morphogenesis, form-generation, in setting up a relation between the emergence of a form and social transformation. What is the relationship between art and creation of new forms? What form can the emergence of new take when the processes and risks of capitalistic exploitation are already in the soul and form of independent life?
Franco Berardi, also known as “Bifo”, is an independent philosopher and media activist based in Bologna. For quite some time we have been working closely together in using contemporary art and contemporary artistic practices as examples, tools and inspiration of how to rethink economy and practices of social organization in the semiocapitalist context. Franco is the founder of the legendary magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970's, he fled to Paris where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980's he contributed to the magazines Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). In the 1990's he published Mutazione e Ciberpunk (Genoa, 1993), Cibernauti (Rome, 1994) and was the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org. Recently he has published for example: Felix (Palgrave McMillan 2008),The Soul at Work (Semiotexte 2010) and Poetry and Finance (Semiotexte 2012). His book Tietotyö ja prekaari mielentila [Infolabour and precarious states of mind] was published in the Polemos series by Tutkijaliitto, Helsinki 2006. He is a member of Robin Hood Minor Asset Management – Investment Cooperative of the Precariat and the coordinator of the European School of Social Imagination (SCEPSI).
PREPARATORY STUDY CIRCLE / Gallery Augusta, Suomenlinna

Wednesday 10.4. 17.00 – 19.00
Reading: The discreet charm of the precariat, Akseli Virtanen
Friday 12.4. 17.00 – 19.00
Reading: From arbitrary power to morphogenesis, Franco Berardi & Akseli Virtanen

CREATION OF NEW SOCIAL FORMS / Gallery Augusta, Suomenlinna
Wednesday 17.4., 13.00-19.00
The present context: the European process of de-civilization and the final defeat of the movement. Precariousness as de-evolution.
Thursday 18.4., 13.00-19.00
History of the general intellect: ideology, economy, social composition. The mind’s we. Neuroplasticity, an evolutionary problem
Friday 19.4., 13.00-15.00
From the sphere of history to the sphere of (de)Evolution.

KLUBI:
Friday 19.4., 18.00- , Becoming-Monster, Esitystaiteen keskus, Suvilahti.