LECTURE: “Civil Action Between Creativity and Criminality”, Pascal Gielen

The lecture “Civil Action Between Creativity and Criminality” is part of the workshop sessions and lecture by Pascal Gielen “ART BEYOND THE CREATIVE CITY / ART, POLITICS AND URBAN LIFE ” as part of the program” Art: Politics: Institutions: Body “,organised by LOKOMOTIVA-Centre for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture

As part of the session, the public lecture “Civil action between creativity and criminality” is organised on May 9 at 19:00
and closed workshops on topics “Macro-Sociological Changes and Global Culture” and “Macro-Sociological Changes and (Art) Institutional Shifts” on May 9 and 10, intended for a group of young professionals who are part of the program “A.P.I.B. ”

For more details:
https://artpoliticsinstitutionsbody.blogspot.mk/

General introduction into the Workshops/Lectures
Since the financial crisis started at the end of 2007 a lot of governments do budget cuts in the cultural and artistic field. Inspired by the critical social theory of Herbert Marcuse (1964), these policy decisions are understood within an ideological framework as ‘repressive liberalism’. That is a (cultural) politics that on the one hand proclaims individual freedom, stimulates cultural entrepreneurship and embraces the creative city, but on the other hand develops a large-scale decentralized control apparatus that strongly restricts individual and artistic freedom. Within this cultural policy creative labor itself can also be ‘instrumentalized’ as a repressive tool. In these workshops and lecture sessions Pascal Gielen analyses the relationship between art, politics and the public space in the creative city on a global level. He also looks how activists and creative ‘workers’ respond to this policy by organizing themselves in alternative ways.

LECTURE: Civil Action Between Creativity and Criminality

In his lecture Gielen analyses the relationship between art, politics and the public space in the creative city. He looks how artists and other creative ‘workers’ respond to this contemporary neoliberal policy by taking civil action in the grey zone between creativity and criminality. The lecture is based on a research Gielen did for the European Cultural Foundation about the role of art and cultural organizations in building a transnational civil space. The research resulted in an analysis of how civil action takes place and how art can play a pivotal role in a so called ‘civil chain’. The results of the research are published in the books No Culture, No Europe; Interrupting the City and The Art of Civil Action.

BIO
Pascal Gielen is full professor of sociology of art and politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University – Belgium) where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor in-chief of the international book series Arts in Society. In 2016 he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. His research focuses on creative labour, the institutional context of the arts and on cultural politics. Gielen has published many books which are translated in English, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

BIO of Gielen you can find at www.ccqo.eu – ‘Team’

Location: KINO Kultura
Time: 19:00