AFIELD Events are in-person gatherings organized in collaboration with members of the network in different parts of the world. They are aimed at realizing making new connections and facilitating mutual support across the globe.
On Thursday, January 25, from 7 to 9pm at KADIST Paris
This double book launch featured two recent publications: Kathrin Böhm’s Art on the Scale of Life and Kuba Szreder’s The ABC of the projectariat. Both authors tackle practical, conceptual and political questions regarding the living and working in a precarious art world. They not only offer a set of coordinates to navigate the perilous waters of global art worlds, but also imagine other ways of enacting artistic economies – more interdependent, inclusionary, and just.
Doina Petrescu began the evening with reflections on modes of composting present in Kathrin Böhm’s artistic practice, unpicking the variety of meanings associated with this rather agrarian term. She discussed “turning the pile” as a concept driving commoning, collectivity and criticality. Doina will also presented her recent publication Live Act: 10 Questions for the Future Here and Now (2023).
The evening continued with Szreder’s aleatoric performance based on randomly selected entries from The ABC of the projectariat. The performance was followed by a joint discussion and further exploration of key terms that are regularily used by all three speakers, such as precarity, interdependence, imaginary futures and diverse economies. All books were on display, with some available for sale.
Edited by Gerrie van Noord, Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson
Since the mid 1990s Böhm has expanded the terms of socially engaged ways of working to an unprecedented scale and breadth by co-producing complex spatial, visual and economic forms. These often entail the production and ongoing re-production of organisational infrastructures, manifested in different collectives. The book follows in the wake of a major collaborative exhibition that explored over twenty years of Kathrin Böhm’s practice across two phases at The Showroom in 2021, COMPOST. Kathrin Böhm: Turning the Heap and COMPOST: For Future Use. Emerging as a key outcome of this process and offering a significant addition to debates on contemporary art and architecture, social action and public culture, it brings together critical dialogue and reflection by internationally acclaimed contributors. Photographic, diagrammatic and typographic imagery run through the book, demonstrating the confident, joyful visual and spatial languages embedded in Böhm’s work.
Published by the Whitworth and Manchester University Press
The book isolates traits such as opportunism, neoliberalism, inequality, fear and cynicism at the root of the condition of the projectariat. This discussion is paired with a practical account of different modes of action, such as art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines. In this short lexicon, Szreder argues that just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.
The book brings together projects and initiatives that invent and implement, on their own scale, new modes of ecological repair and resource management, cooperative principles of production and distribution, models of governance of commons, collectively self-managed spaces and artistic practices used to produce alternatives and strengthen citizenship and cultural change. The book is addressed to all those who, in response to the multiple global crises, are committed to acting here and now, to change their way of living and working to reinvent a society that can preserve a liveable planet.
