2021 Together

Living under a pandemic, we are learning new imaginaries and collective practices revolving around our bodies, and new rules of intimacy, solidarity and proximity. In the current condition of radical uncertainty, we also experience a common refusal to go back to normality – the model of continuous growth, hyper financialization, flexible labour and over-consumption that generated much social injustice and ecological disruption.

And if the explosion of Black Lives Matter into the civic realm following the murder of George Floyd last summer shows that democracy cannot be kept in lockdown, violence against women, lesbian, gay and queer subjects and instances of a deeply engrained structural racism are increasing, asking us to rethink the whole model.

To a certain extent the radical political imaginary inaugurated with the Paris Commune in March 1871, exactly 150 years ago, based on notions of solidarity, commoning, cooperativism, gender equality and generalized reciprocity, turned out to be Eurocentric (reflecting the supposedly superior point of view of Europe), anthropocentric (assuming human mastery over nature) and patriarchal and heteronormative. But can these terms be revitalized from a post-capitalist, ecological and non-heteronormative perspective?

Following the feminist economists Gibson-Graham, I would like to propose that we consider post-capitalism as a “non-capitalocentric” and non-Eurocentric understanding of the world – as differentiated, queer and in ongoing transformation – as well as a set of tools and practices of “socialization of the economy” – such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), Crypto-economy, peer-to-peer and gift-exchange and cooperativism.

Both art and anthropology operate at the threshold, and in the “zone of contact” between the human and more than human world, engaging in practices of dialogical interpretation, micro encounters, political prefiguration and practice-based theory-building and fabulation. What are the skills that artists and curators (and anthropologists) can bring for imagining and implementing a post-capitalist world?