THE UNLEARNING SERIES
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The Unlearning Series is a concept by art theorist Eleni Garoufalia, implemented in the framework of Artecitya with the contribution of artist Rania Emmanouilidou. It is a series of lectures and workshops, that aim to provide the knowledge, tools and inspiration to develop imaginative cultural strategies, in order to engage with the complex spatial state of today’s reality, using the materials and strategies of philosophy, critical geography, political theory and contemporary art.
Unlearning_FINAL from ArtBOX on Vimeo. Unlearning is not a state of non-learning but a practice of a new set of collective knowledge production: the extract of questions that are unframed and the answer with a notion that is not pre-determined. Therefore, it could be described as entering the process of enactment on a daily basis, not from the ‘beginning’, but from the ‘middle’ and considering that a personal responsibility. The strategy of Unlearning, similar to the one that Jean Luc Nancy named Unworlding, is an active position of collective urgency, according to which one tries to find different points of departures, create new points of entry and participate in the everyday by connecting to different sets of knowledge and supplies. From this perspective, the lectures and workshops concentrate on models that intervene in the core of global phenomena and on how subjectivities are produced at the base of geo-political processes.
Photos: George Kogias
The lectures given by Eleni Garoufalia investigate how culture is re-entering ‘globalization’ and discuss whether there is a new set of cultural politics and artistic strategies emerging on a local/global scale. Each lecture focuses on cultural practices that attempt to interact and engage with, rather than comment on, urgent social, cultural and political conditions via the thought of philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, Jean Luc Nancy, Andy Merrifield, Stefano Harney & Fred Moten. The lectures are accompanied by a broad selection of theoretical and literature texts and a selection of film and video materials that are shown in situ. The workshops lead by Rania Emmanouilidou introduce artistic practices and art-created-on-the-streets approaches, as an attempt to release political and cultural possibilities, and to explore the various frameworks within which work by political activists, curators, artists, organisers, editors, funders, philosophers and citizens is articulated as they assemble and aestheticize visual knowledge. The workshops do not approach practices as they are, but as they may become. Spatial practices invite citizens to self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched in an everyday reality. The purpose is to twist oneself inside out to become significant again, by enacting events and practices of knowledge in the everyday, rather than illustrate a series of know-how. Simple, tiny everyday practices in social space may introduce a new set of unexpected relations to imagine and realise social life otherwise. The shift from representation to investigation and participation requires a collectivity, a spatialization of shared rights, a joined intervention as another possible manner of living together. Ultimately, the workshops rehabilitate citizens as active contributors to how social space operates and partial creators of its complex language. Photos: Maria Mavridou
EXHIBITION 20 May - 1 July 2016“The Unlearning team practiced with questions, questions as a way of getting connected with ourselves and other people. We have tried to leave the compulsion of a forced answer behind us. This is usually our main concern – the answer. Although a substantial question already includes the seeds of an answer. This is a dynamic situation on its own, and from the moment it is posed, it states the entry viewpoint, the beginning of a dialectic, a spatial sharing, an encounter of human constellations. The question creates space for intimacies. (…) The exhibition of the Unlearning Series Team is a result of practicing the companionship between us, through questions of modern philosophical statements. The projects of the exhibition come out from the smoke of stories of intimacy exchange.” (Eleni Garoufalia)
Photos: George Kogias
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ARTECITYA PROJECT TV100 23/5/2016
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