PART ONE 21.11 - 24.11.2018

CRIC – Festival of critical culture | 21.11 – 19.12.2018  Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje 21.11.2018 (Wednesday) Festival opening | 19:00h. ALERT! At the gates of power – expect exclusion

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up. (Franz Kafka, A Little Fable)

CRIC – festival of critical culture is a platform that promotes artistic and cultural practices as societal relevant tools that will contribute to emancipation and democratization of the socio-cultural context. It aims to catalyze their affirmation, critical capacities and applicability in order to critically mobilize societal processes. CRIC 03 will explore the possible strategies for reformulating the pseudo imperative political and societal givens through a lab concept that involves a diversity of artistic and discursive practices towards establishing of a platform for new, unstable and critical political and socio-cultural narratives.

In the labyrinth of the layered readings of the exception that defines the chronotope in the frames of the state and ideological disciplinary apparatus, in the frames of this CRIC 03 we would like to explore the possibilities resistance as a gesture of inventing new, solidary political and socio-cultural narratives, that will stand against the pseudo-discursive adopted practices that refer to the question of power, community/commons, public commons and public interest and political sensibility, all contextualized through the readings of epistemological formations that are sewn through critical artistic and cultural practices, but also through the questions that the actual dilemmas embedded in the political philosophy.

In all this scenography, a politics that rests on the concept of exclusion is inaugurated which, simultaneously is one of incorporation into the locus of bare life. What is then the relationship between the political, the artistic and life itself if “life emerges as that which ought to be included through exclusion”. This politics which is one of the breaching of basic human rights and freedoms, all in the name of the state of exception….

The inevitability of the strategy of exception enters the political setting as a gesture of the political mentality of the discourse of transition, which in order to conceal the act of the destruction of the common and its dissolution into the interests of the few who command the sovereign, constantly proclaims the transition as a narrative under which a series of exclusions are being executed. Under the guise of the constant reform, the stabilized system structures the transition’s subjects experiencing of the reality of exclusion, a depoliticizing experience that roots him in the passivity of everyday life. One of the many manifestations of the state of exception is the political exclusion of the many, thus inaugurating another mode of existence besides the “bare life” – that of a coerced life.

The political challenge towards the unlocking of the creative process of becoming of the subject demands a new space and a new language for articulating of the state of exclusion from the multitude of possible plateaus. Our milieu is a scenery of multiple states of exclusion, in which we attempt to perform our political and socio-cultural subjectivity in relation to societal structures that are frozen, closed and pre-determined. It seems as the time in which we live is one of representation and repetition of the “history of the sameness”.

How we’re ought to reconfigure the in-depth archived scripts of modes and political performances in the frames of our societal dynamics and relations that do not follow the logic of creativity and the dialectical community, but that of “associationship”. How are we to articulate the resistance against the imposed dominant imperative on the need for becoming samples of already archived and adopted politics of our community, ones that sketch out precise vectors of our movements, thoughts and behavior? What is the destiny of the societies in which the sovereign generates an authoritarian yet democratically acceptable grammar?

On the traces of Esposito who speaks of the semantics of the proprium, we will attempt at reexamining and researching the phenomena of the community that is organized around the “normality” of the paradigmatic notions that relate to belonging, property and convention. How does the state of exception, of urgency, enable the confusion on the common and the particular?

Is the utopia of the common at times of capital penetration and the absorption of the language of ontological traits? The State of Exclusion – the capacity of the sovereign to overcome the rule of law in the name of the public good, and towards a new law – the law of exception.

Between the debt policies and the neo – fascist wave in the world, Maurizio Lazzarato (IT) | 19:30 – 21:00 Keynote lecture followed by a discussion moderated by Artan Sadiku

Abstract: The last Brazilian elections demonstrate а close connection between war, its articulations (fascism, racism, sexism) and neoliberalism. This is not a novelty, because the emergence of the neoliberalism in Chile happened through the collaboration between the Chilean military and the group of Chilean libertarian economists, The Chicago Boys. The lecture will raise the following issues: How did we get into this situation? What kind of changes happened in Chile between the 1980s and how do they relate to present-day Brazil? What was the influence of Europe and the USA in these processes?

Bio: Maurizio Lazzarato is a Paris-based sociologist, philosopher and independent researcher, specialized in studies of the relationship of work, economy and society. He has written about cinema, video and the new technologies of image production, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. His interest lies in the analysis of cognitive capitalism and its discontents and his work, which is historically situated in the Italian movement of ‘Autonomous Marxism’, focuses on the immateriality of labour and the post-socialist movement.

Post Global Trio (MK) | 21:30 Music performance

Bio: Post Global Trio is a project between Toni Dimitrov, Dimitar Dodovski and Martin Georgievski, created as a continuity of certain communication, cooperation and the need for developing a different stage. Their first release is available on the post label Post global recordings,while the second album appeared for the US label Unknown Tone Records, and the third for the Australian Twice Removed. Their fourth album was released by the Dutch label Shimmering Moods.

Post Global Trio’s music is made of field shots, subtle sections, textures, and inconspicuous repetitive rhythms that resonate somewhere between abstraction and narration, leaving you breathless by its soundscape. The embedded meditative ambience and field sounds bring you through imaginary landscapes, telling a story about feelings and nature. Their performances are an experience that can be felt on a journey through the distant territories of the Macedonian mountains where the recorded field shots are recorded, giving clear images of the subtle sound landscapes.

22.11.2018 (Thursday)

On Becoming Former byPetar Milat (HR) | 19:00 – 20:00 Keynote lecture followed by a moderated discussion

Bio: CËRPA is a side project by Thessaloniki based artist Grigoris Kordellas. The project focuses on experimental and noise sound with some industrial and power electronics elements. His productions and hybrid live sets are characterized by dark, brutal and distorted frequencies with screaming vocals, submerged in both bleakness and cruelty.

Abstract: Related to a general question of whether and how much artistic creation and aesthetic thinking are able to go beyond the disciplinary divide – both within the system of arts and in the general framework of social life – in this talk Petar Milat will suggest that there exists a specific strategy of transversality and indiscipline: to become former. To elaborate this idea Milat will present examples from contemporary aesthetic theory, experimental film, and literature with the aim to demonstrate that the aesthetic emancipatory capacity is located within arts’ singular temporality.

Bio: Petar Milat is a former philosopher and serves as the head of programmes at Multimedia Institute/MaMa [Zagreb, Croatia], in charge of publishing, experimental music and film programmes. Since 2008 he is the director of Human Rights Film Festival, a festival of cinéma d’auteur engagé. The nexus of normative social and aesthetic theory is the main focus of his research. In 2018 Petar was a Jury member at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival.

www.mi2.hr/en www.humanrightsfestival.org/en/ www.zoeforward.org

Das nackte Überleben / Brute survival, Kathrin Becker (DE) | 20:15 – 21:30 Video art presentation and discussion

Abstract: The Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein was founded in 1971 by art mediators and artists and, with its 1,600 titles of international video art, is one of the oldest and largest video collections in Europe. Under the title Das nackte Überleben / Brute Survival, the head of the n.b.k. Video-Forum, Kathrin Becker, has compiled a selection of video works from the past two decades that in terms of content can be related to the notion of state of exception. The title of the screening Brute Survival– or bare survival – is inspired by Agamben’s “bare life”, the bare life that the sovereign power can freely dispose of after abolishing the distinction between “public” and “private”. In her video screening, Becker presents and comments on works that address the individual in relation to a state of exception – be it political, economic, ecological or social: dictatorship (Marina Naprushkina), war (Moser & Schwinger, Mykola Ridnyi) and occupation (Larissa Sansour) are just as much an issue as political exclusion (Oleg Kulik), ecological disasters (Ursula Biemann) or the existence of a code of behavior (Francis Alÿs, Mwangi Hutter, Hiroharu Mori), that regulates the social processes of exclusion and inclusion.

Video works from the collection of the n.b.k. Video-Forum, Berlin Selected by Kathrin Becker, Head of the n.b.k. Video-Forum

Ursula Biemann Deep Weather, 2013 9 min, Farbe, Ton, HD, 16:9

Francis Alÿs El Gringo, 2003 4:12 min, Farbe, Ton, NTSC, 4:3

Frédéric Moser / Philippe Schwinger Acting Facts (From Testimonies to Peers Commission, 1970), 2003 9:40 min, Farbe, Ton, PAL, 4:3

Oleg Kulik I Love Europe, She Does Not Love Me Back, 2001 6:23 min, Farbe, Ton, PAL, 4:3

Mykola Ridnyi Regular Places, 2014–2015 15:23 min, Farbe, Ton, HD, 16:9

Marina Naprushkina Belarus segodnja. Belarus heute, 2008 4 min, Farbe, Ton, PAL, 4:3

Mwangi Hutter Eastleigh Crossing, 2009 7:48 min, Farbe, Ton, HD, 16:9

Larissa Sansour Happy Days, 2006 3:02 min, Farbe, Ton, PAL, 4:3

Hiroharu Mori Defocused Story, 2004 4:37 min, Farbe, Ton, NTSC, 4:3

Bio: Kathrin Becker studied art history and Slavic literatures at Bochum University and Leningrad State University. She is a Berlin based curator and writer and head of the Video-Forum at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). Her curatorial practice focuses on the social role of art in society and on the complex of exclusion / inclusion in contemporary cultures. Her latest projects include: Ceal Floyer. Maximum headroom (n.b.k., 2018); Eric Baudelaire. Walked the Way Home (n.b.k., 2018); Claire Fontaine (n.b.k., 2017); Bani Abidi (n.b.k., 2017); Halil Altındere. Space Refugee (n.b.k., 2016); Elizabeth Price (n.b.k., 2016); Rosa Barba (n.b.k., 2016); A Sense of History (with Marius Babias, Nordstern Video Art Center, Gelsenkirchen, 2016).

23.11.2018 (Friday) Loud and Clear (Amplified) by Maja Ćirić (SRB | 12:00 – 16:00 (1st part) Critical writing workshop in visual arts

It is at the fragile line between the society at large and the institution of art that art criticism, backed-up with doctrine, is most needed. To cater and stimulate alternative knowledge production, by the means of art, in a global political framework is to master evaluations, arguments and analysis. Affinities for profound knowledge are activated by individual voices, drivers of the so-called collective intelligence, in order to set the stage for current debates. In the midst of hypervisibility, hyperobjects and algorithms, stimulated by twists and turns of reasoning, neat conversations stand for good reasons to believe into winning over any ethical ambiguity. Their function is to reinvent and challenge humanity. Better and more accurate conclusions are capable of addressing larger audiences by disseminating “deep thoughts” to the flatness of the mediocre human experience, an effect of the fast flow of information/capital/goods. Skilled in fundamentalist, perspective and constructive critiques students should provide us with stronger reasons to believe in amplified collective integrity.

Cine-Soma. Cartographic Film Narratives by Angela Melitopoulos (DE) | 19:00 – 20:00 Artist’s lecture presentation

Maurizio Lazzarato in discussion with Angela Melitopoulos | 20:00 – 21:00

Abstract: With some examples of her own projects Angela Melitopoulos will discuss how her audio-visual artistic research projects create a kind of multi-folded story telling work that questions how we conceive and live of relations to geography, or better, how to move along something that is in-between a geography and a mind-set. How can we understand the expression of landscape as knowledge, as a changing and speaking entity within our contemporary production of subjectivity? How does a media practice of mapping relate to the idea of what Melitopoulos takes from the term machinic animism by G & D and how can we understand it as a ‘migrant work’. This volunteers for another direction of meaning within the politics the migration and its existential practices in the arts, that intervene in today’s fabrication of the social-political body. The globally enacted normative production of subjectivities resonates with other comprehensions of corporeity that are more animist, mobile and that refuses subject-object, nature-culture divisions. Melitopoulos will show excerpts and unfold cinematic and cartographic practises from different projects. From her video essay Passing Drama, from the audio visual research Assemblages and the cinema of Fernand Deligny’s and from the documenta14 project Crossings that proposes a complex installation as a cartography of places crystallizing major stratifications and realities of the delirious, quasi-schizophrenic condition emerging in the current state of the debt crisis in Greece, where capitalism forces neoliberal deregulations and a civil war against its populations.

Bio: Angela Melitopoulos creates video-installations, video-essays, documentaries and sound pieces as well as theoretical texts. Her works explores non-narrative properties of moving pictures, employing them in constructions of political geographies and new archives on the basis of minority histories e.g. experiences of migration, the anti-capitalist movement and anti-fascist resistance, anti-psychiatry. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf studying with Professor Nam June Paik. Her works are shown in international exhibitions (a.g. the CAAC Seville, the Generali Foundation, Vienna; Sesci San Paolo; Macba Barcelona; OCAT Shenzen; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and Metz; at the Berlinale; the House of World Cultures Berlin; the Antonin Tapies Foundation, Barcelona; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; at the Manifesta 7), Biennials (Taipei, Athens, Thessaloniki). Her last project Crossings was shown at the documenta14. Angela Melitopoulos holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University in London. She is teaching as a professor in the Media School of the Royal Danish Academy of Fines Arts in Copenhagen.

CËRPA (GR) | 21:00 – 23:00 Music set

Millions of dead tourists (GR) | 21:00 – 23:00 Live concert

Millions of Dead Tourists uses and abuses synths, pedal effects, 2 bass guitars, laptop, sequencer and 3 humans. Iason, Sotiris and Yannis are three experienced users and abusers of the Greek underground and experimental scene who decided to join forces in spreading negativity and despair. Among other things, they don’t like reserved rights.

24.11.2018 (Saturday)

Loud and Clear (Amplified) by Maja Ćirić (SRB | 12:00 – 16:00 (2nd part) Critical writing workshop in visual arts

Crisis of Neoliberalism, Crisis of Democracy by Alfredo Saad Filho (BR/UK) | 20:00 – 21:30 Keynote lecture followed by a discussion moderated by Branimir Jovanovic

Abstract: Neoliberalism is in crisis. The financial collapse of 2007-08 was resolved, temporarily, through the creation of a worldwide financial bubble has morphed into a crisis of democracy through the rise of an authoritarian modality of neoliberalism in an increasing number of countries. When in power, authoritarian leaders invariably enforce an exceptionally exclusionary form of neoliberalism, that harms the poor, promotes the financialisation and neoliberalisation of daily life, and concentrates power, income and assets even further. This session will examine the roots of the economic and political crises of neoliberalism, the fractures in the global order, the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, and the openings for the left. Bio: Alfredo Saad-Filho is Professor of Political Economy at SOAS University of London and Head of SOAS Doctoral School. He was Senior Economic Affairs Officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 2011-2012. Alfredo was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Medal of the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, and the SOAS Director’s Teaching Prize. He has taught in universities and research institutions in Brazil, Canada, Italy, Japan, Mozambique, Switzerland and the UK. His publications include 9 books, 70 journal articles, 50 book chapters, and 30 reports for UN and other international agencies. His research work has been published in two dozen countries and in 15 languages, and presented over 200 academic events in 30 countries.