Fellows

There Is No Alternative! Activism and Anti-Globalism in Contemporary Culture - Claudine Zia

Claudine Zia ( Denmark, Iran )

There Is No Alternative! Activism and Anti-Globalism in Contemporary Culture is a democratic and research-based platform that will examine different theoretical, philosophical and practical approaches within cultural activism. The platform will function as a reading group where participants will meet once a week at ZK/U (starting in October) and discuss a specific topic ranging from urban activism, self-organisation and DIY, to fictional political activism, occupy movements and counter-economics.

The aim of the sessions is to understand what cultural activism is and what it consists of in present day. In general, there is a traditional notion of how activism is perceived within art- and cultural discourse: going against dominant and established systems, challenging global capital, occupying spaces, shaking up foundations of institutional systems and so on. However, contemporary cultural activist interventions are in the midst of an expanding field that consist of nuanced bodies of work: urban intervention, anti- gentrification, creating temporal and alternate spaces within fixed structures, re-schooling local communities, developing bottom-up structures, creating cultural pluralism within minor spaces, i.e., participatory art, design, web-based communities, self-publishing, etc.

For more information and participation contact at [email protected]