Mondialisation without the World

The course questions the binary of public vs private, personal vs social, as a formatting structure for contemporary societies. Pull effects of the city and future projects of human living environments will be investigated by understanding the city: its institutions, architecture and relationships, as one and prominent result of an instituting force of imaginative.

Organized in three parts the course will focus on 1) physical training in and out of the classroom 2) investigating the city’s rhythms (sound recording and score making will be discussed) and 3) reading, critiques and actions in the city with the aim to cultivate the students’ curiosity, imagination, collective and critical response.

In reference to Cornelius Castoriadis, Henri Lefebvre, Kostas Axelos, Luce Irigaray, Felix Guattari as well as science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and writer Virginia Woolf, the students will be asked to investigate playful, creative and transformative approaches, which might own potentials to re-define the collective imaginary of our time.

During the course students shall put strategies and possible approaches in intervening in the personal and social instituting imaginary of our society to the test.

Keywords: alternative technologies, science fiction, artificiality, imagination, creativity, social imaginary, shared experience, communal energy, discourse, materiality, malleability/transformation, elemental passions, reflection, playfulness, improvisation, utopian visions. 

Short description of the activities: Schedule and Readings.  

Spontaneous Trainings: movement, voice and group dynamic trainings that will take place during the first three days of the course. The exercises aim to build trust and joy amongst the students as a group. Inspired by practices in the theater and group therapy (domestic violence, post-traumatic and addiction patients) now will be organized for the occasion of the course to empower and to form a collective.

The City Rhythms: actions in the city together with close reading and discussion of parts from the book by Henri Lefebvre and Felix Guattari as well as Luce Irigaray. Sound recording and score making will be discussed in order for the students to form their own substantial results.

The Cosmos as a Play: Reading of the text from Kostas Axelos and Ursula La Guin as well as Felix Guattari and Virginia Woolf this third part of the course will focus on reality manipulation via time manipulation of the social regularities (labor time vs leisure time, non-productive vs productive time) for the making of new social figures.

On the fourth and final day the students will be asked to present individually or/and as groups their notes, ideas or/and projects and to complement, comment and reflect on the course as a whole.  

Readings:

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life, 1992

Felix Guattari, Ecosophical Practices and the Restoration of the “Subjective City”, 1989

Kostas Axelos, Play as the System of Systems, 1969

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1957

Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 1982

Georgia Sagri, (*1979, Athens, GR) lives and works in New York and Athens. She studied music at the National Music School of Athens; she holds a diploma in cello, a BA from Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens, and an MFA from Columbia University, New York. At the center of her practice lies the exploration of performance as an ever-evolving field within social and visual life. Most of her work is influenced from her on-going engagement in political movements and struggles, on issues of autonomy, empowerment, and self-organisation. Her first institutional solo show Mona Lisa Effect (2014) at Kunsthalle Basel, was curated by Adam Szymczyk.

Recent group exhibitions include: Public Programs Documenta 14; Exercises on Freedom (curated by Paul B. Preciado), Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland; The Eccentrics, Sculpture Center, New York; Secret Surface, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Bread and Roses, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. She participated in the 14th Istanbul Biennial 2015 Biennale de Lyon (2013), ProBio, Expo 1: New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2013) and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). She is the founder of the audio-only magazine FORTÉ and SALOON, an ongoing curatorial project. She is the initiator of Ύλη[matter]HYLE a semi-personal/semi-public space in the heart of Athens.