(Cultural) Workers Gone Political

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Ana Vujanović (2014/15)

This article presents a brief discussion on contemporary artists citizens. It will examine the public life, and the political activity in particular (vita activa), of the critical cultural worker in neoliberal capitalist society. Here, a critical cultural worker—theoretician, artist, curator, journal editor, cultural producer, etc.—means the one who wants and tries to be political,[1] hence the cultural worker gone political. The purpose of the article is to unpack, through discussing dubious politicality of the critical cultural worker, a tension between the work and the politics in today’s society, and to propose a few thoughts on what the politics today could be and how it could look like once we recognize its classical definition as socially and historically inadequate.

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TAKE IT OR MAKE IT (2016-2017)

Artistic experiment on social choreography of democracies by Ana Vujanović

 

I set an experimental artistic process based on the premise of working together, in a group, on the issue of the democracy as a real-existing organization of social situation. The experiment takes as its point of departure the cinematic score by experimental filmmaker Heinz Emigholz for his movie Schenec-Tady I (1973).

Emigholz_score

Heinz Emingholz: score plan

Firstly, five performers interpret that score individually, creating artistic materials separated from each other and then they get together and negotiate how to create the group situation democratically, starting from the five solos.
This experiment can result in a presentation, performance or stay in a laboratory framework.
Every time the process is different, as well as its results, since the types, forms and principles of democracy which are examined and physically probed depend on the artists involved and their social contexts and concerns.
For that reason I’m especially interested in the contexts with fragile democracy, where we can see it weak and under the question.

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