[ecrea] Reading the Word, Reading the World

Reading the Word, Reading the World
Research Symposium, Birkbeck/Goldsmiths' Art Department, University of 
London and The Field, New Cross.

On Display: The Aesthetics of Resistance*
25th - 27th April 2016

Research Symposium organized by Claudia Firth (Cultural and Critical 
Studies, Birkbeck) and Achim Lengerer (Art Depart­ment, Goldsmiths) in 
collaboration with Kristien Van den Brande (Art Department, Goldsmiths), 
Cristina Ribas (Art Department, Goldsmiths) and Vera Weghmann (Centre 
for the Study of Social and Global Justice, Nottingham University).

The events will take place at both Goldsmiths' Art Department and 
Birkbeck, with an informal workshop session to be hosted at The Field, 
an alternative community space in New Cross.

Taking Peter Weiss’ historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance as a 
loose starting point, the symposium will take a sideways glance at 
questions of how we might ‘read’ leftist historical narratives. While 
deferring an interrogation of the term resistance to a later point in 
time (and a further symposium in October at Birkbeck), we will follow a 
thread of collective learning and sharing knowledge and ask how 
subjectivity and politics might intersect through the process of 
‘reading' together. One of our questions will be: how are these 
processes of collective ‘reading‘ organised and what can we draw from 
this collective experience for a contemporary artistic-activist praxis.

Events will include: debates on the crossovers between work; education 
and workers’ education from a historical and a contemporary perspective; 
the reading group as cultural, social and historical form in relation to 
The Aesthetics of Resistance; the historical essay as exhibition and 
films by Peter Weiss; reading groups as a practice outside or at the 
margins of institutions; the interrelations between collective reading 
and political praxis.


Monday 25th April
Birkbeck Evening Event
7 pm - 9 pm
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Sq.

An evening panel on the changing nature of work, education and workers’ 
education. The shift to Post Fordist modes of production and cultural 
and immaterial labour have changed our relationship to knowledge and how 
it is produced as well as changing the nature of work itself. With the 
increasing presence of work in education (for example through 
‘employability’ training and work placements) it seems pertinent to ask 
questions regarding the relationship between work and education and the 
organisation of higher education itself. How have these relationships 
changed?  Are there models from the past that could be mobilised now? 
What might alternative models of organisation have to offer? Birkbeck 
College itself comes from a history of Mechanics Institutes in the UK 
originally formed in the 19th Century to provide adult education to 
working people seems the perfect setting in which to ask some of these 
questions.

Round table with Claudia Firth and Vera Weghmann and guests:

Stevphen Shukaitis, lecturer at Essex University. His work includes 
writings on Autonomia, self-organisation, class (re)composition and 
cultural labour.

Mike Neary from the Social Science Centre, Lincoln, who currently 
provide free co-operative higher education. The SSC is run as a 
not-for-profit co-operative, and organised on the basis of democratic, 
non-hierarchical principles.

Richard Clarke - until 2012, was Senior Lecturer in Conservation at 
Birkbeck College and Director of the University of London Centre for 
European Protected Area Research.


Tuesday 26th April
Goldsmiths Day Session
10 am - 6 pm
Seminar room, Studio A, Barriedale Buildings, Goldsmiths, New Cross, 
London SE 14 6NW

10 am Claudia Firth and Achim Lengerer. In Collective Reading as 
Political Act? Firth and Lengerer will introduce their shared research 
of various Aesthetics of Resistance reading groups in East and West 
Germany during the 1970s/1980s. They will explore the reading group as a 
social, cultural and semi-public form, what it means to read and learn 
collectively and what this might mean for critical knowledge production 
and subjectivity.

11:30 am - 1 pm Carles Guerra. 1979: a Monument to Radical Instants is 
the title of an exhibition Guerra curated in Barcelona in 2011 inspired 
by The Aesthetics of Resistance and Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. 
The exhibition was conceived as a kind of historical essay that operated 
through image and object to organise the temporal moment as monument. 
Choosing 1979, Guerra focussed the exhibition on a pivotal year for 
Spain and one that could be characterised as epitomising the birth of 
neoliberalism.

2 - 4 pm Open conversation with protagonists of different reading 
groups: the New Cross Commoners, The Litany Reading Group (Nicola Guy, 
Katherine Jackson, Louisa Lee, Sophie Risner and Amy Tobin), and Andrea 
Williamson and Katie Hare, who are part of a group of 12 MFA candidates 
at Goldsmiths that are meeting on the self-selected theme of love and 
politics. These three self-organised reading groups will share their 
experiences as groups that have read together and reflect on the 
interrelations between reading and their particular social and political 
practices. The session is co-hosted by Kristien Van den Brande whose 
experience with reading groups range from memorising books by heart, 
durational collective readings and self-organised recurrent reading 
sessions in and outside of academia.

4 - 6 pm Screening and lecture by Florian Wüst. This thinking in 
oppositions: Peter Weiss and the political self of the artist. Looking 
at the period in which Peter Weiss shifted from film to theatre in the 
early 1960s, Florian Wüst elaborates on Weiss's growing efforts to 
examine the social, political and economic realities surrounding him. 
How to learn from the follies of history through art? How to activate 
societal change without dismissing intellectual critique and freedom? 
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Edgar Schmitz 
(Art, Goldsmiths).


Wednesday 27th April
‘Reading Group’ Afternoon Session
Starts 1 pm
The Field, 385 Queen’s Rd, New Cross

This will be a practical workshop session in which participants will be 
asked to bring fragments from their experiences of the previous two 
days’ events. These could be words, things, dates, feelings or anything 
they might have taken away with them. Together, we will ‘read’ these 
fragments using a variety of methods and perspectives. Starting with 
discursive modes towards more affective registers to include the body, 
voice, rhythms and dynamics. This will be in collaboration with Cristina 
Ribas who proposes the title Protocol to intersect vocabularies for her 
intervention. The symposium finishes with an invitation to join us and 
the New Cross Commoners at the People’s Kitchen at the Field for a 
communal meal.

Contacts: Achim Lengerer: lfp.lengerer at gmail.com, Claudia Firth: 
claudiaf at talktalk.net

* The title refers to Paulo Freire as well as to Harun Farocki's film On 
Display: Peter Weiss (Zur Ansicht: Peter Weiss), 1981. The image on the 
poster collages subtitle as well as fragments of a still image from 
Farocki's film.


http://art.gold.ac.uk/research/

https://www.facebook.com/events/548618651966275/

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reading-the-word-reading-the-world-on-display-the-aesthetics-of-resistance-tickets-24682615367

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