Europoly Konferenz Tag 1 Event

CONFERENCE/EXHIBITION/FILM PROGRAM
EUROPOLY, VIENNA #4

Past, Present and Future of the Balkan Migrations in Countries of Central and Western Europe

Exhibition opening: 14. December 2017, 7pm
Europoly – The European Union Identity Trading Game by the artist Dejan Kaludjerovi?.
On view: 15. December 2017 – 12. January 2018

Conference:
15. December 2017, 6pm
16. December 2017, 1pm

Film program:
12. January 2018, 5pm

A fourth multidisciplinary event in the framework of the project EUROPOLY takes place in Vienna, realized in collaboration with four independent organisations – Krokodil (Serbia), Bijeli Val (Croatia), Crvena (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and BLOCKFREI (Austria). The intention of the project is to research and map the intense social, cultural and artistic influence which this long-term wave of migrations made on the West Balkan countries, as well as the countries that mostly represented final migrant destination.
An exhibition, series of regional conferences and film screenings are being held held during 2017 in four cities: Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Vienna.
The framework and a starting point of EUROPOLY is the art project EUROPOLY – The European Union Identity Trading Game by the artist Dejan Kaludjerovi?.

CONFERENCE:

Day I: Friday, 15. December 2017, 6pm

?We Refugees? – this is how Hannah Arendt titled her small piece published in 1943 in The Menorah Journal. Arendt?s ?We refugees? goes deep into the tissue of our time: Our societies, the face of today?s Europe, our lives, are changing rapidly. If the very introspective act of imagining oneself as a refugee is made impossible, furiously rejected as ?Gutmensch?-utopia and seen as dangerous for ?our societies?, what are the consequences for solidarity within our societies? The sudden move from ?Willkommenskultur? in Germany and Austria in 2015 to ?politics of fear and walls? of today stands for a structural change of preconditions for livable life. Judy Butler?s term ?livable life? points at the life that can be lived, a normal life that has to go beyond the minimal requirements for a mere survival. The boundaries of livable life for vulnerable parts of our populations today are marked by nationalism, xenophobia, exclusion and segregation. Particularly refugees and migrants have become the new ?others?, the embodiments of the fear from every kind of insecurity in the future, our fears. (Zygmunt Bauman) Our imagined ?vulnerability? is played against the second-class vulnerability of the other that we fear. This is the new constellation haunting the vision of open and democratic Europe. The discussion in two panels of the first day will dig deep into this new constellation.

The first panel will trace the ?We refugees? claim throughout the history, look back to learn about the (possible) future. Do we need to reconsider and re-think the usual notions about Balkanese migrations to Austria? Have the vulnerabilities of the past been transformed into new modes of (multiple) belongings today, of ?livable life?? Questions arising from today?s perspective will be the permanent link between the first and the second panel: What happens with spaces for freedom, and ultimately for livable life of all under the new constellations of ?fear and walls?? What are the consequences of the politics of fear? And finally, is not the vulnerability of today?s European vulnerable – of refugees, migrants, and dispossessed – our own vulnerability? Exploring the horizon of Europe of ?livable life? will be the ultimate utopian goal of the first day discussions.

?We, refugees?? – (Un)livable life of vulnerable

Introduction and moderation: Vedran D?ihi? (Vienna) – politicologist, researcher

6pm – Part I: Looking back to see the future: Austria and Western Balkans tied by history, and culture and migration? Exploring old and new modes of belonging

Participants:
Igor ?tiks (Edinburgh/ Belgrade) philosopher, writer
Karin Liebhart (Vienna) politicologist
Nina Brnada (Vienna) journalist

8pm – Part II: EUROPOLY – GLOBOPOLY: Refugees and migration in the European focus – Constellations of (non)belonging and fear

Participants:
Arash T. Riahi (Vienna) – filmmaker
Igor ?tiks (Edinburgh/ Belgrade) – philosopher, writer
Philipp Ther (Vienna) – historian
Ulrike Lunacek (Vienna) – politician, MEP

Day II: Saturday, 16. December 2017, 1pm

Exhausted (Art) Geographies – After many theoretical, practical and political attempts to define geopoliticality of the contemporary art, especially after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, we faced with an impossibility to define the politics of geographical location outside the global map of the neoliberal distribution of power. Using different means of diversifications, the old one such as: colonial, capitalist and patriarchal mechanisms of social and geographical (re)production and the new one such as: technological, scientific and (techno)cultural methods of social and territorial identification our global world became the geopolitical location where the majority of people doesn?t belong. Inhuman chains of migrations back to back with catastrophic climate changes are ultimate geopolitical exposures of new social class structure within the neoliberal globality in the age of the permanent war. Many artistic practices, theories, exhibitions and critics are a political display of such exhausted geographies or by other words, geopolitical zones of discomfort which refuse to be mobilized for territorial, national, ethnic, religious, economic or other geographies which create the politics of global domination and (post)human exploitation. Starting from those attempts to refuse and to resist to the geopolitics of the present, as well of from the impossibility to step out of perpetuating geopolitical past, those two panels will discuss geographies in conflicts i.e. exhausted geographies and its material limits enacted by political, economic, climatic and epistemic violence of today?s global map shaped by neoliberal distribution of power.

Exhausted (Art) Geographies

Introduction and moderation: Jelena Petrovi? (Belgrade/Vienna) – art researcher and curator

1pm – Part I: Geopolitical art-zones and its discontents (Discussion on art economy and its geopoliticality)

Participants:
Lana ?maj?anin (Sarajevo/Vienna) artist
Iliana Fokianaki (Athens/Rotterdam) writer and curator
Marko Luli? (Vienna) artist
Nata?a Petre?in-Bachelez (Ljubljana/Paris) curator and writer
Georg Schöllhammer (Vienna) editor, author, and curator

3pm – Part II: Future Geographies (Discussion on possible futures: an art world beyond the neoliberal geography)

Participants:
Georg Schöllhammer (Vienna) – editor, author, and curator
Iliana Fokianaki (Athens/Rotterdam) – writer and curator
Lana ?maj?anin (Sarajevo/Vienna) – artist
Marko Luli? (Vienna) – artist
Nata?a Petre?in-Bachelez (Ljubljana/Paris) – curator and writer

FILM PROGRAM:
12. January 2018, 5pm

List of films is soon to be announced.

Local partner: Volkskundemuseum Wien

The project is supported by Allianz Kulturstiftung, ERSTE Foundation, Federal Chancellery of Austria, The City of Vienna, Austrian Cultural Forum in Serbia, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, The City of Zagreb, Eurocomm-PR GmbH.