Cultures of Resistance, Resistances of Culture

Culture and cultural practitioners have played a central role in the
movements of the squares and occupations of 2011. Moreover, occupy wall
street has become a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Day 7 will be
dedicated to bringing together different individuals to reflect on the
cultural questions of these movements and to also attempt to connect to
prior histories of resistance and political struggle and the role culture
has played.

http://www.16beavergroup.org/everything

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1. Day 7 : Friday (13.01)

6PM [at MOMA]

For Friday, we had initially thought to organize a day that would attempt
to bridge inter-generationally the question of culture in the midst of
powerful political and social tumult, crisis, or struggle. We thought to
invite individuals who had been involved in the Black Panthers, Act Up!,
or even historical efforts to organize artists like Art Workers Coalition
and to place them into discussion with the cultures and cultural questions
being posed within and through the Occupy Movements and broader
socio-ecologico-political struggles today

We had thought to also invite participants of the Arts and Labor
Committee, Art and Culture, Occupy Museums and other working groups. But a
proposal has instead been made by the committe preparing day 7, to meet at
MOMA at 6pm.

The Museum is free on Fridays as a result of the struggles waged by groups
such as Art Workers Coalition.

Within the course of the evening, we will attempt to open up a
consideration around these and other questions.

— What kind of culture could emerge from a refusal to accept the systems
of values imposed today by capitalism?
— What kinds of cultures are called for, which could resist the
reinforcement of a system that places the majority of the control over
everything (e.g., culture, science, resources, common wealth, labor, life,
political decisions, information, communication) to a small minority of
individuals?
— What kind of resistance will be necessary to alter the trend of
corporatization of public institutions, including institutions of art?
— What kinds of cultural shifts are necessary to refuse growth, refuse
positivist discourses of progress, refuse patriarchy, refuse racism,
refuse isolationism, refuse hetero-normativity, refuse class, refuse war,
refuse over-consumption, refuse capitalist guilt/debt, …?
— In this midst of contemporary struggles against the crisis of
everything, how can those who identify with and work inside the spheres of
culture (e.g., artists, cultural producers, those who work in institutions
of culture, education etc.) dis-identify with those institutions which
purport to suppoert art, but tacitly or explicitly depend upon, mimic, and
help perpetuate systems based on the immiseration of the majority of the
world’s inhabitants?
— What do cultures of the commons look like?
— And how can public or non-profit cultural institutions be committed to
a culture of the commons? How can these same institutions resist the
becoming numbers of the world?