Started in 2005 with the book 'European Cultural Policies 2015' and
a workshop at IASPIS (Stockholm), this workshop series is organised by
the eipcp in cooperation with different partners over Europe. The series was continued with workshops in Helsinki, Pristina and Vienna; it will be carried forward in 2009.
Artistic Interventions as Cultural Politics / First
Knowledge Network Convention
Vienna, 17 - 20
April 2008
International workshop of the Institute for European Integration Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the eipcp.
Participating projects | Persons
edufactory | Anna Curcio
EscAtelier | Claudia Berardi
Gender Changers | Aileen Derieg
Linkes Erstsemestrigentutorium | Rainer Hackauf
manoa university | Eva Egermann
Märkisches Viertel Berlin | Katja Reichard
preclab | Vassilis Tsianos
remember resistance | Brigitta Kuster
universidad nómada | Marcelo Expósito
UKK Kopenhagen | Katya Sander
Moderation: Monika Mokre, Simon Sheikh
"Cultural Policies as Crisis Management?"
Pristina, 21-23 September, 2006
A
Workshop organized by Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina
(Stacion CCA) in cooperation with eipcp – European Institute for
Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna and translate. Beyond Culture:
The Politics of Translation http://translate.eipcp.net/
There is not much ambiguity in today’s role of cultural policy in the Balkans. It is almost entirely determined by the process of the so-called postwar normalization, which follows strictly the pattern of liberal multiculturalism. Now, when the political constitution of their independent nation states is coming finally to an end, the peoples of the region are expected to reorganize all their relations, including cultural exchange, in accordance with the principles of mutual recognition and democratic tolerance. They should accept each other’s cultural differences as essential features of their national identities and never violate the right of the other to claim its cultural uniqueness and singularity. This is believed to be the only way to achieve the ideal of peaceful coexistence in the Balkans.
However, there are also critics of this concept, who say that this is not historically new to the region. Therefore, instead of being a solution, the multiculturalist vision of cultural policy appears to be part of the problem. Moreover, it seems to legitimize retroactively the very cause of the nationalist wars in the nineties including the practice of ethnical cleansing.
The workshop will take up the criticism of this concept and discusses other theoretical and practical approaches to the question of cultural exchange as well as possibilities of translating them into a concrete cultural policy.
programme / participants / abstracts
A Critique of Creative Industries
Helsinki, 31 August - 2 Sept 2006
A cooperation of FRAME – Finnish Fund for Art Exchange and eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
When in 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their famous Dialectics of Enlightenment they also coined the concept of “cultural industry”. In a chapter titled “The Cultural Industry. Enlightenment as Mass Deception” they laid the ground for their fundamental critique of culture as a component of a new form of totalitarian oppression. Around 1968 the concept was again put to the foreground to criticize the repressive functions especially of mass media, but in the course of the following decades it slowly voided of its critical content. During these years it became adopted as just another principle of neoliberal cultural politics: In a completely transformed manner the concept of the Frankfurt School was (mis-)used as a key concept of Blairist cultural politics and made its way back to the continent in the end of the 1990s. With the help of blockbusters like Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” it became a feature of urban and economic development plans in many European cities, and finally arrived in the agenda of European Union cultural politics.
The workshop is a part of an ongoing workshop series of the eipcp with different partners over Europe. It will assemble different national and urban case studies, put up a general critique of creative industries and theorize from different angles of Europe how the paradigm of creativity contributes to constituting cognitive capitalism. As outcomes and forms of distribution both an issue of FRAME’s print magazine “framework” and eipcp’s multilingual webjournal “transversal” will be published.