2016 ~ Sunday September 18: ROAMING ASSEMBLY #7 ~ ART, STRUGGLE, AND THE CITY: ATHENS AND ISTANBUL: '10 Thoughts on Instituting Otherwise' ~ by Gigi Argyropoulou

This talk surveys current debates on performance and politics in order to think through the production of space in relation to practices of instituting otherwise. Resisting definitions and moving across diverse registers this presentation will seek to think through potential challenges to societal imaginaries that might give rise to sites of struggle, and the enactment of destituent and imaginative ways of inhabiting and being in the city. Questioning the ongoing recuperation of “participation” and the potential of the “political turn” in the arts, in this talk Gigi Argyropoulou will seek to rethink the place/role of performance practice in the socio-political landscape and vice versa while aiming to contest distinctions between the cultural and the political. Bringing together urban tales and city plans, ghosts, moments of excess, buildings in crisis and improvisatory practices this lecture problematises the relation between art and politics, resistance and incorporation, learning and studying.