Time: Thursday October 12, 19.30 – 21.30 hrs
Location: Willem de Kooning Academy, Wijnhaven 61 Rotterdam. Large project space, 4th floor.
Admission: Free

The Master Education in Arts cordially invites you for a lecture by Anna Santamouro, course tutor of the seminar Making Things Public.

The field of socially and politically engaged art practices and their implications outside the artistic and institutional realm have been widely researched and discussed in the last decade. This lecture seeks to redefine such collective processes through the lens of the theories of micropolitics associated primarily with Félix Guattari and the cultural theorist Suely Rolnik. By drawing a genealogy of micropolitics and of the political and philosophical debates that have been accompanying this concept since the 1960s in Europe in the lecture I look at micropolitics through the lens of post-Operatist Italian theorists, in particular Antonio Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Maurizio Lazzarato, who have incorporated this notion as a conceptual and operative tool in their work. Micropolitics here provides a productive framework to conceptualize the proliferation of artistic and curatorial collective forms of intervention in the social and political field as well as their organisational dimension and possibility to function as constituent practices, considering in particular the Southern European and Mediterranean context and the austerity climate in which they emerge.

Anna Santomauro is Programme Curator at Arts Catalyst, an arts organisation based in London. She is also the Co-founder and Chief Curator of Vessel in Bari, Italy, a non-profit arts organisation that develops public programmes and alternative education projects to address contemporary social, political, and economic issues. Based in Birmingham for the last few years, Anna recently worked for Eastside Projects and is curator-in-residence at Grand Union. She is a part-time PhD candidate at the University of Wolverhampton.