NEWS

REARTIKULACIJA NO. 6: TIME FOR THE EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

When facing the current situation in the world, where the privileged part of the population lives its life with styles afforded at the expense of the majority of the world population, one cannot just stand still and observe passively. The situation demands from us a reaction: it calls for a class struggle, for a radical critical intervention in economy, culture, contemporary art, social context and politics. We can take a clear position in relation to the hegemonic structures by any means at our disposal, either with writings, protests, activism, artistic project, though it is important to realize that we have first and foremost to think about new forms of strategies of resistance against any level of discrimination, brutal power, racism, sexism, criminal appropriation and privatization of commons, factories, public spaces, institutions, knowledge, rights, or dignity, through which capital controls, manipulates and finally destroys our lives.

The focus of this issue of the journal Reartikulacija is to connect and expose new forms of colonization and exploitation; to lay bare what is possible to call pure and clear criminal acts by managerial structures and politicians in power, regarding labour, wages, social and health security, pensions for our parents, neighbours, friends, and millions of workers worldwide; to expose clear racist and fascistic attitudes toward migrants and minorities. The current economic crisis, its consequences and the mediation for the salvation of capitalism is giving a fake feeling that capitalism has failed and that it will be replaced by a new social form more concerned with society, environment, etc. But this is far from being true. Behind this false hope, capitalism is just changing its pants, masking its proper exploitative nature and inventing new forms of oppression, updating itself for the 21st century.

This is the point of departure of Reartikulacija no. 6, which by connecting social inequalities, processes of marginalisation, strategies of subjugation and environmental issues from the past to what is happening today seeks to define and localize the old/new sources of oppression and to develop new possible forms for a radical critical activity, to intervene in more and more sophisticated processes of oppression and expropriation in capitalism.

In this issue just four texts are translated into Slovene, since the precarious situation to which we are restricted in the present moment did not allow us to provide additional funds for basic fees (small, almost symbolic, but still important) for our faithful translators and language editors. Nevertheless, the collective Reartikulacija is more than ever convinced that the time demands from us to continue the struggle against every form of exploitation, and by producing radical critical thought, we will continue to contribute to further processes of de-linking the society from the oppression of capital, insisting on justice.

Marina Gržinić and Sebastjan Leban
Editors of the journal Reartikulacija

Reartikulacija is contributing to November, December and January issues of journal e-flux with:

Sebastjan Leban,
Conditioned Contemporaneity (Reartikulacija, Part 1 of 3)

Staš Kleindienst, Between Resistance and Commodity (Reartikulacija, Part 2 of 3)

Marina Gržinić, Drawing a Border (Reartikulacija, Part 3 of 3)

26.1. - 1.2.2009
TRANSMEDIALE 09
http://www.transmediale.de/

Reartikulacija participated at the transmediale.09 on 28th January by organizing the workshop “Re-articulating the scenarios of environmental catastrophe.” The workshop included Marina Gržinić, Sebastjan Leban, Šefik Šeki Tatlić. Madina Tlostanova, Walter Mignolo, Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur and Lala Raščić.

Individual contributions can be seen at: http://www.transmediale.de/en/re-articulating-scenarios-environmental-catastroph-en

Gliding into the DEEP NORTH, the transmediale, festival for art and digital culture, Berlin 2009, explores the multidimensional phenomenon of climate change as a paradigmatic point of inflection. Climate change – with its real, potential and catastrophic consequences – represents a dramatic cultural change, a planetary transformation process that alters transnationally the social, political and economic condition of cultures in our world. We’re about to pass a historically incisive moment, whose maelstrom precludes any turning back! The fall of the Berlin Wall emblematized such a “Point of No Return” just as the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and recently maybe also the collapse of the investment banking system. Emerging in a blind spot such events unleash their radical capacity of breaking through history, blowing across boundaries and ripping through political systems and cultural roots. How can we seize the fundamental reconfiguration of our biological, cultural and technological system called earth? How can we bite and possibly even anticipate that blind spot, the logic and logistic of such a climate-cultural transformation process?

In view of the climate change as a planetary transformation process the need of finding a new radical thinking and acting, reaches far beyond the political and industrial (economic) equipment. We have to adapt to the fundamental social, ecological and cultural shift of climate change by moving the capacity to act from the habitual and institutional sphere (policy and industry, market) into the cultural and individual sphere (decentralized networks). Observing the political and industrial strategies and technologies of ecology, of corporate safety policy, of migration policy, of resource distribution and knowledge transfer etc., we discover a certain helplessness of act.

transmediale.09 DEEP NORTH is conceived as a kind of meta-workshop that offers network structures, discourses, interventions in order to find strategies with which to tackle the proposed topic by the festival in 2009.

THE ART CENTER IN GORICKO MUST STAY!

sign the petition:
http://artcenter.co.nr/izjava_eng.php

There are but a few institutions in cultural and intellectual space like developmental and artistic center in Goričko, eastern Slovenia.

In a few years of its existence, a wide range of artistic, theoretical and educational activities were organized; meetings, lectures, workshops and summer schools for artists, researchers, philosophers and creators from Slovenia and abroad, with a large spectrum of interests. Special attention was given to the indispensable linkage between theory and reflection on one side and social movements on the other; feministic, artistic, ecological etc.

The Art Center’s significance lies not only in its already proven cultural and humanistic projects. Its undisturbed agency is of extraordinary educational importance for everyone attending school, university, and devoted to permanent life-long education. International extension of its activities is of no less importance.

The work done in the Art Center so far is a proof that all this activities – cultural, theoretical and diverse educational – have a substantial potential to grow and thus fill the wide gap in Slovene and international intellectual, research and artistic space. On top of that, the conditions for work and living are stimulative for a creation of the new.

It is altogether illegitimate and it sad that the founders of the Art Center must still struggle for the right to exist. In the past, the undersigned established an active cooperation with the Art Center which we intend to maintain and strengthen further in the future. We join the public appeal to write off the debt that threatens the Art Center with public auction and thus ensure basic and necessary conditions for its undisturbed functioning.

- Eva D. Bahovec, PhD, Full Professor on Departement of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
- Jože Barši, Full Professor on Academy of Fine Ats and Design, Universty of Ljubljana
- Rajko Muršič, PhD, Full Professor and the Head of The Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
- proff. Oto Luthar, PhD, Director of The Scientific Research Centre of te Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
- Mateja Ratej, PhD, Section for Interdiciplinary Research of The Scientific Research Centre of The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
- Marina Gržinić, PhD, Associate Professor of The Institute of Philosophy, The Scientific Research Centre of The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
- Reartikulacija, artistic-political-theoretical-discursive platform, in its name:
Sebastjan Leban,
Staš Kleindienst,
Tanja Passoni
- Editorial Board of The Journal for the Criticism of Science:
Barbara Beznec,
Marta Gregorčič, PhD,
Nikolai Jeffs, PhD,
Andrej Kurnik, PhD,
Katarina Majerhold, MS,
Mitja Velikonja, PhD,
Boris Vezjak, PhD,
Jelka Zorn, PhD.

Support for the Art center join:
- Jana S. Rošker, Full Professor and the Head of the Sinology, Department of Asian and Africa Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana

TRANSMEDIALE.09>

Re-articulating the scenarios of environmental catastrophe - introduction by Marina Grzinic

Marina Grzinic:
Enviromental Catastrophe: a Culmination of Capital Deregulation and Privatization Processes

Sebastjan Leban:
Rethinking the future: Politics of exterminations

Lala Raščić:
A Hasty Investigation of post-Katrina New Orleans part 1

A Hasty Investigation of post-Katrina New Orleans part 2

Sefik Seki Tatlic:
The Vice of the Democratic Man

1st discussion

Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur:
Environmental Racism

Madina Tlostanova:
Re(dis)articulating the Myth of Modernity through the De-colonial Perspective

Walter Mignolo:
De-Linking Epistemology from Capital and Pluri-Versality

2nd discussion

This project was sponsored by:
mzk_ENG