Atmospheres of Protest
Symposium on Sustainability
and Contemporary Art

Central European University Budapest 11 May 2012

SPEAKERS

Emma Dowling (London)

Emma Dowling is a writer, researcher and political activist. She researches the relationship between social and political conflict and governance processes/institutions, as well as new forms of valorisation and measure. She also writes about affect and affective labour and her writing on the topic appears in journals such as Ephemera and Cultural Studies ←→ Critical Methodologies.  She is a contributing author to Occupy Everything - Reflections on Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere edited by A. Lunghi and S. Wheeler and edits Lateral’s research thread on ‘Mobilisations, Interventions and Cultural Policy’. Emma Dowling is Lecturer in Ethics, Governance and Accountability at Queen Mary, University of London and is a founding member of the NGO Clinic.

Noah Fischer (artist, New York)

Noah Fischer is a New York-based artist and activist. After attending Columbia University (MFA, 2004) and receiving a Fulbright for a year of research in the Netherlands, Fischer spend the next years showing visual art in New York galleries and abroad, while collaborating with the Berlin-based performance group andcompany&Co on numerous projects.  In 2008, parallel to the unraveling of world economy, Fischer began a transition from “private” projects to free public collaborations. This journey led to the Summer of Change: a series of numismatic rituals performed on Wall Street with the Aaron Burr Society in Summer 2011.(www.summerofchange.net) On September 17th, 2011, Fischer joined Occupy Wall Street donning a large silver Dime mask. Fischer initiated Occupy Subways and Occupy Museums in the first weeks of OWS and currently spends much of his time working with the Occupying Museums collective . Noah is the curator of the No-Eyes Viewing Wall at Brooklyn Zen Center where he engages in meditation practice. www.noahfischer.org

Maria Juliana Byck(artist, New York)

Maria Juliana Byck is a video artist, curator, documentary filmmaker and activist. In 2011, she spent time in the Middle East and Europe researching sustainable practices for creating the cultural commons through artist-run spaces, and was part of the first Congress of the Collectives in New York City. As a member of the Paper Tiger Television video collective, she has designed a new radical media platform and is currently completing a feature-length documentary on post-industrial global capitalism in Detroit. She has Masters degrees from the New School for Public Engagement and Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work has been shown at MoMA, Pacific Film Archives, Wexner Center, RedCat Theater, Anthology Film Archives, La Generale in Paris and broadcast nationally on Free Speech TV. Maria has partnered on media projects with the University of Hanoi, Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Flux Factory, and is now creating a video installation that negotiates exploitation of desire, identity, labor, and the environment in the fashion industry.  Through Occupy Wall she collaborates with RevTalks, a series of international discussions with revolutionary thinkers, Empowerment and Education’s Open Forum, Global Revolution Media and is a core organizer with Occupy Museums.

Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli (Amsterdam/Berlin)

Living in Amsterdam and Berlin, Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli established the Urbanibalism project in early 2007. Urbanibalism explores the ediblilty of the urban: a gastro-situationism which recovers the spontaneous living matter of the city, transforming urban ingredients into a public recipe. Often ending-up in conviviums, urbanibalism seeks out new relations between people, cultures, histories and ecologies alive within a metropolis.

Over the years Wietske Maas has straddled a miscellany of different cultural tangents from visual arts, taxidermy, sommelier to radio-making. Based in Amsterdam since 2005, Wietske combines artistic pursuits with work as a freelancer for the European Cultural Foundation.

Matteo Pasquinelli completed his doctorate at Queen Mary University and he wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam, 2008). He's currently working on a book on the genealogy of German and French biophilosophy.

http://www.urbanibalism.org
http://www.wietskemaas.org
http://www.matteopasquinelli.org

Tomas Rafa (artist, Slovakia)

Tomas Rafa (born in 1979 in Zilina, Slovakia) graduated from the Department of Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia. He also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. http://www.newnationalism.eu

Gabriella Csoszó (artist, Hungary)

Gabriella Csoszó lives and works in Budapest. Much of her research has focused on the history of Radio Free Europe.  She has examined the periodical pause in its program and its restart in the recent past, analyzing the role of radio in democracy, as well as gradations in the communication of freedom and propaganda. Csoszó is currently working on a documentary photography project with curator Lívia Páldi about the Georg Lukács Archive in Budapest. This year she initiated FreeDoc project, a photoblog with her photos. She supports some important movements and demonstrations with her documentary. The images were taken with the intention to facilitate democratic social change. These photos can be used royalty-free with the permission of the author. http://freedoc-gabriellacsoszo.blogspot.com/

Tamara Steger (CEU Budapest)

Tamara Steger is founder of ACT JUST at Central European University and focuses on global movements for environmental and social justice. She headed to New York City last November 2011 to study the environmental aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A key part of her research was to explore the discourse and public space issues in light of neo-liberalist trends and environmental justice.
http://envjustar.ceu.hu/

Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Translocal.org)

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are curators and contemporary art historians working from Budapest and London, whose work focuses on the theory and aesthetics of East European art from the art production of the socialist era to contemporary artistic responses to the transformations brought by globalisation. Their research on issues of art and ecology, which has looked at the ecological footprint of contemporary art, the roots of sustainability in the radical art of the 1970s, and the sustainability of biennial culture, has been published in book chapters, catalogue essays and journal articles. Their curated shows include the Revolution Trilogy (2006-2009) and most recently Loophole to Happiness (2010-2011). An archive of their collaborative projects and publications is indexed at www.translocal.org. They also run the SocialEast Forum on the Art and Visual Culture of Eastern Europe and the Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art at Central European University Budapest. In 2010 their work was recognised with a grant from the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.

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