April 2012
'The masses of Eastern Europe threw themselves into a kind of collective chaosmosis in order to free themselves from totalitarianism, to live differently...but it is becoming increasingly evident that the failure of 'socialism' is also an indirect failure of the allegedly liberal regimes that lived in cold or hot symbiosis with it for decades.'
{Felix Guattari, 1992)

February 2012
'We are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we come to terms with this post-futuristic condition, we can renounce accumulation and growth and be happy sharing the wealth that comes from past industrial labor and present collective intelligence. If we cannot do this, we are doomed to live in a century of violence, misery, and war.'
{Bifo)

November 2011
‘The atmosphere is the best archive of human activities.’ (Nicholas Mirzoeff at Clark conference on the Global Turn, November 2011)

October 2011
‘All texts - all artworks, indeed- have an irreducibly ecological form. Ecology permeates all forms. Nowadays we're used to wondering what a poem says about race or gender, even if the poem makes no explicit mention of race or gender. We will soon be accustomed to wondering what any text says about the environment even if no animals or trees or mountains appear in it.’ (Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (2010), 11)

September 2011
'This is an unusual moment in the history of global capitalism: the system's famed capacity for surviving and re-inventing itself seems, for the moment, to have disappeared.' (Guardian Newspaper, 14 September 2011)

May 2011
'Of course it is much easier to understand Karl Marx than Marxism. Marx retains hus human proportions...I can imagine him in London, on his trips to the British Museum to work on his magnum opus,which was intended finally to win him scientific recognition and so to end the desperate waiting for fees from impoverished reviews and fringe journals. I imagine him as an intellectual who combined German thoroughness and Jewsih insight. I do not regard him as a leader of the working class, for the good reason that he never was one. In revolutions he was only ever an onlooker.'
(Milan Simecka)

March 2011
'A no-growth economy could only become a reality in a non-profit, non-commodity society. And the only way that could happen is if capitalism is finally overcome and laid to rest and recognized as having been human egotism’s last vain desire to hubristically defy fate and be as a god ruling over all there is. The choice now is no longer that of “socialism or barbarism,” but rather “life or death.”'
(Csaba Polony in Left Curve)

February 2011
'The institution nowadays consists of a global art industry producing visuality and meaning, with people like us more or less "institutionalized" within it. What does it mean to be "critical" under such conditions? Critique implies distance, but this distance has to be renegotiated as well on the basis of the critic's own implication within this system. I am not saying that we should all just happily admit we are compromised and enjoy this state in a perverse fashion. Rather, I am saying that our critical analysis of social conditions should have consequences for what we assume and how we operate.' (Isabelle Graw)

January 2011

'Unless one is seized by avarice or psychotic obsession, all a human being wants is a pleasant, possibly long life, to consume what is necessary to keep fit and make love. “Civilization” is the pompous name given to all the political or moral values that make the pursuit of this lifestyle possible. Meanwhile, the financial dogma states that if we want to be part of the game played in banks and markets, we must give up a pleasant, quiet life. We must give up civilization.But why should we accept this exchange? Europe’s wealth does not come from the stability of the Euro or international markets, or the managers’ ability to monitor their profits. Europe is wealthy because it has millions of intellectuals, scientists, technicians, doctors, and poets...' (Bifo in the E-Flux journal)

December 2010

Call out from Paris
                                          
'We are students and precarious knowledge-workers who have decided to leave their country, who participate in cultural exchange projects, who are searching for work and hope. We are part of a new generation of migrants in a Europe that claims to be a land of rights but that treats us like merchandise.

Without any social support, trapped between the precariousness of production and social relations, we are the living proof of Europe’s failure to provide welfare and knowledge, of neo-liberal policies that have dismantled and privatized our public patrimony, ideologically auctioning it off for “competitive growth”. We live in a Europe subjugated to the interests of banks and businesses where GATS and the Bolkestein directive have undermined the very idea of European citizenship, depriving it of any real meaning, spreading precariousness and poverty.

We are a generation victim to the idea of productivism, overspecialization and social selection disguised as meritocracy. Victims of universities and schools that resemble run-down prisons,  developing concepts and formulas that are deaf to the innovation and needs of what really counts: the students...'
(Students and precarious knowledge-workers from Paris)

September 2010
‘A home is always a human habitat, a network of human bonds and ties, a community of kind. At home, one talks without footnotes, but one can talk without footnotes on the condition that one talks to someone who understands.’
Agnes Heller)

August 2010
'Life is not going anywhere because it’s already there.'(Alan Watts)

May 2010
‘Like brand agents who now volunteer to surreptitiously promote the newest consumer product, individuals who recognize the dangerous ecological and social disruptions arising from unsustainable consumerism need to mobilize their networks to help spread a new paradigm.’ (Worldwatch 2010)

April 2010
‘Technology is not the mastery of nature, but of the relation between nature and man.’ (Walter Benjamin)

February 2010
'It's time for a bit of house-wrecking...it's time for the younger generation to fucking take over so I can go back to my studio.'
(Robert Storr at the CAA in Chicago)

November 2009
‘Art must go beyond the making of mere objects meant for museums and/or to be sold as precious commodities in the art market. Only then can it enter the world of everyday life and the collective energy which is struggling not only to improve life itself but to save this planet from total destruction.’(Rasheed Araeen)

September 2009
‘The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract,empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment.’ (Zizek)

August 2009
'In contemporary art, transparency is a kind of foil overlaying secrecy; it does not work. From the hidden bling of the rich to the routine self-critical utterances of the artist or museum; the power grouping makes everything transparent except its own key relationships.' (Merlin Carpenter)

February 2009
'Squatting the overlooked ruins of the 2009 crisis. There is an enormous economic infrastructure that is being abandoned at the moment, ripe to be socialized. The problem, however, is that we do not really 'see' it, in the same way as in the 1970s and 80s many did not see the subversive potential of squatting warehouses, factories and old housing stock. Luckily this is merely a matter of start wearing the right pair of glasses. Put them on and you discover an abundance of abandoned resources, ready to be re-used.' (Geert Lovink, 7 Resolutions for 2009'

August 2008
'Our world is too heavy to blast at once. It is too complex for us to dream of a Winter Palace to conquer. So we must leave and construct new forms of life, new articulations and novel trajectories within the social field.'
(Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, 2008)

May 2008
'If this seminar was taking place in 1968, half of those present would be stoned, and the other half would be rolling a joint, and I would probably be both.' (Malcolm Miles at the SocialEast Seminar on the Legacy of 1968 in Krakow)

March 2008
'The overall aim of third way politics should be to help citizens pilot their way through the major revolutions of our time: globalisation, transformations in personal life, and our relationship to nature.' (Anthony Giddens)

Febuary 2008
‘...today nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming breakdown of nature, of the stoppage of all life on earth – it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the real that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.’ (Slavoj Žižek, The Spectre is still Roaming Around, 1998)

November 2007
“I’m afraid that the future is Negrian.” (Miško Šuvaković at the SocialEast Seminar on Art and Empire)

July 2007
'For a true philosopher, there are more interesting things in the world than sex.’ (Slavoj Žižek)

June 2007
'I was always against everything that Venice represents.
(Maria Hlavajova at launch of Dutch Pavilion Venice 2007.')

March 2007
‘Gilbert and George’s work is not objectionable because it is crude, raw or in-your-face: many paintings by Picasso are cruel and ugly, and surrealism relished the profane and degraded. But with this pair, there is the suspicion that their fat bank accounts and international reputations are supported by the sycophancy of much of the art world. There is nothing real behind these works – no vituperative anger, no despair, no existential doubt, no love or passion – nothing, in fact, that makes art a meaningful and important human activity.’ (Sue Hubbard)

February 2007
"There will be one day that even carrots will tremble with revolution”(Cezanne)

January 2007
'If you don't mutate, you're half dead.'
Tamas St.Joby

December 2006
'I used to like to talk with people a lot. Then an older colleague of mine visited me, and when he left, I realised that I had been talking all the time. I felt embarrassed. Still, I would not advise anyone not to argue.' (Tibor Várnagy)

November 2006
'Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.'
(Murray Bookchin)

October 2006
'Plants are the most wonderful creations in the world. Virginia Woolf says that she likes humans more than plants. If one confronts me with this question, I could not come up so easily with an answer. And if I consider that I find myself in perfect harmony with the world only in the forest, garden and meadow, I would perhaps decide in favour of the plant, rather than the human person.' (Bela Hamvas)

September 2006
'The middle classes think they have gone green, because they buy organic cotton pyjamas, and hand made soaps with bits of leaf in them, though they still heat their conservatories and retain their holiday homes in Croatia.'(George Monbiot)

August 2006
‘Reason which is not aesthetic is not yet reason, but reason which becomes aesthetic is no longer reason.’ (Martin Seel)

July 2006
‘If the revolution can give art its soul, then art can become the mouthpiece of the revolution.’
(Lunacharsky)

March 2006
‘It is not the supermarket as a centre of trade, which is its legitimate cultural function, that disrupts man’s intuitive contact with his biological sources, but the supermarket as a utopian simplifier and developer of artificial needs that eventually erodes our inner sense of discrimination, and our ability to relate magically to the environment.’
(Newton Harrison)

February 2006
‘The supermarket is the surrogate for walking in forests and now bending to pick up berries, or lifting one’s hand to pluck fruit from a tree or hedge.
The supermarket brings us back to our origins thousands and tens of thousands of years ago.’
(Gustav Metzger)

January 2006
'My life is less complicated if I don't take it too seriously.' (Margit at Karton)

December 2005
"Oriental wisdom has it that time is useful when it is not used." (Paul Virilio, Open Sky)