Ayarkut Talks: Alternative Economy Models in Contemporary Art
Co-curated by Terromoto and Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo PAC
Panel
-> Feb 9 2023 – Feb 10 2023
The inaugural event hosted by AyarKut in Mexico City. Taking place on February 9-10, 2023, “AyarKut Talks: Alternative Economy Models in Contemporary Art” will bring together renowned speakers from around the world for a two-day program.
Co-curated by Terremoto and PAC, the event will delve into the economics of contemporary art and explore practices of commoning, radical economies, and fictitious currencies, as well as the complex relationship between money and ethics.
The program will feature distinguished international and Mexican artists, curators, and scholars, including ruangrupa (Indonesia), Gustavo Romano (Spain), Colectivo Amasijo (Mexico), Jota Izquierdo (Mexico), and Andrea Torreblanca (Mexico).
Programa:
9 de febrero 2023. Day 1: Co-curated by Terremoto
Co-curated by Terromoto, the first day of Alternative Economy Models in Contemporary Art, is a series of panel discussions and conversations around the fictional, symbolic and cold hard economics of contemporary art. Taking as a standpoint the volatility, dynamism, melting and evaporation of some of our economical constructs as well as the momentum of the capital and its failures, the program aims to imagine alternatives related to commoning practices, radical economies and fictitious currencies as well as to question the relationship between money, ethics, speculation and fetish. How can art navigate in a fluid economy where capital originates, distributes and fluctuates constantly? Is it possible to share resources under a neoliberal system? How may we develop a healthier relationship to the art system, one not defined by competition but cooperation?
I. Commoning: economic experiments and microeconomics based on collective share, surplus and labor - 16:00-17:20
Format: PANEL DISCUSSION Art collectives dialogue around their strategies for creating commoning practices using experimental economies, collective cooking, multispecies dialogues, cooperation, DIY and other hybridized practices in order to question the culture of scarcity rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal structures. Participants: ruangrupa (Idn), Colectivo Amasijo (Mx)
Moderated by Helena Lugo
II. Take the Money and Run: The Ballad of Economic Dependency - 17:30-18:20
Format: CONVERSATION
A conversation about ethics of collecting and funding transparency in cultural institutions.
The speakers will be announced soon.
III. Fictitious Economies and Radical Economic Practices of the Everyday Life - 18:30-20:00
Format: PANEL DISCUSSION
Artists doing worldbuilding have created imaginary societies, fictitious economies, made up currencies and other fake institutions to research different ways for the capital to circulate, distribute or engage with society. Whether from an ironic, whimsical or critical perspective, this talk tackles the possibilities of art to create other economic systems and values, that defy, resist and challenge our current social, political and economic inequalities.
Participants: Jota Izquierdo (Mx), Fritzia Irizar (Mx), Gustavo Romano (Esp)
Moderated TBC
10 February, 2023. Day 2: Co-Curated by PAC
Co-curated by PAC, the second day of Alternative Economy Models in Contemporary Art, will focus on projects that have resorted to organisational models, knowledge and understandings that allow to delineate horizons different from those of the neoliberal global logic. Conceived from localization policies, from community, collaborative, indigenous, contextual approaches, and radical pedagogies, these propose alternative paths to those that we have believed to be unique.
As international events such as documenta fifteen, directed by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, have made visible, these are practices conceived from a diversity of understandings and ways of doing things in the world that, contrary to what a colonial perspective claims, have always been contemporary.
I. Artistic practices that go beyond models: inside, outside, negotiating with the system - 12:00-13:20
The projects gathered in this panel are characterized by arising, in all their conception and in the ways of their exchanges, to organizational references that go beyond those of capitalism in Western modernity. They also turn to thought models that have questioned said system. Through their practices, all of them collaborative and that appeal to experiences from other frameworks, they open spaces for reflection and artistic practices that escape an individualistic understanding of art that is conceived solely as the production of objects for a capitalist market. Located in Oaxaca, Lugar común appeals to tequio's modes of collective organization; In dialogue with the feminist methodology of situated knowledge and the tradition of activist political participation in Veracruz, BRUMA Laboratoria investigates an art history in a decentered way; while the community organization Arte a 360 disseminates and promotes contemporary art in the state of Tlaxcala, while raising issues related to the defense of the territory and the Nahuatl language.
Jaime Ruiz / Lugar Común, Oaxaca, México
Moderator: Christian Gómez Vega / Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo / México
II. An infinite horizon: Building projects from other imaginaries... and sustaining their own transformation - 13:30-15:00
In this panel, we propose a space for reflection between representatives of projects that have been built as alternatives to conventional institutions and prevailing models. After reaching the objective of establishing itself, how to continue? How to sustain the energy? How to allow the projects to continue transforming to respond, in the same critical and divergent way, to the new challenges they face? What economic and ethical challenges does sustaining spaces that guarantee freedom of experimentation entail?
The first invited to this panel is SOMA, an independent space that emerged to offer a study program with a postgraduate level, but which has chosen not to be official, to maintain the freedom of artistic and pedagogical experimentation. On the other hand, Common places is the new program of the inSITE platform, with activities in Baja California, Peru and South Africa; here we seek to highlight how an internationally recognized project within a globalized contemporary art discourse opts for a radical look at the local and contextual, and to emphasize the ability of a recognized project to reinvent itself. Finally, TEOR/ética, a space for reflection and exhibition of contemporary artistic practices in Costa Rica, and its ability to sustain energy, financing, and vocation in an independent and non-profit project.
Laura Cortés / SOMA, CDMX
Andrea Torreblanca / Common places, Tijuana, México
María Paola Malavasi Lachner / Teor-ética, Costa-Rica
Moderator: Carmen Cebreros / Curator and researcher / México
For more information please contact Ayarkut: