Atmospheres of Protest:
Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art

The upsurge of new popular movements from Egypt to Greece and Bucharest
to New York has engendered an atmosphere of defiance and social
creativity that has captured the global imagination. Beyond the ebb and
flow of individual protest movements, this symposium asks whether
global solidarity has really taken hold this time and considers the
variety of ways in which contemporary art is embroiled through
practices of dialogue and collaboration in the emergence of a common
horizon and the imagining of a sustainable future. Providing a
trans-disciplinary forum for discussion of the vital issues bridging
the fields of art and environmental thought, the symposium sheds light
on our understanding of the multifarious notion of sustainability,
which appears by turns as a radical concept in global ecological
thinking, can be recruited as a corporate strategy for green
capitalism, and may act as a spur to new forms of social activism.

Speakers include artist-activists Noah Fischer and Maria Byck, who are
members of the Occupy Museums Collective that protests against the
domination of the interests of the 1% in the running of New York art
institutions, as well as Berlin and Amsterdam-based /urbanibalists/
Matteo Pasquinelli and Wietske Maas, who will present a radical
manifesto of urban cannibalism that seeks to recover the spontaneous
living matter of the city. Curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes explore the
creation of liberated zones and the relevance of ecological thought to
new protest movements. Activist and writer on affective labour Emma
Dowling will reflect on the sustainability of the protest movement in
the light of the spread of locally-organised occupations of public and
private space, while Tomas Rafa’s video archive of marches and
counter-demonstrations illuminates the spectrum of contemporary
protest.

The symposium is organised by curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes
(Translocal.org) in collaboration with the Department of Environmental
Science and Policy and the Centre for Arts and Culture at Central
European University (CEU).

The symposium will take place from 2-6pm. The order of speakers will be
on the website. For more information see:
http://www.translocal.org/sustainability