Désoeuvrement! Variously translated as unworking or inoperativity is a notion that haunts contemporary political theory and practice. Unworking overturns the typical valuation of work and action as positive and constructive and opens an avenue to think radical passivity and inactivity as aesthetic and political practices that question the modernist mantra of purposeful production and ceaseless activity. At its most basic, unworking is the critique of work and of everything that we imagine as such. The work of community-building for instance, the work of art, work as wage labour, even psychoanalysis, imagined as ‘working through’. This issue of continent is dedicated to unworking in its various guises. ...

The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents, including technological networks and software. This upgraded ‘operating system’ of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed – even to the extreme of a self-organising system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it. The subtitle of the book makes reference ...

The book explores some of the interconnections between art, activism and the business concept of disruptive innovation. With a backdrop of the crisis of financial capitalism, austerity cuts in the cultural sphere, the idea is to focus on potential art strategies in relation to a broken economy. In a perverse way, we ask whether this presents new opportunities for cultural producers to achieve more autonomy over their production process? If it is indeed possible or desirable, what alternative business models emerge? The book is concerned broadly with business as (artistic) material for reinvention, including critical writing and examples of art/activist ...

In last month’s editorial for the February issue of e-flux journal, we proposed that the communication networks that now saturate our working and private lives have forced us to become cosmopolitan creatures. Our relations to place and time have been shredded to pieces, and we, as those proud pieces, circle the earth like satellites clustering in various locations simultaneously. Aliens to our homes and neighborhoods, we develop terrible posture slouching over screens while simultaneously soaring through the stratosphere at light speed, dazzling our way through galaxies, spotlights, and stars just to cover our measly rent… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle On the Lebanese Rocket Society Joana Hadjithomas ...

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CREATIVITY The book published by F/SUW in cooperation with MayFly Books gathers papers based on presentations at the conference Labour of the Multitudes? Political Economy of Social Creativity, organized in Warsaw in October 2011. It includes contributions by renowned thinkers and artists, including Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Massimiliano Tomba, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Martha Rosler, among many others. The title Joy Forever refers to the false promise of a common happiness, constantly played out by the proponents of the creative class and creative economy – the very promise that since Romanticism has been ascribed ...

Look at Hazards, Look at Losses developed out of a series of conversations, exchanges and visits between kuda.org, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt over 2015-2017 through which different approaches to common problems of cultural production in early-21st century Europe and its peripheries were debated and conceptually probed. Setting out from Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘the aesthetic relations of production’, these discussions proceeded to explore problems bearing upon organisation in small groups in the field of culture, philosophical idealism and materialism, poetry, error, and crisis. The anthology assembled reflects these concerns through engagement with the writing of others who have helped ...

Precariousness increasingly defines the conditions, under which people in all different fields pursue their work. Yet it is not only work, but also living conditions that have become precarious for more and more extensive portions of the European population. The present edition of the republicart web journal deals with more recent attempts to counter non-self-determined precariousness with the means of art and activism, bringing a self-determined turn to the term. In the practices of the Precarias a la Deriva in Madrid, the Glücklichen Arbeitslosen in Berlin, the French Intermittents, the May Day Parades in Barcelona and Milan, or the Italian ...

Progress in autonomy cannot be – nor historically has it ever been – measured in quantitative units. Rather, the need for autonomy is repositioned in relation to society’s political, economic, and cultural developments on an ongoing basis. What do we mean when we speak of ‘autonomy’ and ‘reproduction’ in the field of contemporary art? What kind of objects do these terms encompass, what are their histories, and what internal logical relations can we identify between these concepts? How do they operate in a philosophical discourse about art and in political theory and practice? In this book, Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier ...

Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power […]. All past movements were able to bring society to a standstill and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communisation, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money […] it will tend to break all separations. – Gilles Dauve and Francois Martin, The Eclipse and Re- Emergence of the Communist Movement. The example of the German, and above all, of the Russian revolutions, shows that the proletariat was fully capable of destroying a social order which presented an obstacle to ...

We have our own concept of Time and Motion comes from a growing network of artists who have formed around Auto Italia and its programme and, although a long time coming, is a logical conclusion of artists finding affinity with each others projects, ideas and aspirations. This publication (produced in two parts) outlines a live programme which will see Auto Italia become a base for the production of new work and ideas, pushing artists to the forefront of collaborations with other fields. Produced by Auto Italia in collaboration with Federico Campagna, Huw Lemmey, Michael Oswell and Charlie Woolley this project showcases ...

This issue seeks to bring to the forefront the various positions and strategies of the most diverse art initiatives, from project and off-spaces to personalities within the art field, as well as those of established galleries and institutions and city officials based in Zurich in 2020. Originally, this issue was intended to draw a picture of the Zurich art scene and was meant to be published parallel to Art Basel 2020. Though with the current pandemic’s additional layering, the main focus of the precariousness of the independent art scene in Zurich has increased dramatically. In this respect, we would like ...