The language of the conference is English
Friday, Nov 30, 2007
9.30 am Coffee bar
Welcome words:
Gabriele Russ, Head of the Cultural Department of the County of Styria
10:30 am Wolf-Dieter Narr
(Berlin)
Towards a Politico-material Concept of Human Rights and
the Difficulties of its Implementation
Human rights, first conceived of as defensive assurances of the bourgeois male
and possessive person against intrusions by an absolutistic (hence authoritarian)
state around the end of the 18th century lack their democratic-participatory
consequences and their socio-material preconditions and instruments mainly till
today. There is always the danger that they are (ab-)used by the dominant Western
powers primarily as rather abstract norms, to legitimize all kinds of powerful
measures taken till the so called “humanitarian interventions” (i.e.
wars).
Wolf-Dieter Narr was born in 1937. He has taught Political Science at the Free
University of Berlin, Germany, since 1971. As a human-rights-activist, that
is to say anarchist Narr has not retired yet.
11:30 am Corinna Milborn (Vienna)
Fortress Europe: Those Left out of the ”Land of
Human Rights“
Undocumented Migrants: Strategies and Pitfalls in Pointing Out Human Rights
Violations
The European Union defines itself as an “area of freedom, security and
justice” and builds its identity on the respect of human rights. However,
these rights are only fully valid for EU citizens. Aliens are put into different
classes of deprivation of rights, with undocumented migrants at the bottom.
The lecture informs about the current infractions of human rights inside Europe,
at the borders and in transit countries and talks about the difficulties of
artists, writers, journalists and activists when working on making this situation
visible, whilst dealing with people whose (economic) survival is based on invisibility.
It also questions the motivations and effects of art, science and activism meant
to enhance the visibility of undocumented migrants.
Corinna Milborn was born in Innsbruck in 1972. She is a political scientist,
journalist and author who lives in Vienna, Austria. She specializes in globalization,
human rights and migration, is chief editor of the human rights magazine liga
and political journalist with the news magazine Format.
12:15 am Dieter A. Behr / Europäisches
BürgerInnenforum (Vienna)
„Ensemble on ne se laisse pas faire...“ Migrants'
Self-Organization and Solidarity Work in Europe's Industrial Agriculture
The presentation outlines the stages, accomplishments and open questions of
the solidarity campaign for migrant farm laborers in different countries of
Europe, first and foremost in the southern Spanish market gardening region of
Almeria. The different levels of the political work will be discussed, starting
with the direct support of workers when building up social centers via legal
matters with regard to campaigns against illegalization and different forms
of the seasonal worker status right through to the issue of consumerism and
the roles of supermarket chains and the European agricultural and migration
politics. That way joint consideration of possible strategies of resistance
is to be fuelled in the course of this event.
Dieter A. Behr studied landscape architecture at the BOKU- University of Natural
Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria. He works for the solidarity
campaign of the European Civic Forum for the Spanish farm laborers’ union
SOC and does research work on the issues of foodstuffs production and collective
actions.
1 pm Spitou Mendy / SOC - Sindicato
de Obreros del Campo (Almeria)
Almeria: The SOC for the Rights of Those "Without
Rights"
Since the pogroms of February 2000 which took place in the small town of El
Ejido, fear, damnation, avarice and difficult working and living conditions
of migrants have been widespread in Almeria, in the southeast of Spain. In the
face of the pressures of a reality that calls for medium-term and long-term
solutions, the farm laborers’ union SOC decided to fight against the numerous
obstacles that make the observance of human rights impossible.
The fight for human rights concretizes around several axes in everyday life.
People fight for the right to: identity, work with fair pay, shelter, family
life, correct information, freedom of (peaceful) assembly and association, political
activity etc.
Spitou Mendy has his roots in the Senegal. Between 1982 and 1985 he worked
as a teacher; then, from 1988 to 2001 he was Professor for Latin American languages
and literature. In March 2000 he was elected secretary general of the teachers’
union of the Catholic private school in Dakar (Snec). In June 2001 he was able
to force through agreement on a lodging allowance for the teachers. In the end
of the school year 2001 he followed the request to go into exile “voluntarily”.
Since August 2001 he has lived in Almeria where he has worked together with
the SOC since his arrival and since 2006 he has been a regular staff member.
1.45-2.45 pm Lunch break
3 pm Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur
(Vienna)
The Ongoing Struggles for the Right to have Rights: Universalist
Patterns of Exclusion and Radical Re/visions of Freedoms
Focusing on what Homi Bhaba calls “the unfinished and unsolved histories
of decolonisation which uphold today’s inequalities” the contested
field of citizenship is being deployed. Who has in the cause of history been
systematically excluded from the very definition of the human, the citizen bearing
rights? How have the various struggles of the excluded for, to speak with Hannah
Arendt, “the right to have rights”, lead to a radicalization of
the visions of freedoms, human rights – challenging the very exclusions
imbedded in current concepts of citizenship? Drawing on the revolution for freedom
of enslaved Africans in Haiti and its marginalized impact; in today’s
realities of illegalization, institutionalized racism and movements and strategies
of resistance the aim is to counteract the present silencing of these very his-and
herstories, thus re/connecting to re/visions of freedoms.
Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur is a theorist, activist and the co-founder of
Pamoja, Movement of the young African Diaspora in Austria. She works on institutional
racism and antiracism, history and presence of the African Diaspora in Austria,
Black feminist literary criticism, politics of representation, (neo)colonial
discourse analysis. Johnston-Arthur gives lectures at the University of Vienna
and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.
3.45 pm Seyran Ates (Berlin)
Islam and Human Rights (Women‘s Rights), a Contradiction?
To my mind, when we have a close look at the lives in migration – in Europe
– of many women from Muslim countries, we receive the legitimate impression
that these women do not at all participate in modernity, enlightenment and universal
human rights. In which Europe do these women live? In my opinion they live locked
in an Islamic parallel world which orientates itself consciously and unconsciously
by the Islamic human rights. The latter’s main objective is to keep the
decent Islamic woman within the patriarchal structure of religion, to grant
her human dignity only in the “Islamic” sense of the word.
Seyran Ates was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1963 and immigrated with her parents
to Berlin, Germany, in 1969. Since then she has lived and worked there. Already
at the university she was very involved in women’s rights and human rights
issues. From 1997 to 2006 she ran her own law office and predominantly legally
represented women – especially women from Muslim countries who were victims
of acts of violence.
4.30 pm Rubia Salgado / maiz
(Linz)
Strategies of Becoming Visible As Exemplified in the Public
Relations and Cultural Activities of maiz – an Autonomous Centre for Women
Migrants
On the one hand, it is about work as women migrants and with women migrants
in order to improve their living and working conditions, for professionalization
and empowerment and for the abolishment of tabooing and discriminating sex work
–
and, on the other, it is about the option for realizing political cultural work
that is aimed at changing our society and is laid out in a participatory manner.
In between and joining there is: the determination to create and mediate anti-hegemonic
positions, images and narratives.
Rubia Salgado is co-founder and staff member of maiz. She conceived and realized
different projects at the interface of education, public relations and cultural
work. Salgado is also writer and activist with a strong commitment to the field
of cultural politics.
5.15 pm Josip Rotar / European
Caravan of Erased (Maribor)
European Caravan of Erased - How to Make Invisible Politics
Visible
After being erased from the register of permanent residence in 1992 and after
the start of their organized struggle, Erased organized the European Caravan
to Paris and Brussels last November. The aim of the caravan was to give political
support to their lawsuit on the European Court for Human Rights and to give
visibility to their struggle. The point of the lecture is to show an example
how self-organized groups internationalize their problems and achieve their
political visibility.
Josip Rotar was born in 1981. He is a student of traffic and transportation
engineering in Maribor, Slovenia. During his work for a student radio station
he connected with self-organized social and political groups. Last year he joined
the “European Caravan of Erased”. He is a journalist and media activist
who lives and works in Maribor, Slovenia.
Saturday, Dec 1, 2007
9.30 am Coffee bar10 am Kolya Abramsky (New
York)
Beyond Protest: Towards Constructing Autonomous Relations
of Production, Exchange and Livelihoods?
Global anti-capitalist networks have proved excellent at organizing large global
meetings, global days of action, emergency responses in support of local struggles,
as well as circulating information and news throughout the world. The challenge
facing these networks is how to build on this success in order to go beyond
protest and actually construct long term
alternative relations of production, exchange and livelihoods that go beyond
the nation state,
world-market and wage relation. The focus of the presentation will be on Western
Europe, yet within a global context.
Kolya Abramsky is active in different global anti-capitalist networks. This
has included protests, international solidarity campaigns, educational activities,
publications and translation work. Currently at the State University of New
York, Binghamton, Abramsky is researching the conflicts surrounding a global
transition to renewable energy, and sorely missing living in Europe where he
is from.
11 am Alex Foti /
EuroMayDay (Milan)
Mayday, Precarity and Radical Movements in Europe
Emerging out of the antiglobalization movement, EuroMayDay is a transnational
protest event held on the 1st of May in a dozen or more European cities since
2005, including Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, Helsinki, Seville-Malaga, Vienna, Naples,
Maribor, Copenhagen, Liège. It is also a cross-European network for social
agitation and labor organizing among flexible, immigrant, creative young workers
to fight for economic redistribution and free movement of people across borders.
Alex Foti was born in Milan, Italy, in 1966. He is an activist working on precarity,
urban ecology and radical Europe. After launching projects that combined media
and labor activism in Italy (ChainWorkers, San Precario) Foti has promoted an
Europe-wide mayday against generational precarity and the persecution of migrants
which saw temps, part-timers, immigrants and other precarious, service, and/or
creative workers parading in Milan and many other European cities in 2005, 2006
and 2007. www.euromayday.org
11.45 am Fanny Castel, Julien Bayou
/ Jeudi Noir (Paris)
Bubbles to Burst the Bubble and 80s Hits to Hit the Headlines.
“Housing, Employment: Presenting Issues in a New Language – Actions,
Perspectives and Strategies”
We turn up unexpectedly at small flats for rent, with our only ammunition being
sparkling wine, confetti and disco music and our best ally the camera of an
empathetic journalist. Jeudi Noir performs all that festivity to speak seriously
about the housing bubble and about what it implies for young people. Not to
mention what it implies generally for an ever larger portion of French households.
Besides the concrete description of our actions and the devices we use to achieve
our aims, we will offer a behind-the-scenes analysis on the practices we have
to create visibility and spread our messages.
Julien Bayou was born in 1980. He is serial activist and economist. From 2005
he has worked for “Coordination SUD”, the national coordination
of French NGOs of international solidarity. He takes an interest in issues such
as fair trade, development, intellectual property and open source.
Fanny Castel was born in 1983. She is a serial activist and linguist. She is
currently working for the “Centre International d’Etudes Pédagogiques”,
a national public establishment which parent ministry is the French Ministry
of Education. She takes an interest in issues such as indigenous peoples’
rights and activism, arctic studies and biopiracy.
Together they are founding members of Jeudi Noir, Géneration Précaire
and have opened the Ministère de la Crise de Logement.
12.30 am Teodor Celakoski /
Pravo na Grad (Zagreb)
The Right to the City
The main goal of the presentation is to contextualize the public campaign “The
Right to the City” into a wider social and cultural context, especially
into the context of the rights of the citizens. One of the presentation’s
points will try to answer how the protection of one of the main city squares
is becoming one of the real and symbolic places of struggle against the ongoing
unsustainable development of the whole country? The main focus will be given
to tactical aspects of the campaign that proved to be successful in gaining
wider public support.
Teodor Celakoski is program coordinator of the Multimedia Institute in Zagreb,
Croatia. He initiated numerous projects and several program-based culture cooperation
platforms like Clubture (Croatian network of independent culture ngo-s), Zagreb
– Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000. Celakoski is currently leading the
citizen initiative “The Right to the City” established with the
goal to prevent devastation of public spaces as well as devastation of the protected
urban heritage in Zagreb, Croatia.
1.15-2.15 pm Lunch break
2.30 pm Jens Kastner (Vienna)
Shaping the Border Area
If the debate about border spaces should be tied in with hope, then it is about
adhering to the process of shaping them using both everyday and artistic means.
With that aim in mind, “social constructivist” approaches that focus
on the performative creation of those spaces are on the one hand very helpful.
They plumb the depths of spaces that are created by real action. On the other
hand though, we must not lose sight of the systematic brutality or rather the
brutal system of the border regime. Hence “materialistic” categories
like structure and power are essential in order to adequately describe areas
of (prevented) passage.
Jens Kastner is an art historian and sociologist who lives in Vienna, Austria.
He was Associated Professor at the Institute for Sociology (1999-2004) and at
the Center for Latin American Research (2004-2006) at the University of Münster,
Germany. He works as art critic for several magazines and newspapers.
3.15 pm Dmitry Vilensky
/ Chto delat? (St. Petersburg)
Rights Are Not Given, They Are Taken
There is a common point of the permanent western and particularly the American
critique of the current political situation in Russia as to the abuse of any
human rights and the claims that the Russian authorities have moved far away
from the “standard” norms of a democratic society. And we all know
well Putin’s famous reply on these reproaches: “Look at yourself!”
In my presentation I would like to focus on the history of the development a discourse on human rights in theSoviet – Russian history from establishing the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976 and the difference in approaching the issue of rights from a liberal and a leftist-activist point of view – and on the particular role of visual artists in making these problems visible in the face of the absence of a public sphere and basic structures of a civic society.
Dmitry Vilensky was born in 1964. He is an artist and cultural activist based
in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2003 he initiated the platform “Chto delat?/
What is to be done?”. He is editor of the newspaper Chto delat?/ What
is to be done? www.chtodelat.org
Vilensky works mostly in a frame work of interdisciplinary collective practices
in the media of video, photography, text, installations and exhibition architecture.
4.00 pm Gediminas Urbonas (Vilnius)
Pro-Test Lab: Hacking Public Spaces in Vilnius
The paper charts the construction of a protest lab through the events of artistic
production staged as a campaign of reclaiming public space, as their method
of protest against the privatization of Lietuva (Lithuania) the largest cinema
theater in Vilnius. It analyses the debates that unfold in the conflict between
privatization and publicness, art and ethics, activism and production. The presentation
scrutinizes an art project that employs the energies of the productive side
of protest, archiving all possibilities of impossible protest that rally against
the specific situation of the privatization of public space.
Gediminas Urbonas is an artist who lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania. Together
with Nomeda Urbonas he develops an interdisciplinary art program – a model
for a social and artistic practice with the interest to design organizational
structures that question the relativity of freedom. They use the art platform
to render public spaces for interaction and engagement of the social groups,
evoking local communities and encouraging their cultural and political imagination.
4.45 pm Igor Stokfiszewski
/ Krytyka polityczna (Warsaw)
Artists! Go to Politics!
Critical thought used to apply political tools to the domain of art (however,
often using also the language of aesthetics) and to blur the boundaries between
the languages of art/politics, proving that art IS politics. But is it? Let's
try in a different way. Art is politics. I know this, you know this and artists
who I'd like to say something about – also know this: Artur Zmiejwski,
Joanna Rajkowska, Wilhelm Sasnal. But none of the theories that have been developed
so far made the world of politics take art “seriously” as a tool
for political action. So maybe artists shouldn't assume that their art is political
according to one of a plenty of theories which try to prove it but boldly step
into the domain of politics – on its rights, in its language.
Igor Stokfiszewski was born in 1979. He is literature, theatre and art critic.
Stokfiszewski studied literature in Lodz and Cracow. Between 2001-2006 he was
the co-editor of Ha!art an interdisciplinary cultural magazine. Since 2006 he
works for the “Krytyka Polityczna” (Political Critique) magazine.
He worked as a curator in the contemporary art gallery “Bunkier Sztuki”
in Cracow. As a critic he writes for daily newspapers, weekly magazines, literary
and art magazines.
5.30 pm Caroline Lensing-Hebben & Patrick
Watkins / Rebond pour la Commune (Paris)
Revolution is Televised: Participatory Process and Plural
Voices in the Commune, (Paris 1871) by Peter Watkins
The 1871 Paris Commune was not only an important working class uprising against
the injustices and social ills of its time, it was also a large scale experience
in direct democracy. Through its preparation, shooting process and alternative
distribution, the film La Commune (Paris 1871) by Peter Watkins attempts to
tackle revolutionary form and process by unleashing liberating forces in a collective
audio-visual project involving the participation of “ordinary” citizens
as well as the marginalised communities of our “modern and developed”
societies (sans-papiers, homeless, jobless). The presentation will be accompanied
by film extracts.
Patrick Watkins is researcher on education and civil society in Sub-Saharan
Africa. He acts as a filmmaker, casting director and assistant editor for La
Commune.
Caroline Lensing-Hebben is researcher in political science. She is non professional
actress in Peter Watkins's film La Commune and co-founder of Rebond pour la
Commune, Paris, France.
7 pm Final panel with the participants of the conference