Arnolfini presents a two-day event on Wed 5 and Thurs 6 Sept 2012, with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Lars Bang Larsen and Federico Campagna, exploring the relationship between work, play, and resistance. The event will coincide with final days of Olivia Plender’s exhibition, Rise Early, Be Industrious, which closes on Sunday 9 September.
Olivia Plender, Open Forum, 2008 – ongoing. Mixed media installation, platform, screens, wall painting, monitors, oil on canvas, paintings, lamps, desk, table, fake plants, props. Installation view Arnolfini. Photo: Jamie Woodley.
Including talks, discussions and a film screening, the event will discuss the 1960s and 1970s as a decisive moment in contemporary understanding of subjectivity and politics. With a new emphasis on information, and an emerging global network of trade and production, a new regime of power was forming in which the meaning of ‘resistance’ was also changing. The events will highlight the role of play and pedagogy, both in relation to their function in the emancipatory thinking of the counter movements and political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and within the contemporary culture of ‘self-improvement’ and a neoliberal claim of ‘life-long learning’.
On the first evening Lars Bang Larsen and Franco “Bifo” Berardi will present lectures about two specific aspects: the ideal of a ludic society (a society of play) and the relationship between the body and capital in what Berardi calls “Semiocapitalism”.
On the second evening, a screening of the film “Il Trasloco (Moving out of the Future)” about the Italian Autonomia movement will be introduced by Federico Campagna and followed by a discussion with Berardi, who is one of the film’s protagonists.
www.arnolfini.org.uk