Let’s Program

22-24 February, 2008

Let’s Remake the World III

Seminar and Workshop 22-23-24 February 2008
I YNKB
Baldersgade 70. st. tv.
2200 København N
Phone: 0045 35851037 – 0045 20613173 – 004560810218

Let’s remake the world III seeks to create a discussion about
the place of optimism in the face of war, environmental devastation,
and global capitalism, and to examine how optimism can help fuel positive
change in a realistic way.
See the Background and the questions we intend to address for producing
statements here
We are all participants, no listeners.

Schedule
The programme is subject to alteration

Friday, February 22

14:00: Let’s remake the world III, Introduction by YNKB

14: 30:
Claire Pentecost

16.00
John Jordan
I tend to swing between two ways of feeling and thinking around hope.
One is critiquing hope in the way that Derek Jensen does when he writes
about giving up on hope because it restrains our agency, ( see http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/170/
). The other is looking at hope like Rebecca Solnit does in her fantastic
little book “Hope In The Dark” where she sees hope in the
unexspected nature of history, in the fact that history is always
ready to be made and that the best act of hope is to act in the present
moment with no expectations of consequences .. she echoes Ursula Le
Guin a bit who wrote..”In order to speculate safely on an inhabitable
future, perhaps we would do well to find a rock crevice and go backward…With
all our self-consciousness, we have very little sense of where we
live, where we are right here right now.”

17: 00
Sarah Lewison
Performance : Land Access to Which is Denied No ONe (1970)
A reenactment of the appeal case of “The People of the State
of California vs. Lou Gottlieb” in which Northern California
resident Lou Gottlieb defended his Constitutional right to deed his
land to God.
The event is presented by Sarah Lewison with special guests ‘playing’
members of the court, and will be followed by a discussion of this
historic case and its implications.

In 1969, Lou Gottlieb was facing a State-ordered injunction against
letting people live on his 31-acre ranch, home of the legendary Morningstar
Commune, so he signed over the title of his property to God. His motivation
was both complex and simple: an
attempt keep this land open for all who needed it and loved it, in
perpetuity.
He saw in this act an opening for remediation of the earth and of
human relations.
The court case that followed was a fascinating and sometimes comic
effort on behalf of the State government and the court to deny Gottlieb’s
claim without having to examine the concept of ownership or deny the
existence of God.
Gottlieb wrote, …”if land is held as a source of profit, that
opens a certain pattern of reactive behavior which is very well-established…..
How really should we live on the
earth when we are not concerned at least with this tiny, little pilot
study with maximizing the net?”
Reading is about 40 min, followed by discussion.

19:30
Dinner: YNKB Folkekøkken

2100 -22:00
Music by HavblikAudio

Saturday 23 february

10:00 Coffee and bread

11:00 Brett Bloom
The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World
gathers how-to publications borne out of the massive counter cultural
groundswell in the late 1960s / early 1970s of people who wanted to
take apart and re-assemble the broken world they inherited. Activists,
citizens, designers, artists, radicals, housewives, environmentalists
and others worked together to challenge received notions of women’s
health care, the built environment, authoritarian political and social
structures, and the impoverished imaginary of everyday existence.
My talk will focus on the books from the Library and by extension
the different forms and areas of resistance that they encapsulate.

12:00 Michel Chevalier
“unlimited liability”—a firewall against art-market
cooptation, and resulting (de)mobilizational effects.
In 1969 Lucy Lippard wrote, “the artists who are trying to do
non-object art are introducing a drastic solution to the problems
of artists being bought and sold so easily, along with their art (…).”
In the Summers of 2006 and 2007, I tried to provide a less drastic,
but in my view more precise, response to the influence of commercial
galleries and collectors (not to mention their obliging “critics”
and curators) on art production. I opened a shop that sold inexpensive
art-multiples under the terms of contract that stipulated that no
purchaser could have more than €50,000 in assets, subject to
penalty in case of false disclosure.
I will briefly present the Hamburg context of this project, ‘unlimited
liability’, consider it in light of Marx’s critique of the commodity
form, and try to summarize the media resonance and mixed reactions
this project had.
http://targetautonopop.org:

13:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Kirsten Forkert
Title: Solidarity as both a necessary and elusive concept
My starting point is that one important way of countering cynicism,
defeatism and opportunism (I see each as them as all closely related)
is through creating forms of solidarity. I’m not saying that a concept
such as solidarity doesn’t have to be reworked and reconsidered, especially
if it is going to be useful for artists in any way.
However, I’m also concerned about how easily it is dismissed as unfashionable,
outmoded and even unthinkable in certain contexts.

In my talk, which is based on my research on artists’ working conditions,
I will speculate on how we can both imagine and enact forms of solidarity
in a neoliberal climate (where entrepreneurialism is seen to be the
only form of political empowerment), recently marked by the rapid
expansion of the art market (with the associated values of competition
and meritocracy, and the entrenching of conservative
definitions of the artist’s role). What are ways of working together
and supporting each other? How can we learn from the successes and
failures of past initiatives?

15:00: Keith Stern-Pirlot
Control is freezing the world’s becoming, thereby fixing us
and everything else on this planet so that ALL can be manipulated
in whatever ways fuel the autonomic system that, ironically, doesn’t
even benefit its chief functionaries. But with the bursting of the
global credit bubble, we may be at a watershed moment in time. Not
since the 1930s has capitalist “society” faced such a
serious economic crisis; and with crises, opportunity and change often
follows.
This presentation will explore some ways that Life can escape the
kingdom of clones so as to give rise to the new.

17:00
Short Statements: (All participants must prepare a short statement:
10 minutes each)
Mette Kit Jensen/RACA
YNKB
Learning Site
Kristine Ask
Nis Rømer
Copenhagen Free University
Public Globality Gardens
Parfyme
Jamie Stapleton
Other participants?

18:00
Discussion for a Joint Statement

20:00
Dinner Artist and Musician Michel Chevalier

21:00 – 22:00
Music: Peter Dacke

Sunday 24 February

11:00
Workshop
Turning the joint statement into action. Bring materials.

13:00
Lunch

14:00
Workshop
Turning the joint statement into action. Bring materials.

19:00
Dinner by Claire Pentecost

20: Music: Henning Frimann og Elisabetta Saiu