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Prospections

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18/05/2021
Tactical Solidarities


In solidarity with the Palestinian decolonization struggle and decolonization efforts everywhere

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht stands in solidarity with the Palestinian decolonization struggle and with decolonization efforts everywhere.
 
To counter the long histories and pervasive colonial violence that persists till today, we need to expand the horizon of intersectional solidarities across decolonization efforts everywhere. We firmly believe that the role of cultural institutions such as ours is to tackle and widen the understanding of how knowledge and language are structurally woven in the oppression, and to propose and enact alternatives that align with the struggle and the possibility to build a world together otherwise.
 
BAK also fully endorses the statement issued by the Graduate Gender Programme & Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies at Utrecht University, on 14 May 2021. Read it here.

Moreover, BAK co-wrote (on 19 May 2021) a joint statement with Jan van Eyck Academie and Rijksakademie, as fellow Netherlands-based cultural and post-academic institutions. Read it here.

Related content

30/01/2023
Digital Discomfort

Execution

Critical Software Thing

Originating with the twelfth-century French term l’exécuteur du testament (the executor of the will), the term “execution” today finds itself entangled in myriad systems, such as linguistic systems, judiciary systems, computational systems, and systems of memory—all of which are touched upon in this text (originally published as an entry in The Posthuman Glossary [2028]) by Critical Software Thing (CST)). Be it by guillotine or CPU, as a realization of a decreed sentence, CST suggest that “execution” always relates to the now, “to an actualization, a presence which is always already over.” Highlighting the micro-instructions, micro-operations, and micro-temporality of systems executions, CST point toward the liveness inherent in them. Without succumbing to the seeming seamlessness of computation—harkening to the Cell for Digital Discomfort’s suggestion to embrace a seamful approach to technology—and with an awareness for the executive power of code, CST propose that code itself to be regarded as but “a partial instruction within a wider, dynamic ecology of many executing systems.”

Archive Essay Text
04/12/2022
Digital Discomfort

Afrofuturism

Ramon Amaro

This short-form essay by writer, researcher, and academic Ramon Amaro draws from multiple conceptions and realizations of Afrofuturism—in practice by the science fiction authors Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, the musicians George Clinton and Sun Ra, the filmmakers Marlon Riggs and John Akomfrah, and in theory by theorists Alondra Nelson, Kodwo Eshun, and many others. It’s a quote from Delany in particular that Amaro points to in order to remind the reader that the “forceful and distinguishing aspects” of science fiction itself lie in its marginal nature. Amaro shows how, from this position in the margins, Afrofuturism might—or continue to—disrupt history’s role in preempting the future by celebrating the awkwardness and disjointedness of culture. As a speculative tool for questioning how the black body is conceptualized in relation to ecologies of culture, Afrofuturism offers a “simulated new beginning based on a mythical past of greatness.” Dwelling in the uncertainty and improbability of whether technology could offer a form of liberation for black bodies, Amaro insists upon the idea that black culture and life is about imagining the impossible, as Nelson puts it, “imagining a better place, a different world.”

Archive Essay
11/08/2021

ExitStateCraft

“ExitStateCraft” is conceived as a forum for proposals on exit strategies from the actually existing state. Over the coming months, “ExitStateCraft” unfolds this conversation, dialectically and haltingly, through diverging and contradictory contributions—from imagining alternative states to working toward post-statist social forms, from inter- to trans- and post-national organizational structures, and from critical work with the juridical apparatus to the abrogation of the law itself […]

Editorial Text
07/12/2020
How to Assemble Now

Rebellion Looks Inwards: Organizing in the midst of Extinction

Extinction Rebellion Utrecht, Selçuk Balamir

Extinction Rebellion (XR) entered the spotlight in late 2018 with a call for mass disruptions, followed by a first wave of actions which saw thousands come together to block major bridges in London. Borrowing from the history of civil disobedience and breaking some new ground in its tactics and aesthetics, XR attracted a following and level of media attention previously unattainable for grassroots environmental organizing. [...]

Interview Text
18/12/2022
Tactical Solidarities

Jose Maria Sison (1939–2022)

It is with great sadness to learn that on 16 December 2022 Professor Jose Maria Sison passed away. Having lived in exile in Utrecht, Professor Sison taught at the first New World Academy in 2013, Towards a People’s Culture, which we convened together with artist Jonas Staal in 2013. Professor Sison’s learnings on solidarity, friendship, resilience, and joy of the world in spite of its many hardships and struggles, will continue resonate strongly. Rest in power.

Announcement
24/03/2022
Standing With Ukraine. Standing With the Oppressed

Maidan and (8 Years) After: State of the Ukrainian Left

Nina Potarska

For Prospections “Standing With Ukraine. Standing With the Oppressed,” feminist, social researcher, and peace activist Nina Potarska has kindly given us permission to republish her 2016 text “Maidan and After: State of the Ukrainian Left,” originally published in n+1 magazine 24, New Age (Winter 2016), which gives a socioeconomic context to the Maidan uprising and describes the author’s own involvement in the protests from a feminist position, demanding direct democracy and an end to corruption and (neo)oligarchic rule; and subsequently, her involvement in helping women impacted by the war in eastern Ukraine. The republication of this text is followed by a postscript by Potarska describing her recent years of peacebuilding activist and advocacy work as Ukraine’s national coordinator for the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, Kyiv. Yet today—one month after the full-scale Russian invasion and its fully raging war on Ukraine—the author is faced with an acute sense of grief regarding how to carry on.

Essay Text