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Prospections

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14/12/2020
Tactical Solidarities


Practicing Tactical Solidarities II: A Roundtable on Mutual Aid, Emergency, and Continuous Care

Yasmin Ahmed, Mutual Support Platform, Shay Raviv, Mitchy Mallorca Saturay, Rachael Rakes

This locally-focused second edition of Practicing Tactical Solidarities: A Roundtable on Mutual Aid, Emergency, and Continuous Care took place on 16 December 2020. It featured artists, organizers, and activists working in Utrecht, many of whom were at that time BAK Fellows. While addressing changing needs and urgencies in the protracted pandemic reality and its overlapping and related crises, the conversation contends with tactics and lessons in creating mutual aid networks, lasting support systems, and emergency care. The roundtable’s contributors work in creative, insurgent, and strategic ways in the realms of housing rights, migrant justice, feminist alliance, strengthening local communities, and on several other fronts. These efforts directly address people and systems in the Netherlands, while reverberating to struggles beyond. The discussion also engages with means of working together as collectives, cooperatives, and interdependent structures to forge coalitional ties across different priorities and populations. 

Practicing Tactical Solidarities II takes place within BAK’s online forum, Prospections. The first focus of the forum, Tactical Solidarities, launched in May 2020, offers examples of practical and creative solidarity frameworks, considering what these have looked like in the past, and what they are becoming. Read more about the forum and these issues here.

Participants: Yasmin Ahmed (Revolutionaire Eenheid, International Women’s Alliance); Gerardo Gomez Tonda, Charli Herrington, Gizem Üstüner, and M.C. Julie Yu (Mutual Support Platform and No. More. Later.); Shay Raviv and Ana Bajt (De Voorkamer), Mitchy Mallorca Saturay (Migrante Utrecht, Linangan Willem Geertman Art and Culture Network). Moderated by Rachael Rakes (Curator of Public Practice, BAK) 

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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
03/03/2022

Standing With Ukraine. Standing With the Oppressed

BAK’s digital forum Prospections, provides—via its emergency focus “Standing With Ukraine. Standing With the Oppressed”—an ongoing publication of material such as texts, documentation, and live online events that offer context and insights to radical resistance to the war on Ukraine, and to ways of participating in solidarity with the oppressed, by means of publishing contributions by Ukrainian culture workers as well as a broader constellation of voices from anti-war and anti-imperial struggles across the world. This is a humble framework to think along with, develop, learn from, and support the work of artists, thinkers, and activists in this time of emergency.

Editorial
24/02/2022
Standing With Ukraine. Standing With the Oppressed

NO TO WAR!!!

We at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, condemn the brutal military invasion of Ukraine, launched by Vladimir Putin. In these dark days, we stand in solidarity with the millions of Ukrainian citizens whose lives are endangered and irrevocably torn apart. We invite Dutch, European, and international cultural communities to join us in taking urgent action—together wherever and however possible—in support of the cultural and academic communities impacted by this tragedy.

Text Visual