Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. I Cannot Work Like This Lecture

Cancelled

How can we work within and with institutions today, as cultural workers and artists, at a time of violent racialization and profound ecological crisis, when heightened surveillance reinforces the organized and transnational governmental abuse of natural resources and the commons? How do we engage various institutional constituencies in countries of the Global North, when precisely their governments cause and contribute to inhuman civil wars, ecological catastrophies and drone strikes in certain regions of the world, force thousands of people into displacement and dispossession, whereby too many of them drown, suffocate, are starved to death, or are exposed daily to violence and mercy by those they encounter on their route?

This is an invitation for cultural workers operating in distinct geographies but within an intertwined geopolitical reality to slow down their ways of working and being, to imagine new ecologies of care as a continuous practice of support, and to listen with attention to feelings that arise from encounters with objects and subjects. This is a call to radically open up our institutional borders and show how these work—or don’t—in order to render our organizations palpable, audible, sentient, soft, porous, and above all, decolonial and anti-patriarchal.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an independent curator, editor and writer. Among the projects and exhibitions she curated are Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power at Kiosk (2017, with Wim Waelput, Ghent), Let’s Talk about the Weather at the Sursock Museum (2016, with Nora Razian and Ashkan Sepahvand, Beirut), Resilience. Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia (2013, Ljubljana), transmediale.08 at HKW (2008, Berlin). She was co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2010–12) and co-founder of the network Cluster. She is chief editor of L’Internationale Online, and was chief editor of the Manifesta Journal (2012–14). Her future projects include: Coltan as Cotton. Contour Biennial 9, Mechelen 2018–19; Not Fully Human, Not Human At All, Kadist, Paris, and other partners (2017–20), and Dissident Muses. Delphine Seyrig and Feminist Video Collectives in France (1970s–1980s), LAM, Lille and Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2019–20.

In collaboration with El Graner within the Sâlmon Festival