New areas of Research

After more research and two seminars with students and faculty in December 2012, the focus of our project shifted from models of autogestion or self-management derived from Henri Lefebvre, and from the ways in which communities are “filling in the weak points” of the social fabric through self-management as the state has pulled back and created a new “precariate”, or a level of people living in new forms of precarity and forms of resistance. This aspect of the  project had a site-specific aspect that broadened out from Lüneburg to Hamburg and to the historical and present-day anti-nuclear protests in Gorleben, Brokdorf, and Wendland. Would it be possible to find forms of autogestion in anti-gentrification movements and in the anti-nuclear actions? From this starting point, our research has moved to the tactics, militant and otherwise, of anti-nuclear protests and the visual language of protests.

Filling the Weak Points / Seminar / Workshop

“Autogestion must be studied in two different ways: as a means of struggle, which clears the way; and as a means for the reorganization of society.” [1] 

Henri Lefebvre

“Autogestion is not based on the what, but in the how.” [2] 

Marina Sitrin

This project investigates the possibilities for artistic production to research and represent social relations and movements. In particular we are concerned with forms of social organizing and movements which, as Marina Sitrin describes them “create the future in the present.”[3] Against the backdrop of a crisis in capitalism and the state that is making both the present and the future more precarious, we are looking at contemporary social movements that can be described as new forms of autogestion, or self-management (or horizantalidad in Spanish) that have emerged under the conditions we find ourselves in.