Draft explores contemporary art that produces, contributes to or provokes public debate. It involves nine interdisciplinary collaboratives from nine cities: Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg and Zurich. The conference is focused on the projects developed and carried out by the collaboratives over the past 12 months in their local contexts. The projects intervene in contexts of action, production and discourse, by exploring the imaginary, rendering the latent visible or critiquing concrete circumstances. Media censorship, state authoritarianism, social injustice, xenophobia, nationalism, various forms of violence, migration, the effects of frantic urbanisation, real estate speculation, commodities trading and repatriation are some of the pressing issues highlighted by these year-long investigations. Artists respond to these circumstances through critique and fiction, by establishing infrastructures, educational programmes and counter publics, and by employing re-enactments and mnemonic techniques. They reveal the consequences of such phenomena and processes on our affective and intellectual life—in short, they draft a different history and a different present. The conference will address the notion of debate: debate as a device for managing conflicts, negotiating standpoints, making things public and defining the space we live in. It will be focused in particular on the debate around the crises of belonging—i.e. who can belong, to what and how much—a subterranean reverb that runs through each of the projects.
Draft explores contemporary art that produces, contributes to or provokes public debate. It involves nine interdisciplinary collaboratives from nine cities: Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg and Zurich. The conference is focused on the projects developed and carried out by the collaboratives over the past 12 months in their local contexts. The projects intervene in contexts of action, production and discourse, by exploring the imaginary, rendering the latent visible or critiquing concrete circumstances. Media censorship, state authoritarianism, social injustice, xenophobia, nationalism, various forms of violence, migration, the effects of frantic urbanisation, real estate speculation, commodities trading and repatriation are some of the pressing issues highlighted by these year-long investigations. Artists respond to these circumstances through critique and fiction, by establishing infrastructures, educational programmes and counter publics, and by employing re-enactments and mnemonic techniques. They reveal the consequences of such phenomena and processes on our affective and intellectual life—in short, they draft a different history and a different present. The conference will address the notion of debate: debate as a device for managing conflicts, negotiating standpoints, making things public and defining the space we live in. It will be focused in particular on the debate around the crises of belonging—i.e. who can belong, to what and how much—a subterranean reverb that runs through each of the projects.