Social Art and (Anti-)Social(ist) Housing in Serbia: Contradictions and Antagonisms
Ana Vilenica
2020 03 12 (Thursday)
20:00 @ National Gallery of Art (Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius)
Housing is an essential infrastructure for our social reproduction and a crucial element that makes our life possible. Contemporary housing is set in a battleground between a neoliberal movement that attacks its social infrastructure and grassroots movements that struggle against this anti-social organisation and management. Across the world, cities are experiencing these battles as a so-called housing crisis. For a long time, art has been integral to the neoliberal governance and policies around ‘housing regeneration.’ Art is expected to produce social and economic outcomes; to regenerate the hollowed-out economies of post-industrial cities; to energize communities –– regardless of a total paucity of evidence that the arts can perform any of these tasks.
In this lecture, I will focus on the analysis of complex contradictions in social art on the periphery of Europe. Current role(s) of art in the housing struggles are indicators of the current capitalist mutations that are turning the arts into a source of capital. However, artists have been allying with the oppressed, becoming militant accomplices in housing struggles. Principles of solidarity have been a central force in an artistic politics that pushes for: the reclamation of our histories, the building of new care infrastructures and the facilitation of skill exchange/organizing, within housing movements. By focusing on the situation in Serbia, I will make a typology of social art, showing how it is torn between constant submission, artistic exploitation of the social and attempts to come up with alternative narratives and forms of reproduction in the absence of society.
Ana Vilenica is an urban and cultural researcher, art theoretician and housing activist based in Belgrade. Among her research interests are the role of art in post-socialist urban regeneration; cultural and political strategies for progressive housing policy and other urban regeneration schemes; new mutations in the functioning of the contemporary art world as well as potentials for organising with-in and against dominant urban policy and art world networks. She is the co-editor of the book On the Ruins of Creative City (2013) and Art and Housing Struggles: Between Art and Political Organising (forthcoming). She is a member of the Radical Housing Journal collective and the Roof anti-eviction organisation in Serbia.
Screening of Ken Loach film, “Cathy Come Home” (1966) + discussion with Ana Vilenica
2020 03 13 (Friday)
19:00 @ Luna6 (Zanavykų str. 6, Vilnius)
Loach’s scathing depiction of the ruinous consequences of the capitalist housing system, Cathy Come Home takes us through the crisis of a woman who finds herself simultaneously abandoned by the British welfare system and mercilessly exploited by the profit driven housing market. This deeply personal yet maddeningly global drama raises important questions still relevant today about the bleak intersection of housing inequality, gentrification, as well as gender and racial oppression.
The film will be followed by a discussion with Ana Vilenica who is a member of the Belgrade based Roof Anti-Eviction Network, an editor of Radical Housing Journal and theorist of urban regeneration in post-socialist Yugoslavia.
