Luma Liv(f)e EN

Through a conversation with Michel Bauwens – Belgian activist who has been working for years in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property – we will develop five different themes related to the current Covid-19 crisis as the “the great revealer and the great accelerator”. He will share with us his analysis on this uncertain period, giving us tools for an Economy that should serve the Common Good, based on contributions to create shared resources. He addresses issues relating to scale, to governance, to mediation, and how to build a better balanced long-term equilibrium.

Biography: Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world. Michel is also research director of CommonsTransition.org. a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.

In conversation with:
Maria Finders, Luma Days Curator, Luma Arles
Jan Boelen, Artistic Director, Atelier Luma

One of the great tricks of heritage has been to invert the terms of belonging(s): rather than things belonging to us, we have come to belong to things. A chain of material objects, monuments and artworks becomes the heritage that defines us. The word hereditare that related to heirs, inheritances and property relations, has mutated into something transcendent: heritage is precisely that which is above and beyond individual possession. The rise of secularism was crucial to this maneuver as it allowed artefacts and monuments to be plucked out of a particular context and be symbolically redistributed to a national or a universal ecumene. Today, as the idea of universalism is questioned and secularism is in retreat, what future is there for heritage? The recent re-conversion of Hagia Sophia from museum to mosque is one straw in a quickening wind; the responses the reconversion has invoked reveal the anxieties on all sides. In this talk I will discuss the relationship of secularism and heritage, briefly contrasting the different iterations of secularism – French, Turkish and Indian – which share a name but have been functionally very different from each other. I will then focus on the history and possible future of an iconic Indian monument that has been fetishized, redefined, recontextualised and possibly threatened as the terms of “belonging” – of the Taj Mahal to us, and of us to the Taj Mahal – seem perpetually to be shifting.

Biography: Professor School of Arts and Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University, currently serves as the Dean at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). She received her MFA in 1987 from M.S. University, Baroda and her PhD in 1996 from Punjab University. She was appointed to JNU in 2001. Her research interests cover the history of Indian painting, particularly the Mughal and Rajput schools, and the history and politics of museums, with special reference to India.

By examining the case of the DMZ (or DeMilitarized Zone separating North Korea from South Korea), I will try to bring to light the paradoxes of the contemporary encounter between landscape and heritage. On the one hand, the fecundity of considering this land (248km long by 4km wide) where there is, strictly speaking, nothing to do with a patrimonial view, to read how tragic human history nestles within the banal, thus prompting us to reflect on the idea of patrimonialization linked to this type of landscape. On the other hand, by examining the attempts, particularly in South Korea, to integrate this buffer zone described by Bill Clinton as “one of the scariest places in the world”, within a heritage process that oscillates between conservation (a project had been envisaged to classify this place as a World Heritage site, Due to the presence of rare species), tourism (bicycle tours along the area are organized, with “viewpoints”), and cosmetic make-up, the paradoxes and excesses of the current globalized trend towards heritage will be revealed.

Biography: Professor of art history at the University of Paris I. Specialist in romanticism, author of monographs devoted to Pierre Buraglio and Claude Viallat, he is the author of Constable published by Hazan (2002 and 2010). Pierre Wat has also published numerous texts on contemporary painting, including a remarkable essay, Turner, a magnificent liar (Hazan, 2010). His latest work also published by Hazan editions, Peregrinations, landscapes between nature and history, published in November 2017, received in June 2018 the Prix Vitale and Arnold Blokh awarded by the Jean Blot Foundation.

In this video Paul Graham Raven – postdoctoral researcher for Lund University in Sweden, exploring infrastructural reconfigurations for Anthropocene futures – presents his nine notions of the metasystemic followed by a Q&A. Throughout this conversation he offers us his comprehensive view of the neoliberal infrastructure within its own complex geography in the post-Covid world. He questions technological evolution and the connivance of platforms enabling the infrastructure to lock in and perpetuate existing hierarchies, as opposed to protocols. He also addresses the topic of socioeconomic change, and the role of artists and thinkers in this process, as well as their limits.

Biographie : Dr. Paul Graham Raven researches the rhetorics of climate change adaptation for Lund University, where he will start a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from October 2020. His doctoral thesis introduced a relational model of sociotechnical change for exploring the mutual influence of infrastructural systems and social practices, and pioneered the methodology of “narrative prototyping” for sociotechnical transformations.

Paul sometimes works as a critical futurist and freelance researcher, and has collaborated with speculative designers (e.g. Superflux) and conceptual artists (e.g. Katie Paterson) He’s also an author and critic of science fiction, and an occasional journalist and essayist. He lives in Malmö with a duplicitous cat and some guitars.

In conversation with:
Maria Finders, Luma Days Curator, Luma Arles