Wednesday, April 5th, 2023, 5:30pm
Domesticity and cohabitation: the political imagination of artistic practices
Aria Spinelli
Offline: 2 route des Franchises, 1203 Genève, 5th Floor, room 5.14
Online: here
Image: © Marino Bottini
The seminar analyses how the political imagination of artistic practice fosters visions of citizenship and political belonging by questioning through creative means how to live together and what kinds of situated contexts are called ‘home’. We will use the notion of concrete utopia by scholar Davina Cooper to investigate the relations of art to squatting, particularly art museums and projects within housing squats in Rome. With these hypotheses, we will be looking at the cases of the large, former private food factory in the eastern outskirts of the city squatted by the housing movement Blocco Proletario Mobile, the multicultural housing squat Metropoliz, which houses the art museum, MAAM – Museo dell’Altro e Dell’Altrove (Museum of the Other and Elsewhere), and the four-storey former public building in the central neighbourhood of Esquilino squatted by housing movement Action, called Spintime, which houses art project by Rome based socially engaged art collective Stalker called MAd’O – Museo dell’Atto di Ospitalità (Museum of the Act of Hospitality). Here, occupants and artists collaborate on the premise that artistic projects can be used as a political tactic favouring various facets of the housing movements. Furthermore, a corollary but essential aspect is that these artistic projects foster critical reflections on domesticity and cohabitation. These two cases exemplify how the political imagination of artistic practice can forward modes of rethinking acts of being and living together and in common.