Migration - LCCA Evening School, 6th season, #3 reading workshop

On 17 April at 6 PM, as part of its non-formal education programme, the Evening School, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art invites to the season’s third reading workshop “Migration”.

The twenty-first century is the century of the migrant. It has become more necessary for people to migrate because of environmental, economic and political instability, today people relocate to greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history. In other ways, we are all becoming migrants. People. “A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration,”, in their seminal work Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri paraphrase Karl Marx.

Displacement, nomad’s existence, traveling, the journey is everywhere in contemporary works, whether artists borrow its forms, its iconography or its methods. However, often it is imaginary universe, and artists reflect on displacement not only in the literal sense. The journey becomes not just the fashionable theme but a sign of a deeper development, which affects the representations of the world in which we live and the way we inhabit it, concretely or symbolically. The artist has become the prototype of the contemporary traveller, whose passage through signs and formats highlights a contemporary experience of mobility, displacement, crossing, writes Nicolas Bourriaud.

Texts:

•

Thomas Nail, “Introduction”. The figure of the migrant. Stanford University Press, 2015, pp. 1–7.

• Nicolas Bourriaud, “Journey-Forms”. The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009, pp. 106–131.

To receive the texts, please email to: ieva.ast@gmail.com

The Latvian Center for Contemporary Art within its programme, the Evening School continues its 6th season – series of conversations, talks, discussions and reading workshops or non-academic and informal discussions about seminal texts, devoted to current issues of contemporary art as well as exploration of the recent past. This season highlights themes, related to the LCCA general event programme in 2019 – social utopias, geopolitical and cultural divisions, migration and politics of memory. The programme is curated by Ieva Astahovska; it takes place at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Alberta iela 13, and its events are free of charge. The project is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation.