a lecture by Saskia Sassen for the programme ‘The State of Things’, as part of Norway’s official representation at the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
Thursday 20 October, 17:30
Aula Tafuri, Palazzo Badoer, Università Iuav di Venezia
Calle della Lacca, San Polo 2468, Venice
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, would like to announce When the Acute Challenges of Our Epoch Materialise in Cities, a lecture by Saskia Sassen within the lecture series ‘The State of Things’.
About When the Acute Challenges of Our Epoch Materialise in Cities
Cities have long been sites for conflicts, including wars, racism, religious hatred and exclusion of the poor. And yet, while national states have historically responded to these conflicts by militarising them, cities have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity. Major developments in the current global era signal that cities are losing this capacity, as they become sites for a whole range of new types of conflicts, such as asymmetric war, urban violence and acute environmental challenges. Further, the dense and conflictive urban spaces, overwhelmed by inequality and injustice, can become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of conflicts, from drug wars to the major environmental disasters looming in our immediate futures. New calls for ‘intelligent cities’ with massive installations of closed technical systems supervised by private firms further weaken the civic, displacing political functions onto privately controlled structures. All of these factors challenge the traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities to avoid war more often than not when confronted with conflict, and to incorporate diversity of class, culture, religion and ethnicity. We need to bring back all these variables and work at the making of an ‘open source’ urbanism.
About Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen (b.1949, The Hague, the Netherlands, lives and works in New York, USA) is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair, The Committee of Global Thought, at Columbia University. She is the author of many books on migration and transnational movement, including The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006, published in Italian by Bruno Mondadori in 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization (2005, published in Italian by Einaudi in 2008). For more information, please visit www.saskiasassen.com
The lecture is free and open to everyone. Simultaneous translation to Italian will be available. The recordings of the lecture in the series ‘The State of Things’ are available through live streaming and subsequently stored in the audiovisual archive on OCA’s website.
A publication compiling all the papers will be published upon the completion of the programme in January 2012.
‘The State of Things’ – Upcoming Autumn Lectures
Lecture no.10:
T.J. Clark – The Experience of Defeat
Date and Time: Thursday, 17 November / 18:00
Location: Auditorium Santa Margherita, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro 3689, Venice
About ‘The State of Things’
‘The State of Things‘ is a series of public lectures that is held throughout the biennale period, reflecting upon themes such as diversity, the environment, peace-making, human rights, capital, migration, asylum, Europe, aesthetics and revolution. Each presentation aims to tackle the ‘state of things’ today, drawing from the speakers’ fields of activity and research, and from what they consider the intellectual and political priorities of today. The programme takes its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World War I in an attempt to enable refugees move across borders in search of political and intellectual shelter.
Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes ‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS‘, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.
‘The State of Things’ has been generously supported by Fritt Ord.
