Lecture
Monday, 09/05 at 7pm
Pogon Jedinstvo, Trnjanska struga 34, Zagreb

Following intense online work, participants of the fourth edition of WHW Akademija and the professorial team including Ivana Bago, Vlatka Horvat, Pablo Martínez and WHW are gathering from May 9 – 15 in Zagreb for the summer school. Join us at Pogon Jedinstvo on May 9 for a public lecture by Pablo Martínez and for an informal get together with the team of the fourth edition of WHW Akademija.

Lecture by Pablo Martínez Dissolving the self. Becoming many. On images, bodies and crowds. explores urgencies related to the emancipatory collective gestures in public space.

One of the most devastating consequences of the pandemic has been what has come to be called "social distancing", which, while it has served to protect us from the virus, it has had devastating effects on the power of bodies in relation to public space. At a time when institutions and mainstream media discourse are clearly regressive, it would seem that we need bodies in the streets now more than ever to build affection and resist the persistent attempts by the extreme right and the conservative elites of our countries to narrow our democracies. In the absence of demonstrations, powerful practices of social emancipation disappear. The importance of mobilisations goes beyond the moment of enthusiastic rage, since the physical and emotional experience of building a "we" in the square configures a political memory of the struggles in the bodies, transforming us. On the other hand, the scarcity of assemblies in public space makes it impossible to create new images of the collective and, with them, we lose their powerful impact on the production of political subjectivity, of the construction of a common identity. In this lecture we will go back to the past to see different moments in history when people, with their bodies, imagination and language, gathered in the streets to build up together not just agonistic public sphere but moments of hope. We will transit  concepts such as the image-event, the performativity of the images and the implications of being dissolved into a crowd. We will travel through time as well to try to draw genealogies of the bodies in the streets, from Spanish anarchist revolution to anti aids actions or the more recent occupy movement.

This lecture by Pablo Martínez is realized in cooperation with the collaborative platform Remote Lab, organized by Greta Creative Network.

WHW would like to thank Pogon Jedinstvo and Youth Culture Centre Ribnjak for the collaboration on realizing the program.

WHW Akademija is realized in partnership with Kontakt Collection. The main funders of WHW Akademija are Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation, Foundation for Arts Initiatives/FfAI.

Participation of Vlatke Horvat and Pablo Martínez is a part of i-Portunus Houses pilot scheme. The i-Portunus Houses pilot scheme is implemented, on behalf of the European Commission, by a consortium of organisations that have been pioneers of European cultural mobility programmes themselves. Coordinated by the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam), the i-Portunus Houses consortium involves MitOst (Berlin) as main mobility implementer and the Kultura Nova Foundation (Zagreb) as lead in evaluation and analysis.

The program is supported by:

City Office for Culture, International Relations and Civil Society
Kultura Nova Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU)

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