080062 SE Seminar: Cultural Citizenship: Constructing and Contesting "the Commons" (2014W)

The aesthetic production of cultural citizenship is arguably one of the most significant issues faced by contemporary art practices. Framed historically by the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, two seminal moments in Europe and the Middle East that resonated well beyond their sited geographic locations, this seminar asks whether artists, architects, and cultural institutions can offer singular iterations of ‘cultural citizenship’ and how these contribute to constructing and contesting different models of ‘the commons.’
Some questions that will motivate our study will be: 1) Can we identify novel visual forms, aesthetic strategies, and institutional models through which cultural citizenship has been mediated in different national contexts? 2) How can a distinct demos, which represents the complexity of global, national, local, and regional identifications, be aesthetically conceived and what is its political potential? 3) How have artistic practitioners and institutions responded to existing notions of the imagined social unity connoted by ‘the commons’ and iterated new models through acts of negotiation, interaction, and exchange? 4) What is the relation between these issues and the broader struggles over the meaning of democracy (i.e., an ideal of equal accessibility, rights, and representation), the principles of individual and collective sovereignty, and definition of forms of life as they has been related to the construction of the public sphere, forms of media and publicity, and the intensification of capitalist modernization?