Public talk “Temporary Stabilizations”

Public talk “Temporary Stabilizations” at IMMA International Summer School: Art and Politics: #5 Assembly, convened by Nathan O’Donnell and Lisa Moran

In this public talk, Eva Weinmayr, discusses the social and political agency of artist’s publishing. Speaking from an intersectional feminist perspective the talk’s focus is not on the commodity genre “art publication”, but on the collective processes, exchanges, and relationships such publishing practices can enable.

The talk aims to expand and test the normative criteria of what constitutes a publication. One of the emergent questions posed was whether publishing may be seen as a verb (a process) rather than a noun (i.e. the finished object). Could practice itself be understood as a form of publishing? A teaching situation, for example – a workshop, seminar, or group dialogue, where knowledge is collectively created and shared at the same time – could this also be considered as publishing? What kinds of publics are necessary or relevant to a publication process? How fixed or stable does a transmission of knowledges need to be in order to be called a “publication”? And what is the function and effect of such stability?

In the organiser’s words:

“In recent years, when many democratic institutions and processes are coming under threat, it seems timely to consider the role of assembly in addressing these current predicaments and how can it create the conditions for new thinking and practice on collective action. New and alternative methods are being devised to bring people together, to form publics spaces and allow for decision-making and collective action. Contemporary art is a space where such methods have been developed and enacted.

Foregrounding the role of art and artists, the Summer School will explore the subject of assembly. Drawing on a range of thinking and ideas on the subject of assembly we will consider what happens when people come together to discuss, make, think, argue and be with each other in person or virtually. We will also explore the role of the museum, and the summer school in particular, as a place of assembly and consider the potential of the collective as a model for artists’ practice as well as political action.”