Dialogue
Wed 24 Apr 2024

Seminar 1

The Glasshouse, HDK-Valand, Vasagatan 50.

Participants

Dave BeechErling BjörgvinssonValeria FerrariAnn Ighe Costas LapavitsasJordanna MatlonElena Raviola

13:00-16:00

The seminar will explore key ideas related to value imaginaries. Specifically, it examines the intersection of value imaginaries and globalisation in contemporary art and design. The focus is on tensions that arise between speculation and material reality when aesthetics, labour and everyday life are articulated where global and local processes intertwine. The project thus starts from the contemporary notion that we live in a global village, economically and aesthetically, and this has fundamentally changed the understanding of art, economy and subject creation, while old value hierarchies remain.

The seminar consists of three talks exploring value imaginaries in an unequal world of coeval coexistence. Costas Lapavistas and Dave Beech will discuss value imaginaries related to art and labour, Jordanna Matlon and Erling Björgvinsson will discuss how cultural and economic expression is conditioned and resisted within racist capitalist imaginaries and Elena Raviola will discuss how socio-technical imaginaries of value and aesthetics intersect in digital infrastructures.

The format and the speakers

The seminar is organized in three dialogues, inquiring into imaginaries of values in the uneven system of global “coeval coexistence”, in which they are produced aesthetically and economically and whose aesthetics and economics they produce.

Dialogue 1 – Art, work and imaginaries of value
Costas Lapavistas and Dave Beech will discuss imaginaries of value related to art and work.

Dialogue 2 – Racial Capitalism and Cultural Expression
Jordanna Matlon and Erling Björgvinson will engage in a dialogue on the relationship between racial capitalism, gender and popular culture. Matlon’s research probes how “Blackness” operates as a signifier, intersects with gender norms, manifests in popular culture, and illuminates our understanding of political economy in urban Africa and the African diaspora. She uses history and ethnography to theorize racial capitalism and the political economy of patriarchy in the production of Black masculinity. Björgvinsson is currently working on preparatory work related to the service industry and campaigns geared at young adults and their reproductive health and future gains in Ghana. He is interested in how the design company IDEO, Marie Stopes Kenya, and Marie Stopes International, who developed the service and campaign, activate imaginaries related to the political economy and gender are shaped by Western humanitarianism, humanitarian design, and racial capitalism.

Dialogue 3 – Digitally valuating: Art, scarcity and NFTs
Elena Raviola and Valeria Ferrari will discuss how sociotechnical imaginaries value and aesthetics intersect in new digital infrastructures, like NFTs. Ann Ighe will respond to the dialogues and moderate a final discussion, closing the seminar.

Participants:

Costas Lapavistas & Dave Beech

Jordanna Matlon & Erling Björvingsson

Valeria Ferrari & Elena Raviola

Moderator: Ann Ighe

Contributors

Dave Beech

Dave Beech is a Reader, an artist and the author of a series of academic books that have transformed the field of the political economy of art. As an artist he has exhibited at the Venice biennial, the Liverpool biennial, the Guangzhou biennial, the Istanbul biennial and the Liverpool biennial. He has also organised many artist-led events and institutions including curating major exhibitions in New York, London and Manchester.

Erling Björgvinsson

Erling Björgvinsson is Professor of Design at the School of Design and Crafts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University. A Central topic of research is participatory politics in design and art, in particular in relation to urban spaces and the interaction between public institutions and citizens. He has published in international design and art journals and anthologies.

Valeria Ferrari

Valeria Ferrari is affiliated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures and a member of the collective Slutty Urbanism. With the latter, she explores provocative digital rituals to contrast the hegemonic imaginary of platformisation through systemic errors and glitches. She is founder and former editor of the Glossary of Decentralised Technosocial Systems hosted by the Internet Policy Review. During her PhD at the University of Amsterdam, within the Blockchain and Society Policy and Research Lab, she investigated policymaking discourses around digital platforms and decentralized technologies, focusing on payment and value systems.

Ann Ighe

Ann Ighe is a senior lecturer in economic history at University of Gothenburg, a writer, critic and the editor of cultural journal Ord&Bild.

Costas Lapavitsas

Costas Lapavitsas is a Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a member of Research on Money and Finance (RMF), which has had considerable impact on the European debate and policy making. His longer-term research interests, however, have been on the financialisation of capitalism, its characteristic trends, variable forms and manifold implications for contemporary society. His previous publications include Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit and Political Economy of Money and Finance.

Jordanna Matlon

Dr. Jordanna Matlon is Associate Professor of Global Urban Studies at the School of International Service, American University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Her multiple award-winning book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism (Cornell University Press) investigates the relationship between masculinity, work, and globalization in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Her new book, Blackness as Being: Black Survival in the Age of Climate Catastrophe (under contract, Polity Press), bridges literatures on surplus populations, climate change, and racial capitalism to theorize the possibilities and precariousness of species-survival in the Anthropocene. It offers Blackness as an analytic to think with the paradox of precarious possibility – of past and present modalities of survival and of futures alternatively devastating or liberatory.

Elena Raviola

My main research interest lies in understanding the role of technology and other material artifacts in organizing and managing professional work, especially in cultural and creative fields. I am more specifically interested in how professional norms, rules, structures and ideas are enacted, changed and maintained, in practice and how technology intervenes in these professional practices, transforming over time what is considered professional. Theoretically, I have mainly worked between institutional theory and actor-network theory.

My main field of investigation has been news production. I have conducted a number of ethnographic studies in Italy, France and Sweden in established and new news organizations, all struggling with the establishment and development of so-called digital journalism. Most recently, I have been following two relatively new trends in journalism, namely entrepreneurial journalism and robotjournalism. Both enabled by digital technologies, they have been different responses to the so-much-debated crisis of journalism and news organizations.

I am also interested in the meeting between the arts and business both in academic and industrial practices. I have done research on artistic interventions, that is the use of art in business and other organizations. I have a deep interest for developing qualitative studies and academic writing and in particular by looking at art practices, such as choreography.

I have studied and worked internationally in different countries. I have been visiting researcher at Stanford, Bocconi University and Sciences Po. I have also worked at Jönköping International Business School and Copenhagen Business School before coming to the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg.