in collaboration with Parrhesia Philosophy School Berlin
Podium discussion with Kasia Wojcik, Steven Corcoran, Omid Tofighian, Parwana Amiri, Ioulia Mermigka, DJ Justine
in the Villa Araucaria, Athens and online: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84297225032?pwd=TnR4MzF4SXpoR2xrUjlwdlhDb0dBZz09
Enough of murderous EU polices! The masses are not for sacrifice; they are speaking beings!
How is the immense poetic, artistic, literary, philosophical and political creativity of excluded populations, especially those forced into migration through political and economic injustice, war and persecution, given voice and visibility?
This panels gathers activists, writers, artists and translators from around the globe to critically reflect on the nexus between migration, politics, literature, translation and art. We will discuss how issues of displacement, exile and incarceration inform art, literature and politics. How can art, literature and translation contribute to countering forms of epistemic injustice? How can they create spaces of resistance and freedom against political and societal injustice? What dominant fictions of our times do the creative and political practices of the nomadic multitudes work to undo? And how do the creative productions – political, artistic, literary, poetic – of the nomadic and invisible help to extract us from the imperatives of the culture industry?
Parwana Amiri is an author, poet and political activist from Afghanistan. She started writing from a young age, but her work was first published in Europe. The starting point of her writing and poems is her perspective about life for refugees. She has published three books and a pamphlet. In September 2019 Parwana and her family reached Moria Refugee Camp on Lesvos, Greece. For two years they lived in Ritsona camp on Lesvos and in March 2022 she came with her family to Germany. Parwana greatly values the power of poetry to express the scenes she has experienced as a refugee, and to convey the bitter truths of the times she lives in.
Ioulia Mermigka (she/her) studied Media Arts in the UK and holds a PhD in Cultural and Cinema Studies from the University of Athens. She is currently a freelance researcher and lecturer at the University of Athens and an external collaborator of the Greek Film Archive. Her interests revolve around the intersections of grassroot politics, philosophy and aesthetics. She has co-authored the book: Souzas, N., Mermigka, I. & Diakoumakou J. (2021). «Γιατί η μοναξιά μου θεωρείται ασφαλής χώρα». Αγώνες Αιτούντων Άσυλο και Τοπικές Αντιδράσεις στο Συνοριακό Καθεστώς της Χίου (2015-2016) [“Because my solitude is considered a safe country”: Asylum Seekers’ Struggles and Local Reactions in the Border Regime of Chios Island (2015-2016)]. Thessaloniki: Psifides.
Kasia Wojcik is a curator, dramaturge and poet. Her main interest lies at the intersection of art and activism. Since 2017, she has been part of IIPM / Milo Rau, where she devised as leading curator the award-winning discourse format School of Resistance (2020-2022), as well as other productions. Furthermore, she is a member of the artist collective Staub zu Glitzer, which enabled the transmedia production B6112 at the Volksbühne in 2017 and various other artivist interventions in urban spaces. She is part of the artist lab Neues Theater (AT), the feminist and decolonial artist network Room To Bloom and the poetry collective das ad hoc. At the moment she is primarily working on the transdisciplinary film, performance and exhibition series Constitución Nómada – Moving Assemblies.
Steven Corcoran is a philosopher, educationalist and translator living in Berlin who considers that philosophy orients us toward the good life, helping us to gather truth in its multiple, scattered forms and sites. Corcoran’s work of writing, editing, and translating philosophy has chiefly involved a discernment of artistic and political truth. He is the editor of The Badiou Dictionary and has edited/translated over 20 works of philosophy by, among others, Alain Badiou (Conditions, Polemics and The Idea of Communism), Jacques Rancière (Dissensus, Hatred of Democracy, The Edges of Fiction, and What Times Are We Living In?), Frantz Fanon (Alienation and Freedom), and Achille Mbembe (Necropolitics, The Earthly Community and Brutalism). His current projects include a book on egalitarian political organization and imagination, and a special issue on the thought of Jacques Rancière for Continental Thought & Theory. Corcoran is the founder of Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin e.V., a non-profit teaching and research organization devoted to the public practice of philosophy.
Omid Tofighian is an award-winning lecturer, researcher and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in citizen media, popular culture, displacement and discrimination. He is adjunct lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales; and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck Law, University of London.
His publications include Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave 2016); translation of Behrouz Boochani’s multi-award-winning autobiographical novel No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador 2018); co-editor of special issues for journals Literature and Aesthetics (2011), Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (2019) and Southerly (2021); and co-translator/co-editor of Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani (Bloomsbury 2023).
DJ Justine aka Yustyna Kravchuk is an author and translator, part of the Visual Culture Research Center and Kyiv Biennial collectives. Among her translations are Frames of War by Judith Butler, The Burden of Representation by John Tagg, Notes on 41 by Max Eulitz, etc. Her texts appeared in such publications as The Book of Kyiv (Medusa, 2015), Fünf Jahre nach dem Maidan (2018), Notes on 41 (Spector Books, 2021), as well as media outlets Political Critique, Art Ukraine, Eurozine among others.
Image: Dimitris Tzamouranis, from the series “Mare Nostrum”: 38° 17’N – 026° E, 2015, Oil on canvas, 190x245cm
Villa Araucaria, a residency for Ukranean and international artists in collaboration with the Room to Bloom project