Skills of Economy Residency: Georgios Papadopoulos
During October and November 2015 artist and researcher Georgios Papadopoulos will stay in a recidency organised in collaboration with HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme. His residency is connected to Skills of Economy Sessions, a series of events. During the residency he will take a critical look at the series of events, questioning what those are addressing, and produce a text that is later published on the Skills of Economy website. He will also continue his own research during the residency and organise the platform Faceless Value; the New Aesthetic of Digital Exchanges in collaboration with the Artistic Technology Lab of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the Department of Aesthetics and Communication of the University of Aarhus.
“The central question that motivates the research addresses the capacity of digital technologies to signify and communicate economic value and their influence on our understanding of this concept. Monetary media communicate the economic significance of social relations, and quantify them according to the uniform organizing standard of price. In a further move that affirms commodification, the meaning and the identity of social relations is employed as the rationale of their price providing an alibi of real value. In this capacity the media that materialize money can function as an integral part of interfaces of economic participation, transforming network communications into economic value and imposing the normativities of market exchange and intellectual property on digital exchanges. The other, complementary, question of the workshop investigates the digital representation of economic value in the context of the new aesthetic of digital interfaces. Money traces value by employing symbolic and iconographic elements, at the same time as it safeguards the authenticity of these representations by visible and invisible security technologies.”
Georgios Papadopoulos combines economics and philosophical analysis with an exploratory artistic practice. His research gravitates around money and its socioeconomicfunctions. He holds a Master in Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the Erasmus University, Rotterdam. The title of his thesis is The Ontology of Money; Institutions, Power and Collective Intentionality, and was supervised by Prof. Dr. Arjo Klamer. Between 2008 and 2009 Papadopoulos was a researcher at the theory department of the Jan Van Eyck Academy, in Maastricht, and in 2012 he was awarded the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research by the transmediale festival and the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin. He has published in scientific journals, art reviews, and edited volumes in English, Greek and Spanish.
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Skills of Economy Sessions is a series of events organised in the context of the Skills of Economy project in Helsinki during autumn 2015 and spring 2016. Events focuses on ways of building new economic and social agencies through political, curatorial and theoretical discourses, a video programme as well as artistic and performative interventions at three different theatre contexts.
The first session Parasites in October 2015 is organised in collaboration with the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and Finnish Theatre Academy. It’s focus is to ask whether the concept of social class can be the basis of artistic practices that produce new agencies towards economic and social change. Can artistic and curatorial activities build up classed selves for subjects under the ultimate precarity and flexibility?
The second session For The Love and Fear of Welfare in November 2016 is organised in collaboration with Baltic Circle Festival. It looks into the situation of the late welfare state and the critical and productive possibilities of artists in this specific economic, social and political situation. Can artistic, curatorial and institutional practices offer models for the welfare state to overcome its problematic aspects of nation state, excluding of others and believing in infinite economic growth?
The third session Begining from the End in February 2016 is organised in collaboration with Kiasma Theatre. It is performed through speculation on the concepts of resource, death and the hybrid. The current and future lack of resources raises questions of the position of the human race and civilisation on earth. The event raises questions on communities and economics organised around a lack of resources and speculations of post-human conditions for forms of art, culture and politics.