Keynotes speakers: Antonio Negri, Sandro Mezzadra, Montserrat Galceran, others to be confirmed.
We must dare saying it: the European Union project has come to an end. It is the end of the European "Cunning of Reason" that aimed to overcome the tragic history of the Old-Country through the possible virtue of the so called "social economy of the market". After thirty years, the Eurocide emerges as the truthful face of the European Union, uncapable of dealing with the ruptures of its own identity: the fall of Berlin Wall and the Balkan trauma, as well as the neoliberal treatises of Maastricht, Schengen, Amsterdam and Lisbon became the ground, first, for the fiasco of the European Constitution and, later, for the dictatorship of the Troika Commissaries. For Europe, it is now the time of nightmares: fascism and exploitation, colonialism and racism are turning up, from the oblivion to the stage, as vivid protagonist of darkness, and Sovereignty and the Nation are the trompe l'oeil to hide War, their long-lasting and loyal companion. Every shipwreck in the Mediterranean, every migrant who dies while heading toward the European shores reminds us of this.
This is a new abduction of Europa. Although, this time, it is not about the divine violence of Zeus, but the techocratic violence of a bunch of ransomers - at its peak during the recent years of the crisis - trying to sweep away democracy, social rights, equality and fraternity, resulting from the struggles of emancipation of the subalterns both in the metropolitan space and in the former colonies. Where the myth had conceived and crystallised violence and loot as the taming forces of Europa, the space of the crisis today, out of any victimization, permits to invent another Europa, capable of escaping the violence and discipline of power and of affirming a political practice beyond and against the hegemonic history of this continent. Europa raising herself against the violence of the (European) gods.
The aim today, in other words, cannot be to glimpse just a weak light through these shades for later remaining in the dark, but to break up the hypocritical separation between the public debate of the critical intelectuals and the collective action produced by social mobilisations, in different registers and modes, all around Europe. It is time to deploy a repertoire of practices and notions capable of proliferating in every city and region of the continent to affirm a common (hence not unique) agenda of European social movements.
The uprising of these Europas is of course a matter of reinventing the European space and identity itself. There is no political reinvention of Europe without a reinvention of freedom and equality, capable of corresponding to the needs, creativity and desires of the new subjects of social cooperation inhabiting this part of the world, and capable of challenging the institutional borders of the process of integration by laying the basis for new constellations of cooperation and solidarity toward the South and the East.
Uprising against the attempt of abduction imposed by the 1%, these Europas cannot be disciplined anymore: the present is our kairos for monstruous metamorphoses. Hydras, chupacabras, medusas, aatxes, banshees, golems, marids, bordas. Monstrous descendents of Gaia: new bodies of Europas, inventing myths to be imagined, territories to be inhabited, fleshes to be incarnated.
The Fundación de los
Comunes (http://www.fundaciondeloscomunes.net) is
organising a meeting from the 28th of February until the 2nd of March
2014, within the framework of the "Uses of Art"
project of l'Internationale network of museums (http://internacionala.mg-lj.si/index.php), to give
life to common notions capable of translating, problematising and proliferating
those experiences, actors, inicitavies that, day by day, are making other
Europas.
For this reason and with the aim of building a radical and experimental agency at the Europen level, the FdlC organising team wishes to make a large call for ideas and suggestions to gather precarians, activists, thinkers, migrants, nomads in a collective space of discussion and production.
Please send a 300 words outline of your contribution (with the subject headline ‘Call for ideas’) to ideas@nuevoraptodeeuropa.net. Texts will be used to gather authors and groups in workshops for discussion, organised through out the forthcoming months.
Deadline for
abstracts: 21 of December 2013.
We welcome submissions by individuals and collectives, as well as academic and non-academic thinkers. We welcomes abstracts on a range of issues:
- Analysis of
political and financial elites and the governance of the continent
- Financial dictatorhship and democratic revolution in Europe
- New spatial hierarchies in the making within the EU and new spatial politics
of struggles
- Debt and democracy in Europe
- 15M, Syntagma, Gezi Park as possible prefigurations of a
forthcoming European spring
- Cultural production, cognitive labour, precarisation in the Europe of
austerity
- Migrations, social movements and postcolonial Europe
- Commons and European democracy
- Defending the welfare, producing the commonfare
- Technopolitics of Europe: embodying the network to invent Europe