Category: Projects

Michael Dutton, “Moments of Communism”

Michael Dutton examines political life through the lens of various theories of energy expenditure that go beyond the calculative logic of both capitalism and traditional Marxism.

He draws on the Daoist concept of qi (vital energy), which offers a hydrodynamic ontology in which energy is fluid and shaped by context rather than by fixed categories.

In this way, Dutton seeks to reclaim the political as a fleeting energy found in the “bits and bobs” of communal life, rather than in macrohistorical “modes of production.”

Michael Dutton is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

A founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies, his research uses the Chinese archive to challenge the technocratic turn in social theory.  

With the support of the Ministry of Culture.

Edgar Schmitz, “Trading in Brieftopia”

To shape and face the future without negotiating it with the past would simply be preposterous in most cases.

When the here and now is so marked by depletion and erasure that it starts trembling under the pressures of its excessive futures, it tends to strike new bargains with the past and bring the dead back into the shared spaces of now, before and after.

Most civilisations (have long had to) trade their futures with the claims of the dead, their gifts and demands.

So, which dead do we bring back, and what deals do we strike in Brieftopia?

Edgar Schmitz’s architectures, films, and soundtracks are concerned with developing modes of withdrawal, the dispersed materialities of the choreographic, and the temporal shapes of (in-)animacy.

Schmitz is the founder of the CHOREOGRAPHIC and ANIMATE ASSEMBLY research clusters, curates the Choreographic Devices exhibition series and directs the Art Research Programme at Goldsmiths, University of London.

edgarschmitz.com

With the support of the Ministry of Culture.

Maria Lind will address the question of “How far do we get with moments of magic?” through presenting and discussing three projects with which she has been involved:

The TV Trampoline: From Children’s Television to Contemporary Art and Literature in Moscow, Kalmar, Umeå, Norrtälje and Kiruna,

The Silent University by artist Ahmet Ögut at Tensta konsthall in Stockholm and

The Benevolent Food in Kiruna.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator from Stockholm. She is currently the director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiruna. From 2020 to 2023, she served as the counsellor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden, Moscow. She was the director of Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall 2011-18, the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010), and director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005-2007). From 2002-2004, she was the director of Kunstverein München, and in 1998, co-curator of Europe’s itinerant biennial, Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg.

With the support of the Ministry of Culture.

Magnus Bärtås, “A Tower Taller Than Myself: A Brieftopian Experiment in a Prison”

What do prisons and museums have in common?

Having emerged historically at the same time, they are considered opposites, yet at their core they share a common trait: the principle of observation.

In one of his latest projects, Magnus Bartas works with inmates from the city of Kalmar in southern Sweden, where the prison and the local museum are located 500 meters apart. Over the course of six months, together with six inmates, the artist establishes a connection between the confinement of the prison and the openness of the museum, and they collaboratively create a work of art.

He describes the entire situation that arose as “brieftopian,” or a sudden opportunity to break a pattern and create something radically different.

Magnus Bärtås is an artist, writer, professor of fine arts, and head of research at Konstfak, working primarily with text, video, and installations. In 2010, he won the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen International Film Festival, and in 2024, together with Behzad K. Noori, he won first prize from the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia at the same festival.

With the support of the Ministry of Culture.

Snejanka Mihaylova, “Diagonal Thinking”

Snejanka Mihaylova’s lecture explores thinking as a creative and political practice unfolding in the gaps between past and future, destruction and renewal.

Beginning with Hannah Arendt’s notion of the interval as a condition for new thought, the lecture moves through Paul Valéry’s poetic dialogue “Eupalinos ou l’Architecte” toward the architectural spaces of Tadao Ando on Naoshima. Through philosophy, architecture, and travelogue, Mihaylova reflects on reversed temporalities, survival after catastrophe, and the possibility of imagining forms of life otherwise, approaching art as a fragile yet necessary space for future-oriented thought.

Snejanka Mihaylova’s practice is grounded in performance and writing, as well as in long-term artistic research that approaches performance as a form of thinking and inquiry. Central to her work is the understanding that thinking is not solely internal or abstract, but emerges through relational, embodied, and acoustic experiences in acts of listening, voicing, and shared attention.

Photo by Violeta Apostolova

With the support of the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Bulgaria

Boris Buden, “Can it laugh? Surviving with AI”

AI is an agency supposedly able to think. But can it laugh? When asked directly, the AI answers: “If making a joke means ‘producing a text that causes a human to laugh,’ then yes. If it means ‘having a sense of humor or understanding why something is funny,’ the answer is currently no.” How to understand it, as a sign of hope, or rather of hopelessness?

Boris Buden is a writer, cultural theorist, and translator based in Berlin.

Born in former Yugoslavia, he studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in cultural theory from Humboldt University in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1980s, Buden has published essays and books on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and contemporary art in Croatian, German, and English.

Photo: COURTESY OF VLADISLAV TOMIČIĆ

With the support of the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Bulgaria

There’s just over a week left until the “Brieftopia: Archives of Futurity” symposium on 23 and 24 May in Gabrovo, and over the next few days, we’ll introduce you to the speakers who will be taking part—artists, curators, researchers, and thinkers from Bulgaria and around the world.

They will speak about the future, memory, crises, utopias, and those fleeting moments when it seems possible to imagine something different.

Register for the last remaining spots at:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1F7nCTv5y3Jf35u43A7ZbpqqiZdF4lMfCTKIvkZBLUrM/viewform?edit_requested=true

We start with Behzad K. Noori

In his introductory lecture, artist Behzad K. Noori, who coined the term Brieftopia, describes many facets we have yet to fully discover as closely related to the concept of futurity. Noori situates Brieftopia as both a concept and a method of thinking and practice that emerges from disillusionment yet refuses paralysis. Against the neoliberal capture of the future, far from a symbolic gesture or an emotional retreat into nostalgia, brieftopia is positioned as a practice of surviving failure, proposing a practice of imagination as a lived, fragile, and collective act.

Brieftopia is the final threshold before imagination turns real, often passed unnoticed.

Behzad Khosravi Noori is an artist, writer, educator, and history-teller. His artistic practices include films, installations, and archival studies. His works investigate histories from the Global South, labour and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter-narration to the East-West, North-South dichotomy.

www.behzadnoori.art

With the support of the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Bulgaria