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I Object! Self-Organization and Political Agency as Aesthetic Practice

Keynote Lecture: Tania Bruguera
Solo Keynote Performance: Guillermo Gómez-Peña

In 2017, the SFAI Summer Symposium offers—mandates really—a space to engage more deeply with current political events and the possibilities for artistic creativity as resistance and solution. This is clear and evident in the ongoing practice of our keynote speaker, Tania Bruguera whose interventions, collaborations, and activist artworks seek to transform and redistribute power in its many guises. The questions that Bruguera poses will shape our conversations and, as such, the SFAI Summer Symposium will function as a satellite to her summer-long Escuela de Arte Útil which is part of her survey exhibition Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

More specifically, symposium speakers will consider [re]current illegal actions and uncertain futures, generated by elected governments, through a variety of artistic practices centered on the possibility of political agency through the creation of sites for the creation civil disobedience in the post-State age. How can creative strategies of self-organization, resistance, and institutional re-purposing offer sustainable social solutions and a way forward? Ultimately, the SFAI Symposium as a gathering of peoples and a generator of alternative structures located on a Sanctuary Campus, will argue for why the arts and humanities—themselves imperiled—are more essential to social justice and equality than ever. 

This event is free and open to the public.

PARTICIPANTS
Tania Bruguera
Leslie Dreyer
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Jennifer A. González
Taraneh Hemami
Marc Mayer
Christian Nagler
San Francisco Poster Syndicate
Ellen Sebastian Chang
Bonnie Ora Sherk
Katrín Sigurdardóttir
WochenKlausur

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SCHEDULE
9am–6pm

9:00am: Coffee

9:30am: Welcome + Keynote Lecture by Tania Bruguera

11–1:00pm: Town Hall Meeting: Interventions and Institutions Redefined

1–2:00pm: Lunch, Local Activist Organization Fair, Open Mic, and Poster printing with SF Poster Syndicate in preparation or the Western Regional Advocacy Project conference and political actions surrounding homelessness.

2–4:00pm: Town Hall Meeting: Activating, Collaborating, Advocating

4:15–5:30pm: Reception + artist walk-through of Katrín Sigurdardóttir: Metamorphic  |  Walter and McBean Galleries

5:30pm: Solo keynote performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña. (Cameo by Balitronica aka The Phantom Mariachi)

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SPONSORS