Agência: algumas formas ao alcance de todas as mãos

It happened in Tunisia. And one sole country sufficed to trigger an avalanche of protests and revolutions, from Egypt to Syria and all throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Its consequences are still ambiguous and unfolding. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mediterranean the financial markets speculated further, in a speculative turn from the 2000s housing bubble to that of foreign debt. While Troika (ECB-IMF-EC) validates new loans to developed countries, Europe secretly questions the viability of the eurozone. To this dynamics is added the appropriation of a new vocabulary of occupation, re-discovered between the streets and the virtual space of the internet.

While it is not our ambition to address the totality and complexity of 2011, it is hard for us to synthesize such an intense year without mentioning the urgency in making Agency - Algumas formas ao alcance de todas as mãos happen once again. It was this year's events that triggered the widening of the speculative scope of the program, leading to a new set of discussions about themes such as the public mediation of intellectual property, the exemplarity of the debate on its jurisdiction beyond the virtual, as well as the intrusion of finance into daily life.

From the persecution of Wikileaks to the closing down of Megaupload, could we be witnessing a turning point in the potential of the internet, either by its rising policing, or by its regenerative capacity, capable of producing new models for sharing? In the same nano-second of informatic transaction coexist both the freedom of sharing  promised by the internet, and the accumulation of capital allowed by finance. How can we thus understand the cyclicity of capitalist crisis, or the topology of interactions of a financial society, in face of the models of feedback proposed by cybernetics, structural to contemporary economy? Questions such as the regime of risk assessment and debtocracy, as enhanced by the european crisis, and its consequences for a state of rising labour precarity, as well as for the commodification of intellectual propriety, will be in debate. Therefore, this set of dynamics will be analysed under the discussion about the Common, as had throughout the past decade; its refutation capacity and its ongoing transformations.

Agência: algumas formas ao alcance de todas as mãos is a project by Margarida Mendes, Mariana Silva and Pedro Neves Marques.

More info here: http://www.thisisthebarbershop.blogspot.pt/