3.10.2024 Introduction Day
‘Climate Justice and the Land of Giants’
We look forward to kicking off the 2023 – 2024 Dirty Art Department year where we will meet and greet, look at tea leaves, study the entrails of sacrificed animals (symbolically), inhale smoke and stare at the stars (no crystal balls as they are too consumerist) to feel together the cosmic flow and collective esprit.
This year we fly under the auspices of ‘Climate Justice and the Land of Giants’ as an image of a heroic quest to face the major challenges of climate justice and social inequality we face as a society today, and to reinforce the Dirty Art Departments position to address individual, collective and social practices and in finding contemporary ways of ‘picking up the brick and throwing it’. To heighten the dramatism we give you some lines from the poem ‘Ode to Capitalism’ written by Franco ‘Bifo’ Beradi for the department on its fated ‘Revolution or Bust’ quest in 2018:
‘Do you remember in the origin of times? Continents broke apart in a pandemonium of smoke and black powder and the colossal tyrannasaurs were swallowed by the immensity of vulcans. Had they been able to fly they could have abandoned earth and witnessed from afar the metamorphosis. They tried to resist, clenching enormous stones, but when the magma is unleashed, stones turn into dust. The magma that simmers in the innermost volcano that is unknown to us. Therefore I predict tyrannosaurus will perish and we will perish with them. Only will survive those who comply, those who combine living cells according to a more flexible design. Those who resist will lose!’
But perhaps no compliance is necessary, and a later workshop ‘Land of Giants squatted by Monsters’ will give the space to formulate a concrete collective action. For now we look forward to getting to know you all on a cellular level.
Florence, Catherine, Anna, Kirtis, Caroline, Helena, Jerszy.