Anti-Authoritarian Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and other news)
IRGAC's February Newsletter
Half of February has already passed - time for a quick update from IRGAC!
Last Saturday the deadline for our current call for applications ended. We’re now in the exciting process of going through many interesting proposals from around the world. Through IRGAC, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung together with Potsdam University will finance six postdoc fellowships for activist researchers from across the Global South, starting in April this year. We’re looking forward to present you the new IRGAC researchers by mid-March!
Anti-Authoritarian Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
On a different note: based on our Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies, we created a (nearly) infinitely reproductible, 100% free EXHIBITION of anti-authoritarian strategies that you can order here. Printed one thousand times on newspaper, the exhibition comes as 27 sheets of paper. Find a wall and something to fix the sheets - and turn any space turn into a forum for antifascist strategies! People have shown our exhibition on Italian plazas and music festivals, in museums (such as the M68 in Mexico City and Spore Initiative in Berlin) and universities, in squatted houses and fancy bars … If you also want to turn a wall into a place to learn about counterstrategies worldwide, order your free copies!
Article: South-South Justice for Colombian Victims?
We would also like to bring Julieta Mira’s and Silvia Rojas Castro’s new article on South-South justice and the (limited) potential of universal jurisdiction in Argentina to your attention. In recent years, they argue, civil society organizations have increasingly turned to Argentina to file criminal complaints under the principle of universal jurisdiction (UJ) for international crimes committed in the Global South, including in Myanmar, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Colombia. In their article, Mira and Rojas Castro focus on the complaint filed by Colombian victims and human rights organizations against former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Taking this case as an example, they share a critical analysis of the current status of UJ and the long way ahead to become a cornerstone of South-South justice.
Contesting Authoritarianism: The Power of Music and Counterculture
And last but not least, if you haven’t done so already, take a look at the recordings and summaries of our Contesting Authoritarianism Conference - from “The Crisis of Civilization and the Authoritarian Turn” with Zeynep Gambetti, Alex Demirovic, Hugo Fanton and Börries Nehe, to “Capitalist anti-ecologies and authoritarianism in the Global South” with Sabrina Fernandes, Markus Wissen, Erika Mendes and Boaventura Monjane, and many more!
The discussion “The Power of Music and Counterculture” takes a look at how music and performance channels political dissent and anti-authoritarian struggles - especially in Palestine, as well as for diaspora communities. Watch the rich debate with Palestinian Researcher and Filmmaker Mo’min Swaitat, Writer and Historian Diana Abbani, Berlin-based Syrian rapper Enana, and Muhammad Jabali from AL.Berlin, with moderation by Himmat Zoubi.
In case you are reading this on subastack, we’re looking forward to read your comments! And in case you’ve left X and use bluesky now, consider following us (@irgac-rls).
Take care!