Mao Mollona
Freethought I: Economy of crisis

“Freethought” is an open platform of education and production devoted to the movement of ideas and practices in and out of dedicated institutions, unframing them from the disciplines, protocols and methodologies that conventionally contain them. The work of “Freethought” comes about through generative critical work that is not a form of protest, but rather a radical restructuring of existent disciplinary, economic and academic boundaries. The “Freethought” initiative comes at a moment of new coalitions between civic institutions, innovative research modes based in practice and engagement and new political actors emerging from within grass roots movements.

The three panels discuss the emergent subjectivities and radical possibilities at the intersection of art, pedagogy and political economy in the current wave of crisis of capitalism.

What are the alternative possibilities of human organisation emerging from the current crisis scenario: Can one consider modern bureaucracies as the first examples of massified immaterial labour? What if one was to understand this labour in the bureaucracies as having elements of producing abstractions, affects and effects? Could one begin to understand creative labourers as part of a dispersed bureaucracy – rather than as individual creatives hunted by managerialism?

What would an economy look like, that was to be centred on the body and its sensorium? Could such a sensuous and performative approach to the economy help to rethink static sociological concepts such as colonialism, capitalism, class and work?

Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Mao Mollona
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Julieta González
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Stefano Harney
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Marina Vishmidt