roaming projects and Post Capitalist Desire Collective present We Want It All: Exploring the relationship between desire, culture and apost capitalist project. Through a day of conversation, screenings and talks We Want It All will explore a variety of approaches to the relationship between culture, desire and capitalism with contributions from academics and artists including Lawrence Lek, Laura Oldfield Ford, Kodwo Eshun and Louis Moreno.

Post Capitalist Desire is a new module on the MA Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, created and taught by Mark Fisher from November 2016 until his death in January 2017. Following the tragic loss of Mark, the students of the course, along with Mark’s colleagues in the Visual Cultures department, decided to continue the course. This took the form of a student-led seminar with students inviting Mark’s friends, colleagues and those inspired by his work to join in the conversation. At the heart of the module was the question “What role can culture and aesthetics play in imagining, pre-figuring and facilitating a move beyond capitalism?” Taking its name from the title of a k-punk post, We Want It All picks up this question in relation to Mark’s interest in ‘desire’ and how it might enable us to imagine and produce possible futures.

Schedule

11 am – 1 pm: Apparatus of Capture: the urban art of global real estate (Walking tour with Louis Moreno)

The walk, from Tate Modern in Southwark to One New Change in the City of London, explores how a weird kind of urban agriculture began to emerge in the mid 1990s on the banks of the Thames. One which enabled the City to retain its title as the global market’s metropole and gave their crops of financial products an avant-garde form. Along the way, we will track some of the moments which fertilised the ground, helping finance to move through the earth, extracting rent from culture, enclosing social space as private wealth, and cultivating the triffid like blooms which colonise the surface of the city today.

**** PLEASE NOTE: We will now be meeting on the viewing platform at Switch House, Tate Modern, at 11am****

****Directions here: http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/viewing-level****

1:00 – 2:00pm: Break for lunch

2:00 – 2.15pm: Introduction by Alex Hull and Amy Jones, Post Capitalist Desire Collective, and William Rees, roaming projects

2:15 – 3:00 pm: Lawrence Lek screening, with introduction by William Rees

Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition) [14 mins]

With the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston in East London has degenerated into a post-apocalyptic utopia. Come and explore this drowned world of the near future: filled with forgotten nightclubs, neon-lit music venues, Election booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. Building upon Lek’s original commission for Open Source 2015, this Europa, Mon Amour brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As the viewer is led around, a voiceover extracted from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour speaks to them about the nature of memory. It is a gradual, but relentless, sense of forgetting that comes with any form of urban transformation.

QE3 (2016) [20 mins]

Architectural models, glossy renderings, and virtual reality videos come to life in the fictional last voyage of the QE2 as it returns to its birthplace. The story begins with an anonymous Glaswegian artist-philanthropist who intends to bring the transatlantic ocean liner into the heart of the city and convert it into a new home for the Glasgow School of Art. Designed and built amid the social and industrial upheaval of the 1960s, the luxury liner returns to a city undergoing extensive change under the auspices of urban regeneration. From its moorings in Dubai, the ship passes through the Suez Canal, encountering refugee boats in the Mediterranean, oil rigs in the North Sea, disused shipyards on the Clyde and emerging artist enclaves in Glasgow. A soundtrack by cellist and composer Oliver Coates accompanies the ship on its final European cruise. Continuing Lek’s use of architectural media as a means of social critique, this site-specific simulation transforms the QE2 from a symbol of heavy industry into an institution for art.

3:00 – 4:00 pm: Capitalist Realism Reading Groups, introduced by Amy Jones from Post Capitalist Desire Collective

Members of the Post Capitalist Desire Collective lead a reading group, centered around Chapter 2 of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (What if you held a protest and everyone came?, p. 12-15).

N.B. Attendees are encouraged to take part in the reading groups. Reading in advance is recommended but not essential. Capitalist Realism is available to purchase online; copies of the chapter will be available to read on the day.

4:00 – 4:30 pm: Break for tea, coffee and biscuits

4:30 – 6:00 pm: Laura Oldfield Ford and Kodwo Eshun In Conversation, with an introduction by Alex Hull from Post Capitalist Desire Collective

London based artist and writer Laura Oldfield Ford will be joined by Goldsmiths lecturer, writer and cofounder of the Otolith Group, Kodwo Eshun, to discuss the question: “What role can culture and aesthetics play in imagining, pre-figuring and facilitating a move beyond capitalism?” Their conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Biographies

Mark Fisher was a writer and academic, and formulator of the Post Capitalist Desire module on the MA Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths University. In the 1990s, Fisher was involved in the influential Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University. His blog k-punk, begun in 2003 and available to read online, was influential in its adept writing on the contemporary moment and popular culture. His first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, published in 2009 by Zero Books, was lauded for its diagnosis of contemporary neoliberalism. His subsequent books, Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero, 2014) and The Weird and Eerie (Repeater, 2017) continued his analysis of contemporary culture – especially music – and the social and institutional causes of mental health. Fisher wrote for publications such as Frieze and The Wire, and was also a maker, collaborating with Justin Barton on various creative projects including the ‘sound-essay’ On Vanishing Land.

Louis Moreno is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures and the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. His works examines the urban processes and cultural logic of financial capitalism. Louis is also a member of the curatorial collective freethought alongside Irit Rogoff, Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Mao Mallona and Nora Sternfeld. Their current research interest is focused on shifting the concept of ‘infrastructure’ out of the hands of technocracy, and recently curated Infrastructure, Bergen Assembly, Norway (2016).

Lawrence Lek lives and works in London. Lek creates speculative worlds and site-specific simulations using gaming software, video, installation and performance. Often based on real places, his digital environments reflect the impact of the virtual on our perception of reality. Contrasts between utopia and ruins, desire and loss, and fantasy and history appear throughout his work to symbolise this exchange. Lek is a graduate of the Cooper Union, the Architectural Association, and Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has been featured in recent exhibitions at Tramway, as part of Glasgow International 2016; Seoul Museum of Art, as part of Seoul Mediacity Biennial 2016, KW Institut, Berlin, Germany; Cubitt Gallery, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge and the Delfina Foundation, London. He is recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2016, the Tenderflix/ Tenderpixel Artist Video Award and the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award.

Kodwo Eshun lectures Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2002 he cofounded, with Anjalika Sagar, The Otolith Group, a collective working across film and video, artists’ writing, and exhibition curation. He is the author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction and has written for publications including The Guardian, The Wire, and frieze.

Laura Oldfield Ford is a London based artist and writer concerned with spatial narratives, contested space, architecture and memory. Her work is a psychogeographic mapping of de-industrialised zones. She seeks to investigate new forms of socio-political discourse that have arisen as a result of the radical reordering of urban space in the post-industrial era. She completed a BA at the Slade in 2001 and an MA in Painting at the RCA in 2007. In 2013-2014 she was Stanley Picker Fellow at Kingston University. She is author of Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011) and is currently a TECHNE funded researcher at the Royal College of Art. Recent shows include The Sky is Falling CCA Glasgow, Alpha/Isis/Eden Showroom London 2017, 8 Million Kami CCA Kitakyushu 2016 and Chthonic Reverb Grand Union Birmingham 2016.