Next – Verein für bildende Kunst
AS_TIDE
EU-cultural project 2007 – 2009

Portable Cultures

Mobility, acceleration and social structures
13. Oktober 2008, Schauspielhaus Graz
Michelangelo Pistoletto, artist and art theorist, founder and director of Fondazione Pistoletto – Cittadellarte, Biella
Professor Dr. Wolfgang Welsch, Professor for Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena
Discussion
Main stage, Schauspielhaus Graz
Begin: 7:30 pm

A co-operation between Schauspielhaus Graz, Academy Graz and next – fine arts club.
Wolfgang Welsch is one of the most important theorists in the post-modern era of the German speaking world. He enriched the reflections on life forms in times of globalization and mobility with his concept of “transculturalism”.
Michelangelo Pistoletto is one of the most important exponents of Arte Povera. In 1996 he founded the art-city Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, in a run-down textile factory near Biella, as a center and laboratory to facilitate and explore creative resources and for the production of innovative ideas.
The “nomadology of the 90s” developed from theoretical concepts and became reality. We are confronted with a new type of migration: parallel to the internal European migration runs the migration from poor to rich. Mobility characterizes our age, as a privilege and as a compulsion. When systems begin to move new structures are formed. What happens when mobility in all its aspects, from exile and economic migration to flexibility in work, takes control of entire societies? What is the meaning of “home” of the individual in a globalized world? Origin and home don’t only represent an exclusion of the foreign, but also stands for identification with a social community and a call for active participation in creating and shaping the surrounding. “To find a home in homelessness” – Vilem Flusser calls the new homelessness – the individual situation of being foreign and the experience of the other – a chance for creativity. It shows us that home means taking responsibility for the people close to us and for the shaping of the individual surrounding.