In this book, visual artist André Alves describes the artistic research project “A Never-Ending Thirst: Artistic Reforms to Neoliberal-Imperviousness”, conducted at HDK-Valand—University of Gothenburg (2016-2021). At the core of this project is the debate about the effects that capitalism has in the loss of sensitivity and imagination in culture, and the potential of art or its complicity in such loss.
The book opens with the description of an encounter Alves had with an unusual street ad with the text “Sede do Grupo da Juventude Cansada” (translates to English as “Thirst/Headquarters of the Group of the Fatigued/Fed-up Youth”) in the city of Porto (Portugal) in 2015. That encounter is trigger of Alves doctoral research project focusing on the post-industrial capitalism capture of subjectivity.
At the departure of the project is the attempt to visualize the shaping of subjectivity through the relationship with work in the post-industrial capitalism. Inspired by the Maria Franco Ferraz concept of “Teflon-Skin” used to describe post-industrial capitalism’s pattern of self-preservation and desensitization, Alves addresses how can artistic research contribute with new political imaginaries and rehabilitations of sensitivity and imagination to counter what he describes as “Neoliberal-Teflon Imperviousness.” At stake in this research is the ways in which artistic strategies can be deployed to undo the perception of others as threats felt as “delaying” us, “troubling”, “demanding”, “hard work”, and which influence us to align with what is already familiar, predictable to us.
Throughout the book, Alves enunciates these problems and introduces different artistic practices that experiment with increasing permeability in the bunkered culture of late capitalism. Proposing visual art as an incomplete way of seeing-knowing that calls for a listening horizon, throughout the book Alves addresses the reader with the question of how we might live a listening life together.
ArbetstitelA Never-Ending Thirst: Artistic Reforms to Neoliberal-Teflon Imperviousness
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Publiceringsdatum2021-10-25 00:00:00
FörfattareAndré Alves
erpOwnsPrice Kort BeskrivningAvhandling i Design vid Högskolan för Konst och Design vid Göteborgs universitet. Dissertation in Design in Academy of Art and Design
At the core of this project is the debate about the effects that capitalism has in the loss of sensitivity and imagination in culture. André Alves’ project departed from the understanding that sensitivity and imagination are main aspects of what art works with—and what capitalist seeks to appropriate and destroy—and revives old questions of how the aesthetic contributes to how we live, and how to shape artistic strategies of existence.
The research was developed around twelve projects and forms of writing that articulated, experimented and developed the inquiry.
Throughout André Alves’ research, his artistic projects oscillated between the authored and the collective — and embodiment in the artistic practice of the negotiations between the individual and the collective that his inquiry is about. One of the arguments of the inquiry is how art must take the role to increase affectability in culture, to educate us to welcome the unpredictable, the foreign, difference. In this, the author claim that artistic research can rehearse reforms—to reshape in order to change—to Neoliberal-Teflon static, disaffected composition of the world.
The research is described in terms of a practice, and in that sense, never-concluding. At stake is the potential that artistic research might have as a listening ethics and a pedagogy of openness. And this brings up the aspect of responsibility. If changing ideas and sensitivity is perceived by people as threatening, how to emotionally prepare people to welcome change?
At the later stage of his research, the author reflected on the responsibility of scholar work in relation to sensitivity. Sensitivity is not simply insight. Scholar work is typically linked to intellectual and discursive production, not having present the levels of comfort, the “emotional toolkit”, that people need in order to welcome new, challenging, unpleasant, ideas. That art of connecting thinking-feeling is where André Alves sees his future work.
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