Figure It Out Symposium & Exhibition
Figure It Out The Art of Living Through System Failure is collaborative project that has been granted support under the Creative Europe program, sub-program Culture, of the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Collaborators are Drugo More (HR) (Project Lead), Kiosk (RS), La Labomedia Association (FR), Vektor (EL) and Unfinished Art Space (MT). The project explores a range of practices that enable disenfranchised groups to overcome barriers established by administrative, institutional, and algorithmic regimes.
Gendered, racialized, bordered and exploited, marginalised, underserved, discriminated and vulnerable communities are often forced to develop tools and strategies that are considered unacceptable to the institutions of the system; thus developing practices and phenomena of coping, tinkering, making-do and circumventing exclusions. Sometimes these tools and strategies are forged out of necessity, of survival, sometimes to exercise rights or to secure access to basic services available only to ‘deserving’ citizens. Such tools and strategies are always aimed at a certain system (state, welfare institutions, corporations, workplace, credit, housing, utilities etc.) that has its own rules and conditions of access that these communities or individuals cannot meet, producing and reproducing systemic exclusion.
Finding ‘holes in the system’ and developing strategies to take advantage of system weaknesses, people use their ingenuity to avoid detrimental effects on their lives and lives of their communities.
Moreover, such practices have now expanded into the digital sphere, where they are facing new kinds of power structures and also getting recombined in interesting ways. As dataveillance, algorithmic governance and digital profiling seep into mechanisms of exclusion and dispossession, from border controls to public transport, education, health and housing, new workarounds, tinkering and hacking emerges. As they do with the growing impacts of climate change, forcing underserved communities across the globe to be resourceful and devise their own forms of adaptation.
Works
Women’s Affairs | Kiosk
Ghost Work | !Mediengruppe Bitnik
Algoffshore | RYBN.ORG
FLAG STORIES (use and pass on) | ŠKART
Perch | Keit Bonnici
Mobile Server | Azahara Cerezo
How to get a passport: A guide on obtaining citizenship | Rakel Vella
Register here
Information about travelling to Malta here
Information on the Figure It Out exhibition is here
Figure It Out is co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.
In Malta it is supported by the NGO Co-financing Scheme of the Malta Council for the Voluntary Sector, under the Ministry for Inclusion, Voluntary Organisations and Consumer Rights, as well as the Conference Scheme of the Ministry for Finance and Employment.
The round-table is organised as part of the activities of the Working Group “Analysis, Theory & Politics Of Care”, part of the COST funded project: TOOLKIT OF CARE (TOC), CA21102.
