The Beyond Inhabitation Lab seminar series welcomes a seminar contribution from the international cultural project ‘Figure It Out. The Art of Living Through System Failures’ (Creative Europe, 2023-2025). The project, coordinated by Drugo More (Croatia) has brought together fieldwork research and artistic production to explore practices and phenomena of communities and populations that are failed by systems and institutions. Trapped within constraining situations, these people often develop strategies of lying, cheating and stealing to counter their limitations and powerlessness vis-à- vis these systems. From the position of the dispossessed and excluded, actions and practices that would be condemned in the mainstream assume a different ethical and political connotation. These practices have expanded into the digital sphere as well, where they are getting recombined in interesting ways facing new kinds of algorithmic power structures.
Core Lab member Mara Ferreri and fellow research team member Valeria Graziano (University of Rijeka) will introduce the Figure It Out (2024) book (free download here https://drugo-more.hr/fio-zine/Figure-it-Out.pdf) and the web zine https://pub.sandpoints.org/figureitoutcomrade-e60646ef/inquiry/snadisedruze/ to share reflections on the research process, on the ethics of refusal (cf. Ortner, 1995; Simpson, 2007) that has guided the methodology, and open up a debate on its implications for understanding the dynamics of contemporary popular illegalisms.
Details are in the poster below, or on our events page.