Autonomy Lab was conducted by the Autonomous Practices research
program of Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, in a research group
consisting of teachers and students of the school: Ailie Gieseler, Alice
Strete, Anna-Maria Psyllou, Arvand Pourabbasi, Anika van der Meulen,
Carla Arcos, carlota garcia, Eugi Manenti, Fenna van Breda, Florian
Cramer, Francis Belte, Julia Wilhelm, Lara de Poorter, Leslie Hildering,
Linn Doornaar, Luna Bongers, Natalia Sorzano, Noami van Kleef, Nikki
Giesen, Pragya Jain, Sam Niehorster, Santiago Pinyol, Simon Kentgens,
Sten Heijster, WdKA Haven, Weronika Zielinska, Yunjoo Kwak.
Autonomy Lab investigated new ways of understanding and creating
autonomy, particularly in multidisciplinary artist collectives and
self-organizations in diverse world regions.
Autonomy Lab included workshops with more than a dozen of artist
collectives:
Eat Art Collective (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
展銷場 Display Distribute and Autonomous-8 (Hong Kong)
Woodbine Collective (New York, USA)
BananSkolen (Copenhagen, Denmark)
The Bureau of Care (Athens, Greece & Rotterdam,
Netherlands)
(Summaries of the individual workshops have been published in a
separate research zine.)
Autonomy Lab also participated in documenta fifteen (Kassel, Germany,
2022) where it helped running the ‘Apamart’ of the Indonesian artist
collective Jatiwangi art Factory.
Research questions
…for Autonomy Lab were:
Which concepts of autonomy do collective, self-organized art
practices embody and represent?
How do they differ from established concepts of artistic
autonomy?
What can other societal actors learn from them?
Types
of autonomy identified in the course of the project:
political autonomy
creation of autonomous spaces - for political activist intervention,
community building and mutual aid:
among others in BananSkolen’s activist performance tools, in the
community practices of Italian Autonomists (introduced in a guest
lecture by University of Amsterdam researcher Joost de Bloois),
Woodbine Collective and Wok the Rock (who used the
Indonesian term Gotong Rojong as an equivalent of
mutual aid, Mandiri for self-sufficiency and
Merdeka for institutional independence);
rethinking political autonomy as (a) a human and civil right and (b)
something to be nuanced and relativized as
interdependency (展銷場 Display Distribute
/Autonomous-8 which used the Cantonese and Mandarin word
自治 [zìzhì] to describe a type of autonomy that takes
dependency on others into account; in the case of Hong Kong, its basic
resource dependency on Mainland China], chosen
dependency (CONSTANT, who introduced it as a feminist
concept), and even voluntary surrender
(Take-A-Way, who introduced it in the context of addiction
recovery).
bodily / biopolitical
autonomy
abortion rights/reproductive autonomy (addressed
among others by the Feminist Healthcare Research Collective,
Mother Art, an in autonomist feminism);
migration/freedom of physical movement
(Take-A-Way, BananSkolen; two artist collectives who
collaborate with undocumented refugees);
body normativity and rethinking biology in relation to technology
(CONSTANT): prosthetics, medical treatment, digital and
physical-spatial-architectural control.
autonomy of
choosing one’s own way of life and work
autonomy of integrating care work and reproductive labor into one’s
life and work practice, including ‘autonomous’ artistic practice
(Mother Art, Italian feminist autonomism, The Bureau of
Care).
technological autonomy
self-organized platforms: Free and Open Source,
self-developed technological infrastructures as alternatives to
corporate Internet/social media platforms and their monopolistic,
extractivist business models (CONSTANT, Lumbung_Space,
展銷場 Display Distribute);
rethinking dependency while creating and supporting technological
alternatives: any type of technology, as an infrastructure or platform,
creates dependency. But rather than (pure) autonomy or (pure)
dependency, technology creates interdependency.
(CONSTANT, 展銷場 Display Distribute). Stating that
this interdependency does exist, however, does not obsolete the question
of who is (or is not) in control of technological infrastructures. The
question of technological autonomy thus boils down to a chosen
dependency (CONSTANT);
taking use of resources into consideration: cost, care,
environmental impact. This also concerns the imagining and developing of
alternative technologies and tools (CONSTANT,
The Bureau of Care, lumbung.space).
economic
autonomy: alternative systems of value and exchange
local, small-scale, self-organized economies that
sustain a community and create independence from third
parties (Amigas, Wok the Rock, Jatiwangi art
Factory);
creation of alternative systems of exchange and
finance (Jatiwangi art Factory).
communal/collective
autonomy; autonomy as interdependency
as an alternative to, or a nuancing of, traditional Western
individualistic concepts of autonomy (展銷場 Display
Distribute/Autonomous-8, CONSTANT, Wok the
Rock, Woodbine Collective, Take-A-Way);
as commons : ruangrupa’s & Jatiwangi art
Factory’s Lumbung, Woodbine Collective’s
mutual aid practice,
Varia/lumbung.space’s and CONSTANT’s digital
commons practices. All these concepts overcome a
relatively recent - and arguably: problematic - dichotomy in Western
contemporary art discourse between “care” (as communal and sustainable)
versus “autonomy” (as hyper-individualistic, libertarian, capitalist,
destructive). (iLiana Foukianaki/The Bureau of Care used this
binary opposition.)
institutional
& non-/anti-institutional autonomy
autonomy granted by a supporting institution (such
as an art institution). With its failure to grant sufficient autonomy
and protection for its artists and their communal practices (in the
light of - controversial - political accusations and threats against
them), documenta fifteen became a negative example for the continued
necessity of institutional autonomy;
autonomy gained by creating one’s own institution
(Woodbine, Jatiwangi art Factory, Mother
Art);
Both types of autonomy - granted by an external or a self-created
institution - are conceptually related to the traditional,
post-enlightenment concept of aesthetic and artistic autonomy (that was
part of Western art’s emancipation from clerical and ruling class
control). In the contexts of the collective,
communal and commons-oriented art
practices mentioned here, institutional autonomy effectively gets
repurposed and redesigned to support different, non-fine
art practices;
autonomy as independence from institutions,
respectively the creation of alternative,
self-organized institutions (Amigas,
BananSkolen, Wok the Rock);
This term was coined by art critics around the same time as the
ACKnowledge/Autonomy Lab research project (most prominently in Ullrich,
Wolfgang. Die Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer Autonomie. Wagenbach,
2021). From our research perspective, this terminology still takes a
traditional Western aesthetic autonomy concept as its fixed point of
reference, and therefore does not do justice to the new and diverse ways
in which autonomy is being understood and practiced in today’s
multidisciplinary artist collectives and self-organizations.
