[contra]panorama

In addition to her theoretical work, academic and researcher Eleonora Belfiore has a particular interest in socially engaged arts practice. In this sector, she plays a crucial role in highlighting the labor injustices promoted and reinforced by decades of neoliberal policies and argues for demanding an overall improvement in working conditions in a sector traditionally undervalued by funders and policymakers. Her work, mostly focusing on the UK context, often challenges the assumptions underlying cultural value —and questions the methods used to evaluate cultural impact, in an attempt to bridge the gap between cultural theory and practical policy-making. In this podcast, we talk to Eleonora Belfiore about self-exploitation, value metrics, austerity, social change, community development, feminist ethics of care and cognitive dissonance.

In this podcast, we talk with Nicolás Malevé and Jara Rocha about infrastructures, software programmes and museums. We turn our attention to changes of scale, algorithms, black boxes, epistemicides and cybercides, and we explore the notions of service, access, and air as controversies: what is triggered by changes in temperature, in marketing strategies, and in web render formats? What materialities are suspended in response to these changes? We also consider palliative care and abolition as possible strategies for dismantling world-forms that should cease to exist, and think about how new forms—which we may not yet have managed to imagine—may be generated in this process.