(Due to health issues, Berardi will deliver this lecture via livestream. You are welcome to follow it in the Blue Foyer of DE SINGEL.)
Within the framework of CARTA '22, Antwerp University’s Research Centre for Visual Poetics organizes a series of public lectures and artists talks, and closed seminars. The opening lecture is by the well-known theorist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi.
The past few years have tested our ability to remain sane in a rapidly changing world. If our consciousness has somehow managed to continue functioning, what happened meanwhile to our unconscious? Amidst the negativities and chaos of a suicidal economic system and death, what remains of our ability to act politically and to imagine a movement dedicated to collective freedom?
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a theorist and cultural agitator. He was the founder of Radio Alice in 1976. One of the most prominent members of radical Italian leftist movement Autonomia, Berardi worked closely with the French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari throughout the 1980s. His latest books in English are Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry and Third Unconscious: The Psycho-sphere in the Viral Age.