SVEN LÜTTICKEN: THE GLOBALIST CITY AND TERRESTRIAL ALLIANCES

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Sven Lütticken’s The Globalist City and Terrestrial Alliances is the third encounter of Space is The Place/The Place is Space. The structure of the program takes the shape of periodical encounters. It aims to analyse the role of art as a critical practice which offers tools for stopping, looking and situating ourselves in the world, and for creating situations and imagining ways of living and producing space.

While trying to curb migration from the Global South, neoliberal globalization funnels capital, “expats” and tourists to various metropolitan centers, making sustainable life and work difficult for many residents. Once, the question was whether a different form of globalization (an alter-globalization) is possible. Today, the question can be rephrased as follows: how is a terrestrial form of politics possible within and against globalization? How can (trans)local initiatives make critical use of some of the infrastructures of globalization to pursue alliances and entanglements that oppose the extractivist spoliation of human and non-human life forms, and of the planet? Such questions, of course, seem impossibly big, yet they arise from the contradictory imperatives of everyday practice—not least in the art world, that profiteer of globalization.

Sven Lütticken teaches art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of several books, including Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Sternberg Press, 2017). He just published the essay “Toward a Terrestrial” in e-flux journal and has co-edited the upcoming volume Futurity Report with Eric de Bruyn (Sternberg Press).