STOCKHOLM.- During two weeks in August and in connection to Stockholm Culture Festival, the public will encounter a diverse range of artworks such as installation, video, performance, sound, experiences, theater and an assembly.

Choreographies of the Social explores the changing field of social relations. The project is informed by artistic and activist practices that investigate how we relate to one another and to the world around us. The different works address inherent social tensions and the global dynamics of our time.

The 20th century unfolded amidst the unstoppable drive of the modernist project centering on humanism and rationality, to the detriment and subjugation of all other life-worlds. The last decade was marked by the financial crash of 2008, coupled with unprecedented migration caused by unbearable violence against life, and highly disruptive technological impact. The emergence of social movements with transformative power, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, and los Indignados, was followed by the rising tide of populism and forms of fascism. Even newer movements have appeared, such as the “Yellow Vests,” still unfolding and yet to be defined, and mostly composed of masses of disaffected individuals.

The new global dynamics are prompting quandaries about the meaning of the inherited terms we use to understand society and social movements. How do we relate to one another and to the otherness of the world in this shifting reality? How can we engage with the new narratives of the social-created from algorithms and derived from the amalgamationof social media and populism? What role do emotions play in a time of outright digitalization and what are today’s choreographies of power, solidarity, and care? Can we reclaim the imagination about the future to be able to dream of other ways of being together in this or in other worlds?

Expanding on these questions, the invited artists create spaces to train new alliances and highlight interdependencies between individuals and the group. As their works suggest, affinities and the respective forms in which bodies, individual and collective, appear and reassemble, can arise from the shared concern about the ways we participate in the life-world around us; and how through such processes we can transform and equally be transformed by the world.

Curator: Edi Muka