00

Readings for Artworkers: The Right to the City and postcommunist imagination

Reading Henri Lefebvre in Warsaw’s Praga with: Łukasz Stanek, Ewa Majewska, Lidia Makowska and Maciej Czeredys

"Readings for artworkers" is a series of seminars organised by Free/Slow University of Warsaw. This time we will have an opportunity to read and debate on the first Polish translation of the renowned text by Henri Lefebvre The Right to the City.

On the occasion of the 221st anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution, also called the Great, we invite you for a journey around the inconsistencies of the late capitalism with texts by Henri Lefebvre and Gyorgy Lukacs in our pockets. Although the weather, and also the political situation, would rather encourage a practical realisation of the apotheosis of idleness, we – putting the bourgeois principle of self-moderation into practice – will embark on reconstructing urban utopias, critical theory and romantic love.

Right to the city – as Lefebvre claims – is the right to the city of its inhabitants. Not contemporary “Olympians” – the ruling class, who don’t live anywhere anymore, as constant mobility has become their life practice, but the proletariat – forced to live where they can – people confined to their place of residence, relocated conforming to fashion, settled outside the city centre and crowded in houses that enable “survival”, but not real life.

“Urban air emancipates” Marx claimed, and it might be worth pondering what it means nowadays. Are we still seduced by Lefebvre’s resentment-free, vital and materialistic suggestions? How does the right to the city sound today and what does the division into the master class and the proletariat mean in the era of the galloping postmodern?

We will ask these and other questions at the Knot in Praga.