ART FOR UBI (MANIFESTO)

15.4.2021
a conversation with the Institute of Radical Imagination in residency on Life on the Planet Orismanirana.
The Institute of Radical Imagination states that while the art market confirms its status as a safe-haven for assets of the financial elite, the current pandemic has highlighted the fragility and precarity of art workers around the world, a condition common to a growing portion of humanity. In this situation Universal Basic Income represents a solution and urgent measure to implement. It is not only a response to poverty, but a necessary condition in order to rethink our ecological model, correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care.
If artists are already creating new collective economical models and alter-institutions, these small scale experiments will be much more valuable when connected with the growing social movements around the world fighting for a Universal Basic Income.
The Institute of Radical Imagination is a group of curators, activists, scholars and cultural producers with a shared interest in co-producing research, knowledge, and artistic and political interventions aimed at implementing post-capitalist forms of life.