To conclude our cooperation with Progres. Paradigm Shift #5 - Work Academy (a project initiated by Arne Hendriks) we will stage and organize a 4-day techno opera event.

This live improvisational exercise will bring together the summoned soul of scientific management pioneer, avant-garde writer and poet Aleksei Gastev (1882-1939), the reincarnation of the nutritionist, diabetologist, and rational food promoter Iulian Mincu (1927-2015), the spirit of the former workers from the now abandoned state factories and industries and the ashes of a once imagined Hammer Museum.

From these local remnants of stories, big and small, we sing & sculpt a new vision of man as a musician, as a woman, as a fugitive from impossible ideals and conflict zones, as an artist and refugee, as a future bringer of liberation from our current state of unequal distribution.

Be an integral part of our extended counterfactual jam session, not a turning wheel in the machine, but a solid state drive, a choir of average voices, a spoken poetry podium, a rundown cinema at the outskirts of your town showing long forgotten documentaries.

This is a place of merging and emerging, of making and repairing, of celebration, of gift-giving, of memory and forgetfulness. A random moment in time and space to liberate us from the man with the hammer inside all of us.

At the same time - The Academy of Work coexists with various artistic works, as well as a theater/sequential art piece by local artists, actors, cartoonists and cultural workers that encourage us to perceive both the difficult past and uncertain future at work all around us.

Lighting my City Up, a premiere at The Academy of Work by Cadar Vlad Gheorghe and Ioana Balinț, with George Balinț, Gavril Pop and Ilior Spătar will enact and confront Timisoara’s future predicament.

Escape from Timișoara is an ongoing project also by Vlad Cadar – an actual do-it-together rafting trial & error adventure of building a capacious raft that probes the uneasy escape routes of contemporary extremophile living.

Kosmos.DIY – a new space/intiative in Timisoara exhibits a Micro-Galleries Pavillion co-curated by Erik Kun with works by Lucian Bădărau, Ștefana Hatnean, Elena Ilin & Diana Panduru, Andrei Verdes in times of shrinking resources and budget cuts.

Lucian Barbu will present two comics entitled OHSC CT (The Occupational Health and Safety Commission Cugir-Timișoara): a protest – that detail both personal experiences and a historical perspective on the working conditions of industrialization. 

Ciprian Homorodean tools as TOOLS collection as intervention encourages us to trust no one but the ameliorative potential of tools and their continuous role in the betterment of humanity.

The duo Makunouchi Bento duo will conjure up on the last day The Virtual Bluescreen-Collar Choir, an omnipresent choir of synthetic beings, algorithmic helpers and machinic labor forces joining up a growing mass of ghostly and missing unionizations, incessant layoffs past, present and future.

Miya Yoshida, Berlin based curator, lecturer and cultural practitioner, will explore through images, sound and poetry, the very act of listening - in a lecture performance entitled Mimi o Sumasu (The Very Act of Listening).

All these works engage at various levels with the memory of work, its deletion and loss, of drifting in and out of Timisoara under conditions for speculative investment and rising living costs.

Supported by Eu-Japan Fest