Felicity D Scott: “Don’t Trust the UN Conference”. PowWow and “För en teknik i folkets tjänst!”
Bergen Kunsthall is excited to welcome Felicity D. Scott to a talk as part of our Plattform series. The event takes place as part of Oscar Tuazon’s exhibition “Water School”. The lecture will revisit “För en teknik i folkets tjänst!” (For a Technology in the Service of the People), an exhibition of alternative technologies staged at the Moderna Museet’s exhibition space Filialen in Stockholm in the summer of 1972 by the Swedish collaborative PowWow. The exhibition took place on the occasion of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the first international effort to place environmental issues at the forefront of global concerns. PowWow’s contribution ran directly counter to the consensus politics and circumscribed set of environmental concerns sought by the UN for the Stockholm Conference, and is recalled here as a remarkable attempt to open up a new type of political conversation about alternative, “soft,” or people’s technology. Moreover, against the prevailing ethos of development and the reorganisation of the larger milieu to integrate the system of nations into a global economic paradigm, Pow Wow sought out strategies of cooperation, independent economic development, resource conservation, and other “activities subversive to the capitalist system”.
Felicity D. Scott is Professor of Architecture, Director of the PhD program in Architecture (History and Theory), and Co-Director of the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. She was a co-founder and editor of the magazine Grey Room. Her work as a historian and theorist focuses on articulating genealogies of political and theoretical engagement with questions of techno-scientific, environmental, and geopolitical transformation within modern and contemporary architecture, art, and media. Her most recent book is Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (Zone Books, 2016).
Plattform is Bergen Kunsthall’s series of lectures and debates with artists and prominent thinkers. The event will be live-streamed on our website.