Talks, etc.

15/01/2020: Automate All Things!, Aksioma, Ljubljana (SL)


11/05/2019: Do or Delegate: Entrepreneurial Means and Precarious Ends, Onomatopee, Eindhoven (NL)

Ever since Laszlo Moholy-Nagy “ordered” his paintings by dictating instructions via telephone, the idea that the artist should be the material executor of the artwork increasingly grew out of fashion. While this issue has been mostly understood within the frame of authorship, “Do or Delegate” recognises it first and foremost as a work-related matter. More specifically, the exhibition questions the entrepreneurial shift from art to art direction. What kind of labor goes into art? Who are the ones performing it? Which activities, side-jobs, formal and informal economies constitute or limit a practice?


14/02/2019: Who Does What?, Drugo More, Rijeka (HR)

Who Does What? (WDW?) is a show and a symposium that looks at how work is performed, delegated, outsourced, crowdsourced, transformed, destabilized, disguised, displaced, concealed and revealed, rejected and reclaimed. WDW? focuses on the present of work, a time in which work is as present as ever.


10/03/2018: Life Hacks: Space, Varia, Rotterdam (NL)

What shapes the daily routine of a telemarketing sales agent? How to go beyond the co-working model when it comes to organize a place for collaboration? What’s the territorial and political role of furniture within the semi-domestic area of the artist’s studio? Are life hacks a form of liberation or yet another burden? Together with author and designer François Girard-Meunier, the WORKNOT! collective (Arvand Pourabbasi and Golnar Abbasi), Varia, the Centre for Everyday Technology (represented by Roel Roscam Abbing, Manetta Berends and Niek Hilkmann) and XPUB (the Experimental Publishing program of the Piet Zwart Institute), we will tackle these and more questions during an evening dedicated to spaces that are at once entrepreneurial and precarious.


09/10/2018: A-Z Night #7: Future of Work, Nieuwe Zaal, Hasselt (Be)


19/05/2018: Entrepreneurial Spirit, Bureaucreativity and Self-Design, Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (NL)

“You must become an entrepreneur”. This is the obsessive refrain one can hear at any level of society and education. But what is entrepreneurship? What’s behind the elusive notion of entrepreneurial spirit? In this talk, Silvio Lorusso will delve into the entrepreneurial culture formalized through the work of, among others, Joseph Schumpeter, Peter Drucker and Tom Peters to show that a radical attitude, one that passionately asks for change, might not be so different from the mindset prescribed by entrepreneurialism. When one’s disposition is instrumentalized to please an expanded bureaucracy that indifferently requires to think differently, design becomes first and foremost a matter of self-design.


17/04/2018: Be Like Elon, during The Graphic Revolution, Pakhuis de Zwijger, Rotterdam (NL)


10/03/2018: It Is As If We Were Doing Work, Varia, Rotterdam (NL)


26/01/2018: The Designer Without qualities, Grafill, Oslo (NO)


11/01/2018: Based In, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (NL)

An event to look critically at the role of locality in the context of design, bringing together practitioners who are based outside of their city of origin and thus have the opportunity to analyze their designer identity as a construct traversing national borders, cultures and histories. With artist/designer Silvio Lorusso, architect/researcher Mohamed Elshahed and designer Rachel Jenkins. Moderated by Tamar Shafrir.


12/11/2017: Zine Camp 2017, Rotterdam (NL)


25/10/2017: All Things Optimal, CIM, Warwick (UK)


26/10/2017: Radicality in Contemporary Graphic Design, AMT Southampton, Winchester School of Art, (UK)


09/2017: The Designer without Qualities, PlanD: Techno-Optimism/Techno-Pessimism, Zagreb (Croatia)


06/2017: A Constellation of -Wares, Techno-Galactic Software Observatory, Brussels (Belgium)

Photo by Peter Westenberg.

Link to slides: https://cryptpad.fr/slide/#/1/view/p8EiphzdeHeVf1yI3NJGEQ/hWWCDdvOB+ulWbxgpk9Y9Q2ixCSShE8TQRxjRoM80aA/


06/2017: The Artist Entrepreneur, Praksis, Oslo (Norway)

Link to Notes: https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/seizing-the-means-of-innovation/


08/05/2017: “Welcome to the Entreprecariat”, Re:Publica, Berlin (Germany)


07/04/2017: “Dobrodošli u poduzetnički prekarijat”, Drugo More, Rijeka (Croatia)


23/02/2017: Symposium Citizen-Designer, AKV|St.Joost, Breda (the Netherlands)

Link to transcript: https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/what-design-cant-do/


04/01/2017: The Empire Strikes Again, La Scuola Open Source, Bari (Italy)


29/11/2016: Welcome to the Entreprecariat, Sandberg Instituut + LustLAB, Den Haag (the Netherlands)

Link to transcript: https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/work-ethic-dystopia/


04/12/2015: The Competitive Aesthetics of Failure, MoneyLab#2: Economies of Dissent, Amsterdam (the Netherlands)

Link to transcript: https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/the-competitive-aesthetics-of-failure/