RASL EVENTS #2 TALK with Nato Thompson: Culture as Weapon

RASL and Studium Witte de With, in collaboration with Piet Zwart Institute, present Culture as Weapon, a Keynote Lecture by Nato Thompson.

At Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

(Doors 15:30)

Tickets: Free for students, €6.00 regular

In his lecture, Nato Thompson will discuss his book Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. He will address the growing role of affect in a variety of industries – from charity to counterinsurgency models in the military to contemporary real estate. Throughout the keynote, he will explain how the landscape of strategically deployed human emotion has direct implications to the practice of artists and activism.

Following the lecture we will hear from our critical respondents, visual artist and curator Jeanne van Heeswijk & composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven.

About

Nato Thompson is a writer, curator and activist. From 2007 until 2017, he worked at Creative Time in New York, as chief curator and in 2017 as artistic director. Currently, he holds the position of artistic director at Philadelphia Contemporary, a new multidisciplinary art institution in Philadelphia. He is the author of Experimental Geography (2008), Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21^st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon, in which he shows how culture, in the form of advertisement, public relations and marketing, is used by governments and multinationals to communicate, manipulate and sustain power.

This event is organized by RASL Events, Studium Witte de With of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Piet Zwart Institute as a kick off of the new academic year for the students of the committed institutions – Erasmus University Rotterdam, Codarts Rotterdam, and Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam – but will be accessible to non-students as well. Tickets via the ticketlink.

Image Credit: Nato Thompson’s Culture as Weapon cover.