PRECARIOUS NIGHTS showing AMERICAN HONEY (2016)

Andrea Arnold’s American Honey is a tender road trip showing a group of precarious teenagers trying to make their way through the world selling magazine subscriptions door to door. In the American heartland, we see Sasha Lane as Star in her struggle for “independence in a situation of utter dependency”.

The screening is accompanied by a presentation from Silvio Lorusso on the idea of the ‘entreprecariat’ (from Lorusso’s book ENTREPRECARIAT: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe, published in 2018).

‘Entreprecariat’ is a portmanteau that combines entrepreneurialism and the precariat. With the means and enthusiasm of entrepreneuralism, it brands precarity as flexibility and sells short term contracts and instability as freedom. It is: “...the semi-young creative worker who put effort in her own studio while freelancing for Foodora, the manager on the verge of a burnout, the employee who needs to reinvent himself as soon as his short-term contract is over, the fresh graduate who struggles to repay his loan with a top-notch university.”

Julius Thissen and Pelumi Adejumo will be contributing to this evening with a personal reflection on precarity in the arts.

Silvio Lorusso
Silvio Lorusso is Affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures of Amsterdam, Creative Coding Tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag and researcher at the Willem De Kooning Academy. In 2018 he published his first book entitled ENTREPRECARIAT: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe. His work has been presented at, among other venues, MaXXI, Rome; Transmediale, Berlin; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien; NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf. He holds a Ph.D. in Design Sciences from the School of Doctorate Studies – Iuav University of Venice. His writing has appeared in several magazines and publications, including Volume, Minima&Moralia, Not, Modes of Criticism, Printed Web 3, Metropolis M, Digicult. Since 2013, he manages the Post-Digital Publishing Archive (p-dpa.net).

Julius Thissen
Julius Thissen is an artistic researcher and artist. In his artistic practice he creates performances, photography, film and sculptures that investigate gender identity linked to contemporary performance driven culture and the influence of social expectations on our behavior. Next to his artistic practice he also works as a curator and inclusion expert. He aims to work towards an accessible, diverse and inclusive creative industry to enable the trans and queer community to further emancipate. He does so by giving lectures, developing research based community projects, residencies, the curation of exhibitions and advising museums and institutions. His work was nominated for the Warsteiner Blooom Awards, Arnhemse Nieuwe and he received the Young Talent award by the Mondriaan Fonds.

Pelumi Adejumo
Pelumi Adejumo is writer, poet, performer, and Creative Writing student at ArtEZ.

Review American Honey: www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/american-honey-s-silent-youth
Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQKiRpiVRQM