Two Lectures: Cassie Thornton on Smashing Debt and Alessandra Saviotti on Art as a Tool

Please join us for two consecutive lectures by Cassie Thornton of the Feminist Economics Department and Alessandra Saviotti of the Asociación de Arte Útil.
Sponsored by the Birdhouse Collective and WICAN

Cassie Thornton, working under the Feminist Economics Department (FED), presents the three recent projects in Chicago, Halifax and New York. These projects involve (respectively) (a) encouraging children to use crowbars to destroy walls made out of debt-wracked adults’ imagination, (b) mobilizing citizens in a pub to use yoga to demand the economically depressed Nova Scotia be declared a postwork province, and (c) placing cursed watercolors in financial institutions.

Alessandra Saviotti is an independent curator who focuses on collaborative practices according to the motto ‘cooperation is better than competition’. She presents three projects realised in cooperation with artists, curators, cooks, architects and asylum seekers which try to implement the idea of Arte Útil. Arte Útil (roughly translated into English as ‘useful art’ or, more accurately, art as a tool or device) is an ongoing body of work that draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that can change how we act in society.