Welcome to our November newsletter

Published on: December 7 / 2024

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…

The latest collection of David Graeber’s essays, titled The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, It just came out! Here is an edited extract of Rebecca Solnit’s foreword to the book, published in The Guardian.

The collection features essays and interviews on economics, power, care and art, drawn from over two decades. Edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovsky and a foreword by Rebeca Solnit, these essays are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, and necessary thinker.

Here are some reviews about the book. If you wrote a review or would like to write one, please contact us.

Starting on September 2nd, the Institute facilitates monthly talks with historians, anthropologists, sociologists, publicists and activists, highlighting different aspects of each essay featured in the collection. Until now, we have held the events with Dyan NearyCory Doctorow, and Marcus Rediker. You can find the recordings of these events on our Youtube channel.

Our next meeting is on December 5th with the brilliant Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro. They will talk about the connection between David’s essay “There Was Never a West” and his own work and reflections. Here is the upcoming schedule of announced meetings, taken from the Institute website:

There Never Was a West / Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro 
Event date: December 5 / 2024 
The third discussion of Graeber’s essay “There Never Was a West”: A conversation between Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro, in the framework of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”.

Against economics /Michael Hudson
Event date: January 9 / 2025
The third discussion of Graeber’s essay “Against economics”, in the frame of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”.

There Never Was a West / James Schneider and Sophie Scott-Brown
Event date: February 12 / 2025 
The fourth discussion of Graeber’s essay “There Never Was a West”: A conversation between Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro, in the framework of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”.

Finance Is Just Another Word for Other People’s Debts / Steve Keen
Event date: March 6 / 2025 
The name of Steve’s talk is “How conventional economists will accidentally destroy capitalism”, based on the essay “Finance Is Just Another Word for Other People’s Debts” from the “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”.

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? / Steven Shaviro
Event date: April 3 / 2025 
Talk of Graeber’s essay “What’s The Point If We Can’t Have Fun” This talk will relate Graeber’s account of play with other modern formulations, and suggest how play offers us an alternative to the ideology of capitalist austerity.

The DGI curatorial team has prepared a collection of posters created by artists from different countries, from Turkey to Indonesia and from France to the United States. Each poster is linked to one of the essays from “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”.

Poster by Joan Cornellà Vázquez

Cities Made Differently

Cities Made Differently, the first book of the illustrated series Made Differently, co-authored by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, was released by the MIT Press this November. Just as the essay collection, the inspiration for the title of this series is drawn from one of David Graeber’s most renowned quotes: 

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”

Cities Made Differently is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them.

The origin of the series is Nika Dubrovsky’s project Anthropology for Kids, and Cities Made Differently which now exists in two versions: an illustrated book and a doodle notebook, available for free download on the project’s website.

Nika Dubrovsky will be at Housmans on December 6th at 6PM to celebrate the publication of Cities Made Differently. Joining Nika in conversation will be the inimitable organiser and writer James Schneider. For more information on the event, please check here.

Events related to Cities Made Differently

Linked to the book’s release, a visual assembly was held this November at the Interference Archives in New York City.

We will continue to hold Visual Assemblies related to the Made Differently book series and will announce new venues in our next newsletter.

If you have space for a visual assembly – at your school, museum, no hospital, immigrant welcome center, nursing home, or activist community, any place where participants would like to discuss with each other and with invited guests a possible reorganization of how their social situation is evolving, we would love to collaborate.

Write to us!

Working on David Graeber website

We continue to work on davidgraeber.org

In our newsletters, we’ve mentioned before that we are maintaining two websites: davidgraeber.org and davidgraeber.institute

The first website was created by Nika in 2020 after David’s death. It serves not only as David’s archive but also as his personal website, where we hope his life will continue through his texts, videos, and publications. The institute site, after some thought, was made separately. After all, David is not an institute but a person. These projects deserve to have their own distinct life.

We plan to work on a music collection and are talking to music publishers  about the possibility of publishing vinyl records with David’s voice. It is possible that we will integrate musical works into it.

Currently, we are collecting all available reviews and articles in various languages. We would love your help with this! Now we have collected articles about David in ChineseKoreanPortugueseSpanishPolish,and  French. If you have reviews from your country in your language, please send them to us. And if you have any knowledge of a specific region (such as  Latin America or Africa), perhaps you’d like to join our team? 

We have just updated our interview section. You are welcome to take a look. And if you know of any David Graeber interviews not yet on our website, let us know, and we’ll upload them. Our goal is to build a comprehensive database of David Graeber’s work.

We still have a lot of work left to do in transcribing his videos, collecting quotes and, most importantly, editing the site. If you have some free time to join our efforts, please contact us. 

We are also still looking for information about the translators of David’s books into different languages and the designers who worked on the book covers. Send us information, if you know them.

Many thanks for your support!

The David Graeber Institute in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Together with our friends, we are preparing a conference in St. Vincent on climate change in the context of Global South-North relations in April 2025. 

We are inviting students together with their professors to participate as educational groups to be part of the discussions and community projects we are starting in Saint Vincent, including an interactive playground, spirulina and 3d printer projects and more.

We are thinking about the SV project that could be used by people elsewhere and which could become part of the network.

Read more about our thoughts and plans here

We need your help! Please share with us your thoughts and ideas!

Fight Club and Visual Assembly at the Busan Biennale

David Graeber asserted that human consciousness only exists in dialogue with others, and the myth of the individual “thinker-philosopher” is nothing but a myth. David himself was often subjected to public attacks and withstood them with fortitude. Our fights will be between real people, imaginary people, or real people played by actors. The Fight Club project was featured at the Busan Biennale in South Korea, you can find the relevant information about it in the room of fight club on our Museum of Care website.

This Fall in the DGI and the Museum of Care

On November 14th there was a conversation with Andris Brinkmanis, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas from MIT, who presented their interdisciplinary artistic practice, focusing in particular on their ongoing project The Swamp School.

We just started the reading group on Mikhail Bakhtin and his book Rabelais and His World on 31th October (link). This first meeting was joined by Peter Sahlins. For the video of the event, you can find it on our Youtube Channel. These meetings will be limited in number and will not be entirely online but will include public lectures. The group will meet 12 times during 2024/25, on the last Thursday of each month. 

APT/ART exhibition

Last year, the David Graeber Institute opened its second Apt Art (APT / ART) exhibition entitled “Make Carnival Not War.” This year we continue the “Carnival is Not War” dialog by offering collaborative work with visual artists.

This exhibition will continue throughout the year, evolving in parallel with a reading group devoted to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, its relationship to the legacy of David Graeber and contemporary political reality. 

We are also holding the exhibition Make Carnival not War. This second APT ART exhibition explores the relationships between Carnival and War. The world is moving so fast these days and catastrophically. For this reason, we felt that the classic form, which fixes art objects in a given space, would have missed the mark. 

A dialogue exhibition, a work in progress that should stretch over several months, this exhibition is intended to be a tool for collective discussion.

We started on Friday, 20th October.

The new and first issue of DGI Magazine, which will focus on climate collapse, will be presented at one of the future events of the exhibition.

Here are some posters of the exhibition.

We look forward to seeing everyone at DGI and MoC

Regards, 
David Graeber Institute

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