Welcome to our August newsletter. 

Museum of Care as a shelter. The beginning of the DGI in St Vincent and the Grenadines

The original concept which the DGI had planned was to build a playground in Saint Vincent however due to the recent hurricane (hurricane Beryl) our focus has been shifted in order to solve the most urgent problem of saving human lives. Of course the question arises; can art be useful for this?  From the early days of DGI’s project in Saint Vincent, we wanted to put theoretical knowledge and art into practice in order to make it relevant for daily life and to be a tool to solve peoples’ problems.

At the moment, we are considering ideas on how to build a reliable hurricane shelter that is both affordable and easy to construct. When we had a discussion about playgrounds, our goal was to avoid the trap that other institutions fall into – which often builds elitist bubbles for a select few and sinks into the deadness of bureaucracy and “efficiency.” We prefer an open space for the whole community centered around play, as a parallel but connected institution. This seems like the right answer.

Of course a hurricane shelter would only be used during a hurricane which, unlike a nuclear winter, does not last such a long time. During times when there are no hurricanes it could function like the St. Vincent Museum of Care, which DGI would be happy to run. The plan is for the museum to prioritize human life and human relationships over the preservation of art objects. 

According to Unesco there are 104,000 Museums in the world and the IMO database listed 438 ships worldwide that are abandoned. They can be used to create art-shelters for hurricanes, heatwaves, flooding etc…

We are thinking about the SV project as a model which could be used by anyone and which could become part of the network.

Fight Club and Visual Assembly at the Busan Biennale

A new edition of the Fight Club project will be presented at Busan Biennale (South Korea). This year’s Biennale called Seeing in the Dark is “imagined in the mental space between notions of ‘Pirate Enlightenment’ on the one hand and ‘Buddhist Enlightenment’ on the other”. 

The curators, Philippe Pirrotte and Vera Mey, refer to David Graeber as the key figure in their thinking and mention his idea of ‘pirate utopias’ as early forms of autonomous societies, operating beyond the reach of governments and corporations, embracing a multicultural, spiritually tolerant, sexually free, and occasionally purely egalitarian society. 

On August 18th, the biennale will host a talk with Cory Doctorow about pirate utopias and technology as social relationship at the HANSUNG1918 Cheongja Hall.

Pirate utopias and piracy based on technology historically referred to illegal looting at sea, but nowadays includes acts that infringe on copyrights. The session will discuss creative sharing, freedom of expression, fair use, privacy protection and information transparency related to piracy exploring how these topics evolve into symbols of deception, rebellion, and the rejection of norms.

The Biennale will be open for the general public from August 17th to October 20th. 

Another Art World and Made Differently: presentations in China

Playgrounds in Haikou

The DGI’s and Museum of Care’s project on playgrounds, launched earlier this year, will be presented (and hopefully get a new development!) at the Kindergarten Without Walls Festival in Haikou (China, August 22nd — August 28th). Nika Dubrovsky will meet with artists and other cultural practitioners to discuss the future of this project. We will report more about the events in the coming months!

Nika Dubrovsky’s talk at the Guangdong Museum of Art

On August 30th Nika Dubrovsky will give a talk at the Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou, China), presenting a series of essays Another Art World and the upcoming illustrated series Made Differently, both co-authored by Nika and David.

News from the Estate of David Graeber

Here are some of the publications coming out this Fall: 

Cities Made Differently, the first book of the illustrated series Made Differently, co-authored by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, will be published by the MIT Press. 

We are happy to share the posters our designers made for this series — you can download and print them! 

A collection of David Graeber’s essays, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, with forewords  by Nika Dubrovsky and Rebecca Solnit, will be released by FSG in November — and the English publication will soon be followed by several translations! 

The Russian translation of What are Kings? by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky will soon be out at A+A. It’s a fun collection of truthful and edifying stories on kingship, power and the kings of modern times for readers of all ages — you can have a look at the early version of this book here!

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow is out in Taiwan (at Rye Field) and will soon be published in Turkey (at Epsilon).

Le Monde, Le Nouvel Obs and Philosophie magazine published the reviews of Revolutions in Reverse following the recent release of the French translation.

We are starting to collect and release information about David Graeber’s books available in different languages. Here is a collection from the last month: we are mostly concentrated on Chinese and Portuguese translations.

If you know of any books that have not yet been published in your language – let us know! And if it’s already translated and you’ve seen reviews that aren’t already on our site – send them to us! Are you a publisher looking to publish Graeber’s work in your country? Contact the publishing team at estate@davidgraeber.org.

This Fall in the DGI and the Museum of Care

The new season of events at the DGI and the Museum of Care will start on September 2nd. We will be joined by Dyan Neary to discuss the essay “I Didn’t Understand How Widespread Rape Was. Then the Penny Dropped”. This meeting will open the series of discussions that will continue throughout 2024-2025: with Marcus Rediker, Cory Doctorow, Greg Yudin, James Schneider and many more. Every month with each new guest we will talk about different aspects of the essays featured in Graeber’s latest collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World.

At the Museum of Care, the Pedagogies of Care group, led and moderated by Andris Brinkmanis, will first meet on September 19th and continue on every third Thursday of the month. 

On October 31st, we will facilitate a meeting with Peter Sahlins, author of Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France. This will be a special Halloween meeting and we encourage everyone to dress for the occasion! 

This meeting will be the first in the series of Carnival reading group discussions which will run throughout the next season. We will focus on Mikhail Bakhtin and his book Rabelais and His World. These meetings will have a limited number of participants and will not be shared in full online, but will be accompanied by public lectures. The group will meet 12 times over the course of 2024/25 taking place every last Thursday of each month. 

For the first hour the participants of the group will be online via zoom discussing chapters of the book by Bakhtin. All participants will be asked to host at least one of the discussions with later on a guest speaker joining us and opening a space for everyone else who would like to join us online. The talk of the guest speaker will be followed by a Q&A. Each part will last 60 mins.

If you are interested, send an email to info@davidgraeber.org.

APT / ART exhibition

Last year the David Graeber Institute launched its second Apartment Art (APT / ART) exhibition, Make Carnival Not War. This year we are continuing the dialogue between Carnival Not War with participatory collaborations with visual artists. 

As we see more and more warmongers across the world trying to convince us that the only solution to our differences is to kill each other, it is a matter of urgency to delve into the opposite – the carnivalesque. As power depicts people as if they are wearing unchangeable masks, we must remind ourselves (and others) that we are not fixed entities, that we and everyone else can change, recreate, and reinvent ourselves and the world around us. 

The final work will be exhibited on Rowley Way on October 31st at the annual carnival that celebrates the life and work of David Graeber. Afterwards the placards will be exhibited throughout the estate.

We look forward to seeing everyone at our events next season! 

Yours, 
David Graeber Institute