New season 2024-2025

Our new season has begun, and we are very excited to welcome everyone to the David Graeber Institute and the Museum of Care for 2024-2025!

We’ve already held our first meeting to celebrate the release of David’s new collection of essays, “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World Is…” (coming out on November 12th from FSG and Penguin).

Since we were strict about our commitment to keeping the session to just 60 minutes, there wasn’t enough time for an in-depth discussion. We had hoped to delve into topics such as  cancel culture, violence, bullying, as well as what David referred to as “belittling.” We are thinking of organizing a follow-up discussion. We will announce the date on our social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X) once we have it. Our next meeting is October 3 with the brilliant Cory Doctorow, who already attended our talk at the Busan Biennale in Busan, South Korea in August. 

Here are some clips from Cory’s talk in Busan.

On October 3, Cory Doctorow will talk Enshittification: Was There Ever an Old, Good Internet? 

It sure feels like the internet used to be good. What made it good? Was it better people? Better companies? Better technology? What historical forces transformed the old, good internet into today’s enshitternet of five giant websites, each filled with text from the other four. More importantly, what can we do to transform that enshitternet to an unfortunate transitional phase en route to a new, good internet? 

Please register here

Next meetings are: 

There Never Was a West / Marcus Rediker
Event date: November 7 / 2024 

The second discussion of David Graeber’s essay “There Never Was a West”, led and moderated by Marcus Rediker, in the frame of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” reading group. 

There Never Was a West / Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro
Event date: December 5 / 2024 

In one of his most powerful essays, Graeber debunks the idea that there ever was such a thing as “the West”. More specifically, he attacks the view that democracy was a “Western” invention and questions the admiration for democratic Athens. We will discuss how to disentangle democracy from the project of “Westernization” and what lessons can be drawn from the Athenian experience for this endeavor.There Never Was a West”: A conversation between Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro, in the frame of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”.

Please register here

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 Dubrovsky 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’ve just redesigned the home page and the books page—many thanks to Sasha Bidin, Clive Russell, Lena Korykhalova, Ulyana Mikhailov, and others! We would love to hear your thoughts on the new design, so please share your feedback with us.
 
David Graeber, though born in New York City, was greatly influenced by his migrant background and the two years he spent living in Madagascar. He was an avid reader of French literature and was deeply influenced by Russian authors such as Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, Kropotkin, and Bakunin. But most importantly, David was an anthropologist.
 
One of the key missions of the Institute is to move away from an Anglocentric perspective. We plan to explore David’s legacy and the impact of his ideas across different languages and cultures. We’ve already started this research in China (thanks to Yang), in France (thanks to Vasily), and we’re continuing our efforts in Korea, Japan, Portugal, and Spain.
 
Currently, we are collecting all available reviews and articles in various languages. We would love your help with this! 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 articles section. You are welcome to take a look. And if you know of any David Graeber articles 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. Many thanks for your support!
 
On a further note, we’re also considering how to further develop the Music Library section. This section was created three years ago in collaboration with Oleg Kostikhin. While we’ve had many ideas—like adding more filters or integrating it with a service where you can listen to the music immediately—we haven’t yet decided on the best approach.

DGI in SV

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’ day-to-day problems.

Rachel Donald and Nika Dubrovsky met with artists, activists, government officials and Institute staff to discuss the creation of a museum – a hurricane shelter.  

At the moment, we are exploring the idea of building an affordable, easy-to-construct hurricane shelter that could also function as the St. Vincent Museum of Care when not in use, prioritizing human relationships over objects. Unlike traditional institutions that focus on exclusivity, we envision an open space centered around play for the whole community.

We are thinking about the SV project that could be used by people elsewhere and which could become part of the network.
We need your help! Please share with us your thoughts and ideas!

Fight Club and Visual Assembly at the Busan Biennale

The Fight Club project was featured at the Busan Biennale in South Korea, themed “Seeing in the Dark” which explored the space between ‘Pirate Enlightenment’ and ‘Buddhist Enlightenment.’ Curators Philippe Pirrotte and Vera Mey were influenced by David Graeber’s concept of ‘pirate utopias’—early, autonomous societies beyond government and corporate control. On August 18th, Cory Doctorow led a discussion on pirate utopias and technology as social relationships, examining piracy’s evolution into symbols of rebellion and social commentary. The Biennale was open to the public from August 17th to October 20th.

Visual Assembly draws inspiration from Soviet monumental propaganda, rooted in Tommaso Campanella’s “City of the Sun,” where public spaces served as educational tools. Reimagining this, Visual Assembly transforms murals into participatory floor paintings, turning propaganda into spaces for dialogue. Visual Assembly at Busan Biennale invites both children and adults to re-plan their social spaces. Focused on the theme “Technology as Social Relations,” it prompts discussions on using technology to shape the world we want, incorporating insights from David Graeber and inspired by conversations with Cory Doctorow.

Another Art World and Made Differently: presentations in China

In August, Nika Dubrovsky visited China and gave a few presentations at various locations. She revisited the Inside-Out Art Museum, where she had previously been in October 2023. During her visit last year, she gave a lecture on the possibility of an alternative art world as a vision of liberation, where everyone should truly be an artist, and engaged in a dialogue with Yinghua Lu, the museum’s director.

Nika Dubrovsky also joined the Art Festival in Haikou. In 2018, Tang Haoduo and his team founded “The Kindergarten Without Walls” in Haikou, China, as a nonprofit community space for art and education. The kindergarten quickly became a vibrant hub for children’s free play and creative activities. Since 2022, it has hosted the annual “Kindergarten Without Walls Children’s Art Festival,” featuring over thirty projects by artists and educators with the children. This year’s festival, themed “Let’s Frolic and Play Games!”, saw Nika Dubrovsky participating alongside other artists and friends. Nika led a workshop titled “Play Ground As An Everyday Carnival,” exploring the playground as a microcosm of contemporary society, demonstrating its hopes and despair, its behavioral practices and its ways of development.

At the end of August, as part of the Archipelago Lecture Series at the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, a presentation titled “Correlating with the Community – Imagine an Alternate Order of Power and Possibility” was hosted by Xiaoyang Chen and Stephanie Sipei Liu, with Nika Dubrovsky and Kathleen Hearn as the speakers, discussing how our world can be made differently. Both Nika and Kathleen participated in the 3rd “Kindergarten Without Walls Children’s Art Festival” in Haikou.

This Fall in the DGI and the Museum of Care

On October 31st, 7 pm London time, 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!

We are starting our long-awaited reading group on Mikhail Bakhtin and his book Rabelais and His World. 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.

During the first hour, participants will discuss chapters of Bakhtin’s book online via Zoom. Afterward, a guest speaker will join, opening the session to anyone else who would like to participate online. A Q&A will follow the guest speaker’s presentation. Each part will last 60 minutes, for a total of 120 minutes.

If you have already expressed interest in joining the group, please confirm your participation by emailing info@davidgraeber.org and research@davidgraeber.org as soon as possible.

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. 

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!