BRISTOL.- Arnolfini presents a two-day event with Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Lars Bang Larsen and Federico Campagna, exploring the relationship between work, play, and resistance. The event will coincide with final days of Olivia Plender’s exhibition, Rise Early, Be Industrious, which closes on Sunday 9 September.

Including talks, discussions and a film screening, the event will discuss the 1960s and 1970s as a decisive moment in contemporary understanding of subjectivity and politics. With a new emphasis on information, and an emerging global network of trade and production, a new regime of power was forming in which the meaning of ‘resistance’ was also changing. The events will highlight the role of play and pedagogy, both in relation to their function in the emancipatory thinking of the counter movements and political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and within the contemporary culture of ‘self-improvement’ and a neoliberal claim of ‘life-long learning’.

On the first evening Lars Bang Larsen and Franco "Bifo" Berardi will present lectures about two specific aspects: the ideal of a ludic society (a society of play) and the relationship between the body and capital in what Berardi calls "Semiocapitalism".

On the second evening, a screening of the film "Il Trasloco (Moving out of the Future)" about the Italian Autonomia movement will be introduced by Federico Campagna and followed by a discussion with Berardi, who is one of the film's protagonists.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Born in 1949, Franco "Bifo" Berardi is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He founded the magazine A/traverse (1975-81) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-78). Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. Bifo's most recents books are After the future (2011) and The Soul at Work (2010). He is currently collaborating with e-flux Journal and is the coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCEPSI). His forthcoming book Poetry and Finance will be published in September by Semiotext(e).

Lars Bang Larsen
Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian and a curator. He has co-curated exhibitions such as Pyramids of Mars (2000), Populism (2005), and A History of Irritated Material (2010). His PhD was about psychedelic concepts in neo-avantgarde art, and his books include The Model: Palle Nielsen's Model for a Qualitative Society (1968) (2010).