Artist, curator Hwang Seokho and working group (Drifts)

Drifts | Ungoverned Lives

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kaksivuotinen

Drifts is a nomadic art platform that organizes festivals, symposiums, and projects in different regions in Helsinki and Seoul. It seeks to engage with critical dialogues and address urgent societal issues through audiovisual, performative, experimental, and discursive practices. The platform is developed through a collaborative approach to foster long-term sustainable relations with the diverse neighborhoods and communities that contribute to the city's plurality. By drifting between different regions, practices, and formats, we aim to raise questions such as the right to the city and right to culture, where culture happens, whose culture is valued and reproduced, and to promote awareness of the diverse urban environments and the communities that inhabit them. 'Ungoverned Lives' is Drifts' curatorial framework for 2023–2025. It proposes thinking-with strategies of resistance in the urgency of building resilient imagination with the arts. What practices and tools can foreground anti-colonial traditions of knowledge, healing, care, and collectivity amid a resurgent hegemonic wartime paradigm, national patriotism, and eco-political crises? Can art foster new imaginaries to contribute to a radical planetary repair? 'Ungoverned Lives' critically delves into diverse communities' struggles and their strategies to resist and be resilient in the face of state extractions, nationalism, and coloniality. It questions how historical and contemporary systemic oppression, racism, and social injustice continue to be the norm. It is a transhistorical and transcultural exploration of the histories from below and the memory of struggle addressed with a diverse group of local and international practitioners through moving images, sound works, audiovisual performances, lectures, and texts in two festivals and an encompassing publication.