Jonas Staal speaks at ‘Occupy the Future’, the Creative Time Summit in DC

Fri, Oct 14 - Sun, Oct 16  2016

Dutch artist Jonas Staal will speak at ‘Occupy the Future’, the Creative Time Summit in DC, from October 14 until 16 in Lincoln Theatre. The Creative Time Summit is the world’s largest international conference on art and social change. Occurring in the nation’s capital just weeks before the 2016 Presidential Election, the Creative Time Summit DC will take this important moment to collectively consider what it might mean to radically transform the current state of democracy. Around the world both the left and the right are making their dissatisfaction with the center known, setting the stage for a virulent electoral season. Shaking up the political landscape, worldwide social movements, from the Arab Spring to  the #BlackLivesMatter movement are now ingrained in popular discourse. The 2016 Summit offers a platform for citizen-led strategies and grassroots movements working within, as well as disrupting, electoral politics. The main question of the summit will revolve around the aim to push forward the ideals of human rights in practice, and what power might mean in the future. 

Jonas Staal will speak on October 14, 10:35 AM, in Section 1 of the Summit: ‘Occupy Power’. Staal and four others will discuss what it would mean for a grassroots social justice movement to actually take power; what would be required to turn resistance into a revolution. Staal will be reevaluating current political structures to produce radical alternatives and redistributions of power. Jonas Staal is the artist and founder of the artistic and political organization ‘New World Summit‘, which develops parliaments for stateless and blacklisted political movements. Currently, Staal is working on a commission of the autonomous government of Rojava (northern-Syria) to build a public parliament representing its ideals of a new “stateless democracy.”

Get your tickets for the summit here.