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Abstract
Lanthimos's Kynodontas/Dogtooth (2009) has been viewed by audiences, journalists, critics and the Greek political class alike as tapping into the issues that stand at the heart of the contemporary political moment. Reception of the film has often focused on the allegorical family in relation to the malaises of neo-liberalism, austerity and the crisis. My contention is that one of the most crucial aspects of this type of account, the economic well-being and class identity of the family, has strangely failed to be taken into consideration. This article shows that the upper middleclass status of the fictional family is one of the premises of the dystopian world of Dogtooth, and demonstrates the various ways in which the omission of the family's financial prosperity has been central in the rhetoric used to discuss the film's ostensible political import.

Tricksters are folkloric figures found in numerous cultures, seemingly dreamed up – or springing out of nowhere – to provide ways of undermining, ridiculing or resisting everything that is wrong, fucked up, unfair in the world, from the tyranny of gods and sovereigns, to social inequality, to the existential injustice of mortality and suffering. As 'the creative idiot, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby' (Lewis Hyde), trickster crosses every boundary and confuses every distinction. Michel Serres took the tricksy god Hermes – patron of communication, but also of theft, interruption and secrets – as his guiding figure and alter ego, in order to weave together and traverse disparate cultural spheres with randoneés, 'expeditions filled with random discoveries'. Trickster circumvents the logic and techniques of power through a mixture of cunning and naivety, discovering new possibilities as much through foolishness and error as through devious shifts of identity and perspective. The exhibition 'BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places' – taking its name from a popular exclamation used in contemporary Russian to indicate a farce, a mess, chaos – features works that in one way or another engage with such unruly states. Might it be that today's tricksters are to be found in the creative political activity of artists and cultural practitioners attempting to respond to the oppressive mess they find all around them? Could the disarming, oblique ways in which the trickster takes on states of misrule that cannot be challenged face-on be a particularly apt strategy for resistance in times of turbo-capitalism: embracing chaos to turn it against itself? Are hegemonic oppressive forces a necessary condition for the emergence of tricksters – in fact, do the tricks and machinations of power themselves form the prototype and genesis of the trickster? As opposed to its traditionally embodied and most often male form, is the trickster of today more a mode than a figure, fragmenting and ...

"Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind." Harun Farocki's condemnation of cinema's unwillingness to represent labour finds echoes in present-day political discussions about the struggles and persistent invisibility of labour in public space. Undocumented labour, the weakening of union organizing, and the decoupling of work from physical space in the era of the Internet, are phenomena that have irreversibly altered everyday life. At the same time, a new vocabulary capturing the expansions of labour – affective labour, care work, women's work, immaterial and precarious labour – has made it possible to deepen our understanding of what ought to be considered as labour and where this labour happens. In the same vein, a growing number of filmmakers are showing a commitment to render the spaces where work takes place today visible again. Despite arguments to the contrary, film and the moving image have always been concerned with the processes of labour, including the work of cinema itself. If film theorists such as Jean Louis Comolli chastised cinema's distancing approach to spaces of labour, it could be argued that they had in mind a limited notion of the workspace. In other words, whilst the space in front of the factory has enjoyed relatively little screen time in film's history, spaces of labour hold an enduring relationship with the medium. This conference will tackle the historically shifting relationship between cinema and the representation of labour spaces and will reflect on the renewed attention to the workspace in today's art cinema and documentary production. ; In Front of the Factory: Cinematic Spaces of Labour , conference, ICI Berlin, 26–27 May 2016

As a practice, failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities. J. J. Halberstam Revolutionaries are everywhere, but nowhere is there any real revolution. Abdelkebir el-Khatibi The word resistance usually evokes images of struggle, of opposition, but also of power, of domination, and oppression. In its concrete manifestations, however, resistance is more of a process of trial and error; it is often a story of failures intersecting, weaknesses combining and of building precarious solidarities in times of crisis. In this sense, revolution is never a simple story of 'success'. This one-day conference aimed at exploring resistances as a multiplicity, as practices and modes of thinking that challenge normative values of success and failure. Resistances act on the mechanisms of power in particular places, in concerted actions, as well as in daily routines of living, being, working, imagining, and organizing. They can manifest as coalitions of the weak and dispossessed but also as coagulations in that in-between, uncomfortable space of the semi-peripheral. The panels investigated resistances in the decolonial queer context, the cultural field at large, protest politics, and sex work, and involved researchers alongside activists and other agents. ; Weak Resistance: Everyday Struggles and the Politics of Failure , conference, ICI Berlin, 27 May 2015

'What is to be Undone?: Trickery as Political Resistance', discussion presented at the series Trickster Art: Celebrating Chaos, Challenging Misrule , 26 November 2015