Robin Vanbesien – Unfolding Solidarity Poetics

In his PhD research project ‘Unfolding Solidarity Poetics’, Robin Vanbesien explores the poetics and imaginaries of various self-organized and emancipatory social practices. Doing so, he aims to shed light on the intricate reciprocities between artistic poetics and social practices of care and solidarity. What does it mean to reclaim the poetics of an artistic practice as a poetics that attends to situated conditions of lived vulnerability? Furthermore, how can such “solidarity poetics” offer the terms of transition that alter today’s precarious infrastructures of sociality? By means of artistic non-fiction films that focus on specific (historical) cases of empowerment (i.e. the solidarity movement in Athens; an antiracist youth centre in Mechelen), Vanbesien aims to make certain solidarity poetics tangible and concrete, while at the same time preserving these as distinctly sensuous.