The Distribution Effect

The Distribution Effect: Cassettes, Archives, Video and Alternative Cultures of Circulation is a one-day public cultural event that explores distribution as integral to artistic production and not a mere afterlife consideration within artistic production.  

Distribution is political. It determines who has access to culture, who controls its circulation, who profits from it, and ultimately what is allowed to become visible, audible and public. The infrastructures through which music, images and knowledge move are never neutral: they organise relations of ownership and access, establish boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate circulation, and decide who gets called an author, a distributor—or a pirate.  

The event emerges from the doctoral course Distribution within Artistic Practice, led by Vincenzo Estremo (HDK-Valand/NABA) where an international cohort of students from several different academies across Europe. Taking distribution not as a secondary or final stage of artistic production but as a dimension of artistic production in its own right, the course examined how forms of circulation produce relations of production, ownership, infrastructure and publics. 

On Sunday 8 November, three creative scenarios of distribution will be presented at Bio Valand at HDK-Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. These three collaborative projects developed through the course address variously moving between cassette piracy in working-class Naples; the autonomous infrastructures of Italian social centres; and the industrial pop-culture phenomenon of the independent music video. Together, these three projects ask a shared question: what happens when distribution stops being understood as the final stage of cultural production and is recognised as a political and artistic practice in itself? 

Who has been doing the stealing all along? is a listening session assembled as a mixtape of pirate radio, courtroom audio, field recordings, readings, conversations, performance and music. Starting from the story of Mixed by Erry and moving through debates around looting, property and appropriation, it reverses the conventional question of piracy: not simply what was taken from the cultural industry, but what the industry itself has taken, from whom, and how those histories might be recirculated. Project team: Cristiano Corbucci, Ana Cristina Pansera de Araujo, Andrea Catherine Steves and Julia Wieger  

Cyberpunk Epiphanies in Florence returns to CPA Firenze Sud and 3GG, the extraordinary three-day festival of art, performance and electronic music organised in the occupied social centre in 1997. Through footage from the Ogino:knauss archive, alongside a recent conversation with Lorenzo Tripodi, the guided screening connects two generations of Florentine counterculture and approaches the archive not as evidence of something finished, but as material to be reassembled, re-voiced and put back into circulation. Project team: Paolo Bufalini, Leone Contini, Carmine Pistone and Elisa Storelli. 

After Music Video: Labour and Creativity of the Desire Medium turns to another infrastructure of distribution: the music video. Before the dominance of digital platforms, music television—and MTV in particular—distributed not only songs and stars but fashions, behaviours, gender norms and forms of desire on a massive scale. Today, the music video is simultaneously ubiquitous and displaced: everywhere across digital platforms, yet without the cultural centrality it once held. Through a Q&A with directors Matt Broadley, who directed music videos for Ace of Base and other international pop acts, and Klara Björk, with the participation of filmmaker Gabriela Pichler, the event revisits this industry from the perspective of those who worked within it. Accompanied by a screening of selected works, the conversation addresses labour and authorship, creativity and industrial structures, and the aesthetics through which filmed pop culture was produced and circulated. Project team: Francesco Alberico, Giulia Mengozzi, Vladislav Shapovalov and Linda Sternö. 

Attendance free, booking required.