TOXIC TEMPLE, the book (de Gruyter 2022) - out now!

 

It is with considerable joy that I can announce the release of TOXIC TEMPLE, the book which I consider the next contribution of what I once what to look back at as my oeuvre. In Toxic Temple, Anna Lerchbaumer and me have embarked more than 4 years ago on "an artistic & philosophical journey into the Toxicity of the Now" and have since then met many contributors and inspirations on the way. We have created musical compositions, sound pieces, video installations, entire exhibitions, performances, lectures and whole philosophies of this speculative religion venerating WASTE as a means of communication with the human after-life. In this wonderful book, we have combined various genres of text, from prayers, poetry to philosophical investigations into plastic eternity, nuclear semiotics, the oceanic undead, the many worlds ending, and so many more topics. We have contributions of authors such as Heather Davis, Sam Hertz, Eben Kirksey, Julia Grillmayr, Elisabeth Felkensteiner, Julietta Aranda and many more. On top of that, the book consists of a stunning collage of exhibition documentation, images specifically made for the book and other graphic experiments. You can find some inside-peeks into the book below. The book is now officially on sale and can be either ordered at any of your local bookshops or directly at the publisher. 

Also, we will celebrate two release events:

• on the 8th of May we will have a full afternoon of performative interventions, readings, lectures and concerts around the TOXIC TEMPLE at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin 
• from the 20th to the 23th of May we will devote an entire holy MESS to the book in Vienna's AIL

 

 

Nein zum Loch - Panel-Diskussion and Scores gegen den Ausbau der Mönchsberggarage

Nächsten Donnerstag, am 28.4.2022 werde ich an einem Panel gegen den Ausbau der Salzburger Mönchsberggarage teilnehmen und davor performative Interventionen im öffentlichen Raum anleiten. Auch dieses Betonierprojekt einer vollkommen veralteten Verkehrspolitik werden wir verhindern - Nein zum Loch! 

Ihr findet mehr zur Initiative und wie ihr diese unterstützen könnt hier: https://www.neinzumloch.at

 

 

Donnerstag, 28. April 2022
Filmabend mit anschließender Diskussion im Das Kino Salzburg
Vorab zur Einstimmung: Intervention am Platzl mit
Handlungsanleitungen von Kilian Jörg

 
PROGRAMMÜBERSICHT
17 bis 18 Uhr, Platzl / Beginn Linzergasse
Eine performative Intervention im öffentlichen Raum mit Handlungsanleitungen von Kilian Jörg –
inspiriert vom Programm Diverting the Public Space von Kilian Jörg und David Kummer
19:00 Uhr, Das Kino
DIE ROTE LINIE - Widerstand im Hambacher Forst
Ein Film von Karin de Miguel Wessendorf
21:15 Uhr, Das Kino
Publikumsgespräch zum Thema „Nein zum Loch“ - Ermächtigung zum Widerstand gegen den Ausbau
der Mönchsberggarage

 

Kilian Jörg leitet mit einem Input die Podiumsdiskussion ein: Das Auto gilt als unverzichtbares Element unserer modernen Welt. Doch welche noch viel besseren Welten verstellen uns die Autos? Und das, selbst wenn wir ihre endlosen Parkreihen in ausgehöhlten Bergen verstecken? Kilian Jörg wird in seinem Input den Protest gegen die Salzburger Mönchsberggarage im aktuellen, internationalen Protest gegen das Autoregime situieren und fragen, welche Lehren man aus der
langen Vergangenheit ökologischer und spezifisch gegen Autoinfrastrukturen gerichtete Kämpfe für die heutige Zeit ziehen kann. Wie Katja Diehl neulich sagte, ist das Auto für unsere Gesellschaften
mindestens so süchtig-machend wie Heroin. Was ist die effizienteste Entzugskur gegen das Auto? Welches Methadon würde sogar bei so hoffnungslos Suchtkranken wie der ÖVP wirken?

 
Am Podium:
- Angelika Gasteiner (ehem. Gemeinderätin Bürgerliste, Verkehrsexpertin und ehem.
Aufsichtsrätin der Parkgaragengesellschaft)
- Kilian Jörg (Philosoph, Aktivist und Künstler)
- Thomas Beck (Aktionsbündnis Mobilitätswende Salzburg)
- Vertreter*in Fridays for Future
Mit Videobotschaft der Regisseurin Karin de Miguel Wessendorf und Input von Kilian Jörg
Moderation: Barbara Sieberth

 

Teaching @ "Temporäre Schule zur Entwicklung schöner Gesten"

Next week I will give a workshop at the newly established "Temporäre Schule zur Entwicklung schöner Gesten" by Claudia Heu and Philipp Ehmann. We will also have a publication open to everybody on Saturday, the 23rd from 11:30 - 13:30 - drop by, I am already very excited to be able to contribute to this very interesting new format of teaching and transferring knowledge!

"The OPEN SPACE completes a four-day laboratory with invited experts Tina Auer (AT), Stephen Hodge (UK), Kilian Jörg (AT/DE), Michael Pinsky (UK) and Ursula Reisenberger (AT), who share their questions and artistic, as well as theoretical approaches to the topics of public space, play, presence and art.

The OPEN SPACE is a kind of world café, in which these topics are publicly discussed, deepened and further reflected upon. We cordially invite interested guests to join us.

The OPEN SPACE – ART.PUBLIC SPACE.PRESENCE takes place within the framework of the Temporary School for the Development of Beautiful Gestures – a concept by Claudia Heu. The school begins in early April 2022 and is part of the four-year format Schule@Im_flieger, which combines transgenerational and transdisciplinary knowledge transfer, artistic research and production, and discourse. Under the artistic direction of performance artist Claudia Heu and theater maker Philipp J. Ehmann, the project will focus on the theme „Performative Art. Public Space. Presence“ at the intersection of art and social issues with the following selected artists: Adriana Cubidis, Jakob Egger, Ella Felber, Kim Groneweg, Magrethe Meierhofer-Lischka, Bri Schöllbauer and Joanna Zabielska. The focus is on exploring new contexts, ways of working and forms of artistic interactions in public space, as well as questioning and deepening one’s own artistic practice."

Reasonable Messages from Unreasonable Dances - Workshop with Sabina Holzer at Impulstanz 2022

 

After working, writing, dancing and quarreling together for many years, Sabina Holzer and me will now finally be able to give a workshop on some of those topics we obsess about (writing, reading, moving, reasoning, etc.) at Impulstanz 2022! My now completed work on Reasonings in the Anthropocene will equally play a part as Sabina's life-long research and questing of the poetics of bodily movement and matter, additionally we will include our more recent research topics of flow, liquidity and toxic entanglements into this long-delayed workshop! 

The program of Impulstanz now finally went online and you can book your slot here. 

Yes! — there are vast territories with which one can only get in touch with as moving i.e. dancing bodies. Everything seems different there: pasts connect with futures; the self and the collective intermingles, strange creatures – plants, animals, anorganic particles, microbes, and humans – create assemblages we somehow feel entitled to call “ours”. How can we share these experiences? What kind of messages can we bring from these exquisite, mysterious places? What kind of reasonings linger within this troubled mattering of the vivid chaosmos? How can we render them less mysterious and more ... reasonable – even much more reasonable than occidental’s old reasoning!

Reason – a big word for occidental philosophy – doesn’t come up often in the field of dance practices. And why should it? Most of the history of philosophy is concerned with repressing the body and its corporeal relating to matters. A reasonable thought has – for the longest time – been regarded as one that abstracts the most radical from bodily matters to attain outer-worldly clarity. However, in times of ecological catastrophe we feel that these abstractions bring more harm than good. We need to find ways of relating and reasoning that stay in with the manifold troubles of this planet.

While connecting with our speaking, dreaming, thinking, desiring and inventive bodies, we charter traces of wishes and wisdom about ourselves and the world we live in. Relating to this nonverbal writing in space and time, we invite some philosophies and fictions to bridge science / theory / fiction and experiences. While exploring the spaces around the words and ways to listen to this polyphony between all sorts of bodies, we are mesmerised. How to approach the intelligence of the body without subordinating the body to that big word of Reason? How to follow and set free the manifold reasonings of bodies? A whole different ecology of attention awaits us here and wants to share its potentials.

 

exhaust(ed) entanglements - Overcoming the Auto-Self of the Anthropocene - conference at FU Berlin, 12-14th of May 2022

I am excited to finally & officially announce the conference "exhaust(ed) entanglements - Overcoming the Auto-Self of the Anthropocene" I have put together in the last half year and will be chairing. As you can imagine, the topic revolves around my current research topic about toxic entanglements & the car and I have managed to invite some very interesting guest-speakers and performers. It will all take place from 12th to 14th of May 2022, mainly at the Henry-Ford-Bau (I am chuckling as I type this) of FU Berlin and other locations throughout the city. 

Humans taking up too much space, blocking each other’s ways while emitting way too many toxic gases. A description of an everyday traffic jam can equally be read as a metaphor for the catastrophic predicament some call the Anthropocene. In this symposium, various scholars are invited to discuss the car as a main factor of a toxic entanglement to modern lifestyles.

Many contemporary discourses stress the need for new alliances and Utopian speculations that can help to foster a future of more planetary thriving. Likewise, the question arises which old alliances, fantasies and collective dreams need to be abandoned to actually get there without falling into the pitfalls of green-washed eco-capitalism.

What affective entanglements, subjective investments and pragmatic as well as economic compromises tie us to the status-quo of fossil-fueled late capitalism? How resilient are our environmentally damaging lifestyles even in the face of more and more visible catastrophe?

In this three-day symposium, academics, activists, artists, journalists and other scholars are brought together to discuss these pressing questions with a focus on the car and car-centered mobility, urbanity, rurality and lifestyles. We propose that it is no wonder that the German word for car, “auto”, means “the self” in its etymological root.

The damage of an over-identification with this kind of auto-self goes way further than the direct environmental damage of the vehicles’ exhaust pollution and soil sealing, but are the cause for our being dead-locked into a dynamic of ever-more precarization, globalization, fossilization of and alienation and detachment from sustainable livelihoods. The self-identification with the auto does not only make us chose the wrong means of transport, but leaves us trapped within our limiting logics and outlooks of anthropocentrism and modern exceptionalism that seduce us to homogenize the planet ever more. In the car we simply can’t see (let alone feel, smell or hear) many of the less loud but more nourishing alternatives of going about with and on the planet.

Even though the awareness of our ecological predicament and the politicization of carbon-intensive life-styles has risen significantly in the last years, the car and its centrality to modern human ideas of the good life seems almost impossible to overcome. As such, we regard the car as the signature device of a much larger problem: Namely, that of the “Homogenocene” and our highly resilient attachment to it. By investigating the material compositions, economic dynamics, cultural imaginaries and affective histories around car-culture, this transdisciplinary symposium seeks to speculate about which Utopian, no-longer-modern fabulations might help us to get out of this raging deadlock. In overcoming the auto-self of the Anthropocene, we seek to not only to find more ecological ways of transportation, but also less self-referential and anthropocentric ways of sharing, reasoning and dwelling on the planet.

...you can download the full program folder here.

...and find more time-relevant information here.