Alexis Shotwell in Vienna - LANDEN x Against Purity, 10th of October 2023

I am very honored to have the opportunity to invite Alexis Shotwell to a full-day workshop at our emerging research cluster LANDEN in Vienna, taking place on the 10th of October at im_flieger. Her book "Against Purity" has had a deep impact on my own thinking, learning and acting and since she is a fellow anarchist, I am so excited to learn more about her recent work on LeGuin's utopianism, practices of prefiguration and the concept of freedom as a collective entity. There are sill some slots available to participate in this amazing opportunity to think and become together with Alexis <3

Find all info here

Im_flieger’s youngest artistic research cluster is engaged with the topic of landing in its many and yet to define meanings. We are interested in both theoretical as well as physical approaches to engage in new and old forms of reclaiming territory in non-capitalist, non-colonial and non-patriarchal ways of inhabiting the planet. Nonetheless, we are aware of the dangers of various kinds of “purity politics” in any attempts to land on, or re-connect with the Earth, Gaia. For this and many other reasons we have invited the philosopher and activist Alexis Shotwell for a full-day workshop as part of the several-year artistic research project LANDEN focusing both on her latest book “Against Purity – Living Ethically in compromised times” and her current project about Ursula Le Guin’s ambiguous utopianism, the importance of process and whether/how prefiguration is a political strategy, …. and an artistic one.

Guest-Appearance @ "Exzess - Eine Techno-Oper", rbb-Radio

In early summer, Jorinde Schulz and me were invited to meet Noam Brusilovsky and Tobias Purfürst in front of - what has once been to us - the TEMPLE, meaning that club next to Metro in Berlin. We talked about our book on it (Die Clubmaschine (Berghain)) and our changing relationship to club-culture in the years that followed. It was a very nice interview and now they cut up our statements into a radiophonic opera they did for the Berlin public radio station RBB.

You can listen to it here!

Talk on "Neue Vorsicht" & musical dance-theater play "Rasender Stillstand" @ Festspiele Bregenzerwald

 I am honored to have co-inspired a musical theater play at the Festspiele Bregenzerwald this year with my book "Neue Vorsicht - Philosophie des Abstands im Zeitalter der Katastrophen". The piece is titled "Rasender Stillstand" [Raging Deadlock] and is a topic very dear to me in my research about the Resilience of Modernity and the deadlock of our ecocidal life-forms. Therefore I am very happy to give a little input from my book on the (under-reflected) relation between activism and developing taste, between withdrawal and immersion, between breathing in and breathing out. I will speak at the infamous "Felbers schiefes Haus" and the whole day program will be accompanied by food, walks, music and dance. I am very excited about next week!

Find the program here.

And my book, of course, here.

"Messy Utopia" - Essay with Rasa Weber published at Ztscript #39

 

 

 

Two years ago, my good friend and designer Rasa Weber and me started to write a text on an idea that we have touched many times in our exciting conversations: the idea of a certain "messy utopia" - a new, yet minoritarian utopianism that shimmers through "newer" discourses such as New Materialism, Post-Humanism, Living Architecture, etc.  In this utopianism, the messy and the unclear are no longer to be avoided, but some sort of ideal state for the more-than-human living (and thriving). 

As it goes, two years later, we both felt a bit further in our thinking than back then, but I still enjoyed reading these ventures out into a "messy utopia" and I would even argue that I have found an almost concrete political program that is behind this messy utopianism (among so much else) by now: ZADism and the anarchist cult-book bolo'bolo. I will also keep working and publishing on this concept of "messy utopias", for I still find it very useful to think with.

You can find more about ZTScript, the wonderful Magazine that published our text, here: https://www.ztscrpt.net/

There will be a little release event tomorrow, Saturday the 16th of September 2023, in Vienna at NKW. More info here.

For now I will leave you with the opening lines of the text, which sets the tone for the rest:

How can we put aside our all-too-modern notions of human control over an orderly cosmos and learn to find forms of utopian engagement within the mess of a much-more-than-human planet?

A white, orderly and rectangular world in which the human is in control: When hearing the word "utopia," most would probably associate it with sleek, clean and smooth shapes. We all know such images from various Sci-Fi Movies and architectural renderings. You could say they look like Le Corbusier’s wildest dreams come true. Even in their greenwashed, more contemporary version, one feature remains: No mess is allowed in these ideal places. Everything is under (human) control. However, in certain progressive niches of discourse across various disciplines, we are witnessing a phenomenon we propose to call “messy utopia”. We seem to be experiencing a valorization of the messy, the impure and dirty, stimulated by microbiology, chaos theory, quantum physics, New Materialism and other post-anthropocentric models of thought. A new but still underrepresented utopianism seeks to set aside all-too-modern notions of human control, clean surfaces, and orderly forms, and learn to find intricate, unruly and feral ways of utopian engagement in the mess of a much more-than-human planet.

 

Lecture in the Dark @ Post-Human Social-Club on 14.9 at Zentrum Fokus Forschung Wien

 

I have been invited to participate in a new trans-disciplinary format called the POSTHUMAN SOCIALCLUB and will hold its inaugural lecture titled "What is the Post-Human Social Club" next week, the 14th of September at Zentrum Fokus Forschung in Vienna. Come by, I will hold the lecture in a very experimental manner and the whole thing is designed to become something like a bigger trans-disciplinary jam session - excited how this will end up :)

With the 'posthuman social club' we want to think outside of the box of what has been labeled “the human realm of Reason” and develop new regimes of perception, sensuality and corporeality that can with care and afterthought lead us the way away from our humanist, modern form of making and thinking the world to more inclusive ways of sharing many worlds with other critters.
In the permeation of choreography and composition, with club culture, philosophy, ecology and media art we invite speculation of what a post-human social – or even a post-human society – could actually mean. We cannot overcome the euro- and anthropocentric, often misogynistic and racist tendencies of the „Enlightenment“ tradition overnight. The 'posthuman social clubs' are a sensual attunement, cultivation, celebration, exultation, differentiation and problematisation of these [posthuman] desires.

 

Works by
Isabella Forciniti ·Julia Grillmayr · Kilian Jörg · Bruno Liberda ·
Jorge Sánchez-Chiong ·Samuel Toro Pérez · Las Chulas [Angélica Castelló, Natalia Dominguez Rangel, Lorena Moreno Vera, Lucía Simón Medina] · TE-R [Louise Linsenbolz, Thomas Wagensommerer] · Brigitte Wilfing

--> all the info on FB

 

"Soiled love: May it last long" - Stoffwechsel Lab 2023

 

Part of my visit at Longo Mai this April/May I was able to spent with my long-time research cluster and good friends of "Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration". I remember our time in the french Provence, discussing forms of commoning, reading loads of texts on ZADism and smelling the fragrances of rosemary and lavender everywhere with such great intensity and fondness. I am particularly overjoyed to present some of our results at our Open Lab this year on 12th of September at im_flieger. Michael Hirsch and me are also now working on a text on ZADism which is turning longer and longer - it is one of these texts that have developed a life of their own and we are curious where it will lead us. We will present some of that text and its process at the Lab in the form of a discursive walk.

Find all info here.

The Provençal word Longo Mai means “May it last long” in English. This year, the metabolism collective is exploring the questions of soil and earth, radical ecology and concrete utopias of alternative forms of life. In this context, we also visited the Longo Mai commune as part of a working week in the south of France in June 2023 and got to know their experiment, which has now been going on for decades, with a different cultivation of the soil and a different collective way of life beyond growth, intensive agriculture and capitalist wage labor.  

The lab focuses on speculative questions, practical exercises and experiences with the phenomena of earth, soil, land and home; “prefiguration” in the sense of models of future other ways of living in the now, and the productive tension between revolutionary-anarchist and radical-reformist models of action, politics and society.  

We invite you to the practice of walking through the Vienna Woods followed by a gathering with food in the Im_flieger Studio. Our guest and discussion partner is Alexander Behr, political scientist, journalist and long-time member of the Longo Mai collective.

 

Territory beyond state and property (Aug 21-26 @ Bravos Foundry, Gallicia)

I have been quite inactive on this blog for a while. This is because I was mainly operating in the clandestine and autonomous zones of France and Spain recently and this is nothing I would publish freely. However, I can tell you that I am learning a lot and there will be a few publications around certain experiences coming up, among which a publication about the slogan "ZAD partout" as a political program (with Michael Hirsch) and a presentation of our visit to Longo Mai with Stoffwechsel in September. More on this in due time. 

Currently I am on my way to various autonomous meetings, among which are Les Resistances in Larzac and the Rencontres de luttes paysanes in Bure. At the moment I feel extremely fortunate to be able to get to know these related "eco-anarchist" scenes in France and I feel the germano-phone sphere could really learn a lot from their practices and experiences. I will try to start more of this "translation-work" in the future - if you are curious, do not hesitate to contact me in person. I feel the Rhine is still such a huge frontier of political cultures and - perhaps unsurprisingly - I feel France is a little more advanced in understanding the eco-political struggles we are all facing (whether we want to or not).

So much about this short update from my side. I will also attend a workshop on related topics in The Bravos Foundry in Gallicia, Spain, where I will talk about the role of car as a vehicle of homogenization and how to work with it in rural communes. The whole week-long program is called "Territory beyond state and property" and will happen from 21-26th of August. Here is the abstract of my presentation:

Driving the Homogenocene
Not all earthlings are affected equally by the catastrophes of our times. While some lifeforms are entrenching their privileges, others face extinction, expulsion or violent adaption. The term “Homogenocene” seeks to understand these two dynamics in relation: the modern form of the Good Life paves and normalizes our expectations, desires and interactions in a monolithic way that absorbs the air to breath and ground to stand on for a plurality of the living. In this workshop, I propose to understand the car as a main driver and embodiment of this Homogenocene and want to discuss possibilities of undoing its auto-destructive homogenisation of landscapes, desires and economies. The car will be thought of as a metaphor for our being dead-locked in an ecologically catastrophical way of relating to the planet. With it, I want to engage a discussion about our own entanglements with automobile infrastructure in our utopian imaginations as well as practical necessities and horizontally seek strategies for active resistance and alternative worlding that promotes plurality as a radical practice. Roots have a hard time spouting through pavement after all.

You can find the full program here. I am sure it will be a blast. If you are close, please come by!