"Die Verbindungen, die befreien" - a new book project (?) with Michael Hirsch

 

It seems like I got myself into a new book project. After visiting Longo Mai together with Stoffwechsel and together and alone reading a lot of French literature about the ZAD, Michael Hirsch and me started to write a text that was supposed to be 10 pages but now has swollen to a size that can only be held by the form of the book. It is exciting to think together about this with Michael, because we have found a way to make our differences in thought and action communicate in a really productive way. He is more the leftist state-philosopher, while I am more on the anarchist movement side. But we both know that our thinking gets fuzzy, or imprecise, where the respective other's strengths lie. So we have engaged in a dialogue, using what is commonly thought to be inconsolable trenches as tools to think productive with - we are at the moment riding the contradictions between State and Anarchy, Reform and Revolution, Top-Down and Bottom-Up and love the sparks that emerge from the friction. 

The text is titled: "Die Verbindungen, die befreien - 'ZAD Partout' als politisches Programm" and we have now put some little excerpts online as part as the obligations to the process we have engaged with at Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration. 

Find the text online and I hope you will be able to read about this project again in due time!

"Welten ohne Autos" - Interview with Sabrina Rosina at skug

Following our performative public space intervention in June titled "Die Letzte Waschung", an interview has now gone online at Skug in which Sabrina Rosina and me explain why we like washing and burning cars (among many other things). 

Find the interview here.

 

 

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 @ Posthuman 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