The (fascist) locking-in of European Car Cultures - talk at KAOS Berlin available via podcast and radio (in German)

Hätte sich das Auto ohne Faschismus jemals so dominant in Europa durchsetzen können? Wann wurde es normal, den öffentlichen urbanen Raum als von täglicher Todesgefahr geprägt zu verstehen? Warum fuhr Kaiser Wilhelm schon 1906 ein Elektro-Auto?
Das Zentrum Für Demokratie Treptow-Köpenick und KAOS Berlin hat einen Podcast von meinem Talk letzten November hochgeladen, in dem ich einige Punkte der gewaltvollen Anfangsgeschichte des Autos erzähle. 

My talk about the (fascist) history of the locking-in of car cultures from November during the panel "Ist eine autofreie Stadt möglich oder eine Spinnerei?" at KAOS Berlin has been aired on the radio and is also available as a podcast of the Zentrum für Demokratie here (in German).

Some Images I used in the presentation (that isn't available in the podcast)

Kaiser Wilhelm in an electric car in front of Berlin's Marienkirche in 1906

The ideal of German Nature & it's fascist taming by means of the Autobahnen

The French railway-system in the 1930ies and today

"The entanglement of ‘wilderness’ and car infrastructure on the Pasterze glacier" @ This Is Not A Glacier, AIL 26.1.2024

Friday next week I will be speaking about a research I have started together with Guus Diepenmaat, Victor Kössl and Sandra Sieczkowski this year (a short-film is in the making about this. The title of my presentation will be "The entanglement of ‘wilderness’ and car infrastructure on the Pasterze glacier" and will be part of a Panel with the wonderful title "Guilt-tripping on the loss of Wilderness". Below you can find the abstract of both my talk and the symposium in general as well as all the necessary info. 

National Parks as zones for consuming Nature? The entanglement of the car with our love for the high peaks examined through the lens of the Glocknerhochalpenstraße

The Glocknerhochalpenstraße is Austria’s perhaps most famous street, leading directly to the countries biggest glacier, the Pasterze. Right next to its melting glory, you can find a 5-story parking house and an exhibition of racing cars. If you drive a bit further up the road that leads through the core protection area of Central Europe’s biggest National Park, you can drink an overpriced coffee at the Porsche Café and chat with car enthusiasts of all countries, who came here for a day ride to enjoy nature. The tarmac of the entire street is full of tyre tracks from the frequent drift races.

 In this input presentation of an ongoing research, I want to look behind the apparent contradictions of such Nature Protection zones to look for their hidden entanglements. Rather then regarding the car as “bad for Nature”, I regard it as a machine that produces Nature for us as something to be consumed. By examining the history of the development of National Parks, their expropriation of indigenous tribes and their agenda of “protection of Nature”, I want to raise questions for an environmentalism of the future and a re-diversification of what it means to be human. The challenge for National Parks of the catastrophic future might turn out to again disentangle humans from their self-identification with cars.

This Is Not a Glacier

Thickening Description for Thinning Ice 

26 Jan 2024, 15:00 

Glaciers are often portrayed as icons of global warming because of their physical loss through melting and the loss of climate records stored in glacial ice. This is an attempt at a more multifaceted, heterogenous and thicker description of a glacier, beyond its current reductive stereotype. 

--> Web presence 

 

(The Photos are screenshots from the film-project mentioned above) 

Lecture & Panels at nacht:leben, Innsbruck - 26.1

I have been invited to "nacht:leben", a meeting and conference of club comissions in Innsbruck to talk about my 2018 book "Die Clubmaschine" (co-written with Jorinde Schulz) and how my relation to it and club culture in general changed in the last years of multiple crises and further precarisation of life-worlds. On the 26.1, I will be discussing this and other topics with the wonderful David Prieth and I can't wait for it!
 

--> https://www.pmk.or.at/events/nachtleben-club-kultur-konferenz 

The CARS WE LIKE - Thinking and Enacting Radical Change in Mobility - Symposium from 4th to 8th of March 2024 at AIL Vienna

As a follow-up to the 2022 conference exhaust(ed) entanglements at FU Berlin, I will be organizing a 5-day symposium & workshop titled "The CARS WE LIKE - Thinking and Enacting Radical Change in Mobility" from the 4th to the 8th of March 2024 at the AIL of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In collaboration with the Futurama.Lab, we have invited an amazing array of speakers (Institut Momentum Paris (Agnes Sinai), Kilian Jörg, La Deroute des Routes (Enora Chopard), Marta Navaridas, Rainer Prohaska, Sand im Getriebe (Anna Raabe), Luc
Schuiten, Gretchen Sorin, Arthur Summereder, System Change not Climate Change (Mira Kapfinger), Verkehrswende Österreich, Markus Wissen, Conny Zenk) and will have an exciting 5-day building workshop for the CARS WE LIKE.

Mobility is one of the major challenges of global ecological transformation and yet our ideas for innovation seem to be very limited and one-sided – especially when it comes to automobility. In this transdisciplinary workshop and symposium, we will work towards overcoming this dead zone of imagination by prefiguring better worlds, beyond an auto-centered paradigm, for the many flourishing worlds of the future.

How can mobility become a source of inspiration in a devastated global society that mostly feels it has to or is obligated to move (to work, to the supermarket, etc.) and tends to forget the joys of doing so voluntarily and as a larger-than human practice?

The environment must no longer be adapted to the car, but the car to the environment is the leading motto of this 5-day-workshop led by the Futurama.Lab. It will focus on introducing plurality and fun to the gray monotony of mundane traffic jams. Participants will be able to build dada-esque, modular forms of radically ecological cars using recycled materials, found objects and bike waste.

The accompanying symposium seeks to go beyond mere critique by combining theory and practice in a novel way. Evening lectures, panels and screenings will investigate radical utopias of car-free worlds, the need to devise new safe spaces beyond the car, the car as a crucial nexus in the consumer-capitalist system and how the arts can take part in this transformation. International experts and visionaries whose perspectives are almost unknown in the German-speaking sphere will be introduced to stimulate a dynamic discourse for the radical change we need.

You can sign up for the 5-day-workshop (and see some more infos) here.

More Info on the detailed program etc. will follow shortly!