"Cars and Coloniality" - Video Investigation with kaur chimuk

I have had the honor to pursue a little web dialogue about the car and its coloniality for the "Affect and Colonialism-Weblab" of FU Berlin with wonderful kaur chimuk. Talking from the streets of Austria and India, we raised some questions about what kind of coloniality the car embodies. This can only be understood as a starting point for further, in depth investigations

"In this experimental video conversation, we have attempted to discuss some of the relations between cars and coloniality on-site - that is, on the streets of our respective habitats. Sitting on streets colonized by cars in both Vienna and Howrah(close to Calcutta), we drift along the many trajectories a reflection on this central piece of material late-modern capitalist history brought us. The noise of the traffic mirrors our own ramblings about the multitudinous meanderings about these very exhaust (ed) entanglements. Within this short duration, we tried to explore the performativity of gender proposition, especially in the context of South Asian queer accessibility around the interest of automobile marketing in terms of sharing/projecting equal opportunity in the time of aggressive 'globalization'."

Find the video here.

Panel Discussion at Climate Cultures Festival Berlin

I am very happy to attend this year's Climate Cultures Festival Berlin, taking place from 26-28th of August. I will be discussing the car and the petromodern entanglements it embodies with Katja Diehl, author of the book Autokorrektur. Before that, we will have a screening of the 1973 movie "Smog".

Find more details here.

exhaust(ed) entanglements - video documentation online

The online-documentation of the conference "exhaust(ed) entanglements - overcoming the auto-self of the Anthropocene" has now gone online. Below you can find my keynote and following this link you can find all the videos we were allowed to upload. I think it has become a very nice little archive about cars and out exhaust(ed) entanglements to them - and I can already announce that there will be more next year! 

 

Exhaust(ed) Entanglements - Kilian Jörg: Keynote from CRC Affective Societies on Vimeo.

Ökologischer Antifaschismus? Versuch einer Ausweitung der Kampfzone fürs 21. Jahrhundert

Mainly inspired by the ground-breaking book "White Skin, Black Fuel" by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, I have speculated about a new kind of alliance between Anti-Fascism and Ecological Activism for the 21st century. I want to understand the fight against (the hegemony of) Automobility, coal industry etc. as an anti-fascist struggle against the material heritage of European Fascism. The text appeared in German in the July Edition of Volksstimme and can be read online here.    

"Im 21. Jahrhundert sollte sich die Erinnerungskultur von den Gräueltaten der NS-Verbrecher*innen ausweiten auf ihr materielles Erbe, welches bis heute sowohl in vielen staatstragenden Namen wie im materiellen Erbe in Form von Straßennetzen, vernachlässigten Bahnverbindungen und irrationaler Förderung von fossilen Brennstoffen fortbesteht. Ausschwitz liegt in einem Kohlerevier und in einigen Nebenlagern wurden die Häftlinge auch durch Zwangsarbeit im Untertagebau ermordet. Auf eine ähnliche Weise ist die »freie Fahrt für freie Bürger« mit den Aufschrift »Arbeit mach frei« und »Jedem das Seine« der Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt und Buchenwald verbunden. Wer heute einen Porsche mit Stolz fährt, reiht sich unwissentlich und unwillentlich in diese Tradition ein. Wenn wir bald mal wieder auf der Baustelle der aktuellen Stadtautobahn zur Lobau stehen und diese besetzen, können wir mit Fug und Recht auch »Alerta Antifascista« rufen und so dem Antifaschismus eine neue Kraft verleihen."

Affect as Disruption: Affective Experimentation, Automobility, and the Ecological Crisis

 

Together with Paul Schuetze, Imke von Maur and Jan Slaby, I have published a paper titled "Affect as Disruption: Affective Experimentation, Automobility, and the Ecological Crisis" in the just-released "Methodologies of Affective Experimentation" Anthology at Palgrave. 

Find the abstract below, the link to the anthology here and the link to the paper here.

"In this text we construe affect as a conservative force, as glue that holds social life in place. With this starting point, we direct our attention towards the unfolding of the ecological crises. Using the case of ‘automobile supremacy’, we discuss a paradigmatic affective formation that keeps Western societies deadlocked in a loop of business as usual, preventing them from adequately addressing the climate catastrophe. Drawing on the concepts of affective arrangement and affective milieu, we chart some of the affective groundings of automobile supremacy and of the widespread failure to overcome the status quo. In response to this conservative thrust of affect, we then survey how ossified affective formations can be disrupted and eventually left behind. Can affect itself be deployed as a resource to disturb, fracture, and break sedimented social formations and patterns? In search of an answer, we explore prospects of obstruction leaning on affective experimentation as a creative method of disruption. By discussing ways to disturb automobility in its unfettered flow, we provide an angle on modes of disruption as small-scale openings that abruptly and momentarily halt the affective relations that were sustaining social formations before."

Diverting the Public Space #2 @ Im_Flieger

Next week, 27th of June and 1st of July we will be back at Im_Flieger to continue our ongoing urban space performative intervention research "Diverting the Public Space" - this time Dutch artist, performer and theater maker Guus Diepenmaat will join our practice. You can attend our activities in a workshop / sharing on both Wednesday and Friday at 18h. More information here.

"The research in public space, which began in the summer of 2021, will continue in 2022. The current Corona pandemic has, among other things, changed and sensitized the perception of public space. The project Diverting the Public Space aims to accompany this transformation in a performative exploratory and supportive way. In Vienna, the Im_flieger runway serves as the starting point for the research.

Through a spectrum of shared physical practices in public space, Diverting the Public Space aims to explore new modes of action and perception, leading to a self-empowerment of the participants and an invitation to dialogue and engagement with passers-by. Together, old patterns of movement in public space will be questioned and a new playful yet critical physicality will be explored. The developed and guided partitions / scores shall give the possibility to deeply inscribe into the public space in a different way and to practice and experience a choreographic perception. The space, transformed into a multifaceted adventure playground (for young and old), is intended to open utopian windows of possibility for a different „merging“ with our human-made, urban environment and the questioning of its norms."

"The Car & the Modern Concept of the Good Life" - Talk at Vivir Bien Conference

The Centre PROEIB Andes at the University Mayor of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia together with the Max-Weber-Kolleg of the University of Erfurt are organizing a bilingual (English / Spanish) conference about the concept of "The Good Life / Vivir Bien / Sumak Kawsay/Suma Quamana" next week (13th to 16th of June) and I have been invited to give a talk about the car and its exhaust(ed) entanglements with the modern idea of the Good Life.

Find more information and the links to the online sessions of the conference here. 

Below you can find the abstract of my talk.

Living Well with exhaust(ed) entanglements?

The car is perhaps the symbol of the good life in its modern declination. What is called “Modernity” might have started out in Europe with some privileged white men having “enlightened” ideas, but it nowadays has to be regarded as one globalized epistemo-ontological regime that tends to homogenize the planet ever more by means of distributing consumer goods such as the car to ever more regions and corners of the world. For this reason, the term Homogenocene, as proposed by Charles Mann, might be a helpful further specification of the much discussed “Anthropocene” - and the car is one main agent of flattening and paving this planet to an ever more homogeneous habitat for modern humanoids while causing extinction and displacement of many other life forms.

In how far is our modern version of the “good life” toxic? What does it mean if the concepts, ideals and life-forms most of us humans strive for are progressively understood to have a catastrophic ecological effect on the planet? In this talk, I want to address and frame such questions by referring to the concept of “exhaust(ed) entanglements” that I have developed for the eponymous conference I am organizing in May 2022 in Berlin.

While it might be true that “Modernity” as a philosophical, epistemological concept might be somewhat passé (to the extent that some, like Bruno Latour, even declare that “we have never been modern”), the very modern promise of the Good Life seems to live on and continue to attract more and more peoples to this very one modern lifestyle. In the context of the “Good Life”-Conference, I am particularly interested in stimulating a dialogue about these “exhaust(ed) entanglements” with the car, Modernity and its promises of the good life between scholars of Germany (a “fully developed” car nation) and Bolivia (in which car culture isn’t – for good or for worse – developed to a similar degree).