Stoffwechsel: "Normality" - with my digital presence from the boat

The second part of my wonderful research cluster's "Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration" full-year occupation with Normality will unfortunately happen without my physical presence, since I am still floating down the Danube (currently shortly before Lom, Bulgaria). However, I will be able to send some digital greetings / contributions both at the opening as well as the closing event. On the 15th, in two days, you will be able to hear the draft of the audio-composition I am putting together using the MS Fusion (and the winds and the waves) as an instrument. On the 21st I will "zoom in" (the new zooming out?) I will - most likely read some of that poem ("Die Donau hinab") I am writing along the kms of the river. 

Find more details below and here.

We live between the suffering of normality and the dreams of another normality.
„What is normal, who is normal, who or what is not? What is a norm anyway?“ How is normality formed in society and what sets such processes in motion? Where are the boundaries of normality, how and through what are they shifted? To what extent can a life outside normality function? What role does art play in this field of reference?
The Denkkollektiv #7 explores the phenomena of normality and deviation from it as a construction of conforming and non-conforming ways of life. Of patterns of behavior, posture and movement of bodies, psyches, souls, couples, social groups, organizations and collectives.
„Normality“ oscillates between the terror of submission to a ruling norm on the one hand, and the longing for comforting habits and everyday rituals on the other. Normality is not an unchanging essence, but an ever-transforming process of intra- and extra-societal negotiation of values, boundaries, identities, and affiliations. All that we call normal today has by no means always been so and will not be so in the future. The collective experience of the suspension of so-called „normality“ by the state policies in the „Corona crisis“ of the last 2 years calls for renegotiation of normality, for impulses for new, processual normalities.
„What is normal for me?“ Based on the respective particular answers of the participants, the Denkkollektiv #7 artistically and reflectively explores present ways of life, and asks for new life possibilities.

 

Sa 22.-Sa 29.1. 2022 & Fr 16.-Di 20.9.2022// artistc research

Thur 15. & Wed 21.9.2022 // 19.00 // OPEN LAB
Bräuhausgasse 40/Souterrain, 1050 Wien

 

Photos by Sabrina Bühn

On board the MS Fusion

This month I will float down the Danube slowly on board the MS Fusion, an artistic-installation, turned modular eco-boat, turned artistic residency my fabulous Rainer Prohaska. We have set off from Belgrade at the end of August and hope to reach the Black Sea by the beginning of October. I will work on two site-specific works, a long poem in which I have set myself the score to write (at least) one verse-line every Danube-Kilometer (they are marked as little black boards each kilometer along the shore - Belgrade was km 1164, the Black Sea will be km 0) and a little field recording audio-piece. Aside of that, I will of course continue working on my main project these years: my book on the car in the Anthropocene. Find some impressions of my work-place below and greetings from the Danube!

"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."