LIVING ON PLATFORMS II

STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, our life on platforms has assumed a state of permanence. We are learning, working, shopping, communicating and enjoying ourselves online all the time. The screen has become the most important interface to the outside world. Other crises – climate change, racist violence, social inequality – have become equally permanent. In this development, a new culture of crisis management has gained the upper hand, which awaits us with a solution for everything with simple rhetorics of resilience and efficiency. But instead of seeing this promise kept, our institutional trust is increasingly dwindling and it is becoming clear that many crises are also a means to control and accelerate the existing spatial, infrastructural and social changes. As a result, a discussion has broken out as to whether we really want to return to a pre-crisis state or whether we are longing for alternatives. What would such alternatives look like? Can such alternatives be envisaged independently of the experience of the current crisis?

Such thinking requires, as Donna Haraway argued in Staying with the Trouble, sym-poiesis or “making-with” instead of auto-poiesis or “self-making” – learning to stay with the trouble of living together. In the field of art, the urge for collective forms of work is currently making clear how joint thinking and joint action can lead to new possibilities: documenta 15, curated by the Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa; the projects of the five art collectives nominated for the Turner Prize 2021; or the discussion of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, provoked by Hashim Sarkis with the question “How will we live together?” – they all represent arenas for experimenting with new forms of life and propose “making-with” architectures.

In the Visual Culture module, we dedicate ourselves every Monday afternoon in a virtual salon (lectures, talks, presentations, roundtable discussions, film afternoons, etc.) to a certain aspect of the ongoing living on platforms: who profits and who loses, and what is the architecture of the structure that is created here? Given this starting point, what alternatives can we jointly develop?

Visual Culture Module
Mondays, 17:00-19:00
Start: 04 October 2021
Location: Online via ZOOM

For further details please see link below