Friday, 9 & Saturday, 10 June
PART TIME COMMITMENT Working Group #2: Infrastructures, Liberal Discomfort, Disruption
with Lisa Jeschke, Johanna Klingler, MYSTI, Marina Vishmidt
Infrastructures enable and encourage certain actions and outcomes and implicitly do not enable others. As long as it functions, infrastructure is hardly noticed. Infrastructure, writes theorist Marina Vishmidt, has a strong temporal dimension, insofar as infrastructure is that which repeats. "The repetition is normalised into everyday routine, and when it stops, an aperture is cut into its artifice – through which history and power relations can be seen." (Marina Vishmidt, Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique)
Working Group #2 takes a look at the different aspects of infrastructure from the perspective of artistic and activist practices.
Friday, June 9, 5 pm & Saturday, June 10, 2 – 4 pm
Reading group & workshop
with Johanna Klingler
Johanna Klingler invites you to a two-hour reading group in preparation for Marina Vishmidt's lecture the following day. Texts on the so-called infrastructure critique will be read and discussed together. In addition, an introduction to relevant theoretical terms and concepts will be given.
In the second part of the reading group, on Saturday, 10 June from 2–4 pm we will reflect on challenges, strategies and motivations of working together. The workshop aims to reflect on the different aspects of collective work and situate them within the concept of infrastructure. In addition to an exchange about structural and individual difficulties and advantages of collective working, the main aim is to reflect together on strategies of inclusive cooperation.
To participate in both events, please register by email by 4 June to: projekt@lothringer13.com
Saturday, June 10, 5 pm
Extended Part-Time Liberal Discomfort: A Conversation for Interruption
by Lisa Jeschke & MYSTI
Lisa Jeschke & MYSTI perform a prescripted conversation on questions such as: what is liberalism, what is the problem with liberalism and what is its art? Thank you. Unlike with their previous workshop-conversation Liberal Discomfort Zone (HKW 2021), there are no participatory elements. Audience members can interrupt – if they want to.
Saturday, June 10, 7 pm
How Infrastructure and Reproduction Communicate
Lecture by Marina Vishmidt about the connections between social reproduction theory and infrastructural critique
Similar to the arguments of social reproduction feminism, which focuses not only on physical care but also the maintenance of ideological values in societal reproduction, Vishmidt's approach to the concept of infastructure concerns, among other things, factors that socially anchor ideological norms and thus make them appear as naturally given, defining infrastructure as epistemic as well as material. The maintenance of such norms, which according to Louis Althusser, are being socially reproduced in the interest of the state and capital, takes place not least through institutions that seem indirectly involved in their reproduction. Thus, institutions such as education, religion and art contribute to the naturalisation of class relations (in the form of class, race and gender) by affirming structures from a position that is ostensibly external to the socially created system. But so do 'institutions' such as the human, freedom or aesthetics, as the presuppositions for the independent, the whole or the abundant that continues to shape emancipatory desire, meaning critique, including infrastructural critique, can only ever be operative if it is ruthless.
All formats will be in English.
Followed by drinks and snacks!
Lisa Jeschke is a poet, performer and translator who writes in English and German. German-language publications include: The Anthology of Drunken Women's Poems (hochroth, 2019); with Andreas Bülhoff and Lütfiye Güzel: oder redo (materials/sync.ed, 2022).
Johanna Klingler is currently doing her PhD on practices of infrastructure critique with Prof. Sabeth Buchmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Since 2022, she has been managing the archive of the Kunstverein Muenchen together with Jonas von Lenthe. She is co-editor of the publication series Re:Re (Wirklichkeit Books Berlin) and alumna of the Berlin Program for Artists (BPA). Her research projects include, for example, the archive development of the British photographer, activist, educator and historian Terry Dennett (in: "Camera Forward!", MayDay Rooms London & PM Press UK, 2021).
MYSTI: Self-published titles include I AM NOT SULKING I AM HONORING YOUR LIMITATIONS, Heterosexual Panic, and EVERYONE'S PERSONAL BECAME POLITICAL & LANGUAGE MEANT NOTHING. Online: www.holdmyhairback.wordpress.com & foullows.substack.com
Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Mousse, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes, including Speculation for the Documents of Contemporary Art series (Whitechapel/MIT 2023). She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). In 2022, she was the Rudolph Arnheim Visiting Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and will take up a professorship in art theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in the autumn of 2023. Her research has been funded by the DAAD, the European Social Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.
