What kind of knowledge do we have to define in order to initiate a decolonial university? In her contribution to the “Pluralising Practices” debate, Katrin Köppert takes this question as a starting point to discuss the project “DE_colonize Uni_VERSITY”.
After the interrogation of pluralising activist and artistic practices, Hongwei Bao cautions against an uncritical celebration of pluralising practices without taking into consideration its neoliberal conditions for both academics and cultural workers in his contribution to the second instalment of the “pluralising practices” debate.
criticalhabitations opens the third debate on: pluralising practices.
Introduced by the editors of critical habitations, the debate features contributions by Anna Artaker, who describes her artistic practice which transforms Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “dialectical image” into a body of artworks in her project MEDIUMS OF HISTORY, and Sumugan Sivanesan who interrogates transmedia civil disobedience in the age of fossil-fuelled information capitalism.
Jayce Salloum (Kanada) & Mireille Kassar (Frankreich) kollaborieren mit internationalen Künstler*innen.
Die gezeigten Arbeiten überschreiten ihre Spezifik und werden Teil einer eigenständigen Geschichte, die sich über die Ausstellung hinaus immer weiter schreiben wird.
… „ Wir haben ein engagiertes Projekt geschaffen, dass zu sorgfältigen dialektischen Juxatpositionen anregt, schöpferische Eingriffe, Überlagerungen, Licht wie Spiel vereinigend, Interaktionen hervorruft die sich direkt auf die erfahrbaren Ebenen der Ausstellung auswirken. In diesem vielschichtigen Organismus in Bewegung können hier Dinge erscheinen und verschwinden – ein Geist in den Fasern der Ausstellung; wir müssen die Ideen erneuern, diesen kleinen Ort wie einen nomadischen Ort, das Scheußliche und das Erhabene entlang des Weges erblicken, den Künstler und den Betrachter mit dieser Trennung herausfordern und damit konfrontieren; unter vielfachen Klängen die Wahl treffen; die Architektur, das rohe Material, die Energie, unvorhersehbare Begegnungen zu bezeugen.” (Jayce Salloum & Mireille Kassar)
…„ Rencontres Improbables is to be considered as a stance, a sort of “pause” belonging to a much more global motion. Making a mark, the proposition is intense rather than merely a sampling, a set of statements of presence and articulations of being. The project is founded upon the idea of “intensity” rather than of “expansion” or “addition”. It is a summation of joint forces. There is no frivolity, or at least if there is, it will be for relief; for moments of plea- sure to counter the weight we feel tasked with, the meanings we are driven to make. These meanings are a matrix of lives, struggles, energies, sculpting the space and engaging the visitor.” (Jayce Salloum & Mireille Kassar)
Contemporary cities generate waste of various kinds on a scale that is often difficult to imagine and comprehend. Yet cities are also key sites for innovative practices of reuse, recycling and re-purposing. Through such cultures of renewal, waste products not only acquire a new value and function, but they also become entangled in new social relations, material practices and urban forms. Although waste is generally understood as the mundane, worthless, redundant and discarded afterwards of how we live our lives, this project takes as a starting point the fact that we spend a good amount of time in our ‘ordinary’ lives managing waste, and that the problem of how we manage waste is at the heart of environmental crisis and the development of more sustainable futures. Building on research in waste studies, and premised on the analytic importance of exploring that which is rejected, this project recognizes waste as a dynamic category that needs to be understood in relation to the urban contexts in which it is most commonly found and transformed, and the relationships in which it is embedded.
The workshop brings together scholars from Australia and Germany within the fields of cultural and urban studies to investigate the diverse cultural phenomenon that is waste, the urban infrastructures that were designed to eliminate waste in the name of hygiene and technical efficiency but which are now in crisis, and the range of amateur and DIY urbanisms that are retooling waste in new and innovative ways.
For more information, please contact Anja Schwarz.
criticalhabitations opens the second debate on: the posthuman present.
Introduced by Alexander Dunst, the debate features contributions by James Burton who returns to the writing of Philip K. Dick to question our understanding of the android and the human and Fabienne Collignon, who takes up Burton’s inquiry into human versus posthuman to seek an escape from the latter’s violence in a poetic inhumanity.
We’re happy to announce our third workshop which will take place at the University of Arts and Design, Linz, Austria, June 1st-3rd 2016.
Over the last two decades, increasingly diverse intellectual practices have become subsumed under the heading cultural studies. These engagements speak from different linguistic, regional, national and diasporic contexts, draw on specific local traditions and methodologies, and are forking distinct trajectories, thus making it impossible to speak of a unified cultural studies. This heterogeneity has led to an increasing emphasis on decolonising knowledge and the need for new transcultural approaches that transcend the limitations of regional studies. On the one hand, this development highlights the necessity of translation: of languages, concepts, different academic approaches. On the other, this decolonial momentum reasserts cultural studies as a political project that exceeds academic spaces of knowledge and opens itself to epistemologies that challenge the university’s Eurocentrism, gender and class gaps from the outside. These multiform spaces of knowledge become inhabitable at the intersection of artistic, academic and activist modes of knowledge production, in spaces and via events open to a diverse public. They can be discerned in new models of publishing not exclusively reserved to academia, such as open-access online journals or blogs that utilise the virtual and accessible space of the internet.
This two-day workshop invites to reflect on practices of epistemological translation between diverse knowledge spaces. How can we translate between spaces inside and outside of academia? How can we encourage decolonial agendas when negotiating between institutional and other agents? Furthermore, we invite scholars to reflect on, propose and invent practices of cultural studies in virtual and other spaces. What kinds of practices do we have to create such open spaces? How can we inhabit them?
Participants: Anna Artaker (Vienna), Hongwei Bao (Nottingham), Henriette Gunkel (London), Karin Harrasser (Linz), Katrin Köppert (Linz), Anja Michaelsen (Bochum), Sumugan Sivanesan (Berlin), Daniel Winkler (Innsbruck)
Organizers: Alexander Dunst (Paderborn), Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Flensburg), Anja Schwarz (Potsdam), Gudrun Rath (Linz)
Find more information here.
criticalhabitations features longer work by authors associated with the blog for you to read and comment.
In his contribution “Inhabiting Photography – Between Medium and Mediality” to the debate section Saadi Nikro considers the life of photographs as embodied circulations and social economies of affect.
criticalhabitations 