Under the Skin(s) of the Past(s) and Future(s): or How to Inhabit a Volkskundemuseum? • Volkskundemuseum Wien • 2024
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Residency and exhibition project by the Artistic Strategies department • University for applied Arts Vienna
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Artistic Strategies Teachers • Anne Faucheret, Bouchra Khalili, Mika Maruyama, Stephanie Misa, Antoine Turillon
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Giant map and collective exhibition realised by • Emma Gioia Enzi • Sven Kammerer • Aimée Kohn • Aizat Sagymbaeva • the class Insularities, Immunities, Communities
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Guests of the class Insularities, Immunities, Communities • Alix Eynaudi • Sabina Holzer • Herbert Justnik • Kathrin Pokorny-Nagel • Fabian Ritzi • Marlene Schütze
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The Western official understanding of community differentiates between immunized and de-munized bodies and territories, protecting some and sacrificing others. Based on this vision of community, capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal ideology and technologies deploy a wide range of strategies so as to create borders - real and symbolic - political and ontological. They separate, isolate, sort, suppress, silence, invisibilize and kill. They consolidate already existing racisms and anti-feminisms and foster extraction and dispossession. They accelerate the threats on ecosystems and the destruction of knowledges and practices inhabiting the world differently.
Which vocabularies, stories, narratives, and artistic practices can enable another sense of community, based on social care and environmental justice and human/more-than-human cooperation? Which languages, practices and performance(s) of emancipatory community-making will help to postpone the end of the world? Beyond naïve (but sometimes necessary) idealizations of these concepts, the residency project precisely aims at analyzing current forms of community, their “assets” and “traps”. To do just that, we will transgress competition, separation, borders, and insularization. We will browse the museum space, delve into its history, and meet the many collectives who will be living there at the same time as us. Working with diverse tools of encountering, contextualizing, mapping and putting in common, we will develop a polyphonic score, that will be incarnated in the shape of books, writings, interventions, performances. With this project, the process matters as much as its outcomes.
During our collective residency at Volkskundemuseum, we work as a polymorphous and unstable collective, that comes and goes, that makes and unmakes itself. We explore notions of collective belongings, of what we have in common, on how to encounter, and on how to create forms and methods of allyships so as to collectively imagine emancipatory ways to belong.
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“NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down.”
– Diane Di Prima, Revolutionary Letter #8, 1968
„[A] solidarity based on collective self-care can be nurtured through intersectional, unstable, even ambiguous links, from loved ones to allies, to comrades to fellow travelers. By reconsidering collectivity in this light, one comes closer to empowering the sustainable solidarities of the future.”
– Katya García Antón, Art and Solidarity Reader, 2022
„We aren’t going away. We’ll be there for as long as it takes.”
– from Greenham Factor, the journal of the Greenham Woman Peace Camp, 1981
“Can we imagine reconstructing our lives around a communing of our relations with others, including animals, waters, plants, and mountains— which the large-scale construction of robots will certainly destroy? This is the horizon that the discourse and the politics of the commons opens for us today, not the promise of an impossible return to the past by the possibility of recovering the power of collectively deciding our fate on this earth. This is what I call re-enchanting the world.”
– Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, 2019
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The Giant Map (…is always incomplete) by the class Insularities, Immunities, Communities
Over the one-year seminar, we shared resources, visited exhibitions, took part to workshops, discussed artistic practices and texts related to the notions of insularities, immunities and communities – and how tactics and practices of solidarities, forms of allyship and kinship can break the common regime of separation. Combining the theoretical, the fictional and the poetic, practicing mapping, drawing and superimposing, cherishing the process over the outcome, we investigated existing and imagined, common and peculiar, visible and invisible tights between these notions, at different scales, from different positions. As a temporary collective constituted with students and their guests, inspired by diagrammatic thinking, alternative mapping and carto-poetics, we began to draw and compose a giant multi-layered map, contextualizing, leaving traces, but most importantly leaving holes and gaps.
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Photos : Antoine Turillon
