Conversation | On Unalienated Planetarity by Antonia Majaca and Marina Vishmidt

Sunday, October 20th, 2019 | 12:00pm at Monnot Theater

If ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Planetary Computation’ have been deployed as two separate fields of concern, in the context of contemporary art and theory, it is a split whose main role has been to foreclose the complicity of contemporary art in the fundamentally unsustainable relations of production within capitalism and its underlying extractivist relation to both nature and technology. How can art and theory go beyond the role of redemptive companions to the impending planetary cataclysm? An essential prerequisite in invoking a crucial epistemic break by means of art and critical thought is the project of undoing the patriarchal gendering of both technology and nature: detechnologizing nature and denaturalizing techne. Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist critical practices have historically striven to dismantle diverse figuration of 'reified thought', with concepts such as situated knowledge, double consciousness, and more recently, planetarity, extraction and 'being human as praxis'. Taking this sketch as a point of departure, we will focus on current debates around cosmotechnics from a feminist, anti-/decolonial perspective and work on clarifying a notion of alienation adequate to this planetary condition.

Antonia Majaca is curator and writer based in Berlin and the research leader of The Incomputable (2019-2021) at the IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology. Since 2017 she has been running a theory seminar at the Dutch Art Institute. At the HKW - Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, she recently co-curated Parapolitics - Cultural Freedom and the Cold War. In 2015 she founded Feminist Takes - a long term project considering the relation between the Non-Western avant-garde cinema and feminist theory. The publication Feminist Takes - Early Works (co-edited with Jelena Vesic and Rachel O'Reilly) is forthcoming with Tranzitdisplay and Sternberg Press. She recently directed Berlin Biennial X - BBX Crit Sessions (in collaboration with Gabi Ngcobo and co-run with Sohrab Mohebbi) and Memorial For(u)ms – Histories of Possibility, commissioned by the German DAAD and Hebel am Ufer Theater, Berlin.

Marina Vishmidt is a writer, an editor and a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the Master’s degree in Culture Industry. She has taught at the University of Brighton, Middlesex University, and the Sandberg Instituut. From 2014-2018, she ran a theory seminar at the Dutch Art Institute. Her work has appeared in Zeitschrift for Kunstgeschichte, South Atlantic Quarterly, Ephemera, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, Third Text, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, 2018). 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).

This event is part of Home Works 8: A Forum on Cultural Practices.