The Radical Teaching Workshop: Feminist Practices of Writing and Mapping
SEPTEMBER 23RD AND 24TH, 2022
More information here.
With: Wiki Riot Squad (Hannah Schmedes, Eva Königshofen, Lena Wassermeier), topsoil (Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel), From Where I Stand (Oona Lochner and Isabel Mehl) and Karolin Meunier.
During the two days we want to explore and test different forms of collective learning. The three workshops will focus on feminist practices of writing as ways of experimental knowledge production. There is a growing desire for many to leave traditional teaching institutions and their outdated formats of knowledge transmission in order to collectively share knowledge in a collective way. What other practices and techniques are available? How can we create new places to practice other ways of teaching and learning? Based on these questions, the three workshops are dedicated to different forms of feminist knowledge production. They not only draw on the long tradition of feminist practices of empowerment and consciousness raising, but also use speculative and artistic formats to realize a different kind of learning.
Concept: Gerko Egert
At Vierte Welt In coperation with nocturne – Plattform for experimental Knowledge Production
Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
ADDRESS:
Vierte Welt
Kottbusser Tor im Zentrum Kreuzberg | Adalbertstr. 96 | Galerie 1.OG | 10999 Berlin
U-Bhf Kottbusser Tor | Linie U1 | U8 | U12 | Ausgang Adalbertstraße
PROGRAMM:
Friday, Sep. 23rd, 2022
13:00 – 17:00 How to Edit in Not-So-Open Sources: Wikipedia Workshop with @wiki_riot_squad
Saturday, Sep. 24th, 2022
11:00 – 13:00 Workshop with topsoil (Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel)
14:00 – 16:30 Wissen in Klammern. Ein Schreibworkshop mit From Where I Stand (Oona Lochner and Isabel Mehl)
17:00 – 18:00 Discussion (Host: Karolin Meunier)
DETAILS:
Friday, Sep. 23rd, 2022
13:00 – 17:00
HOW TO EDIT IN NOT-SO-OPEN SOURCES: WIKIPEDIA WORKSHOP WITH @WIKI_RIOT_SQUAD
(Hannah Schmedes, Eva Königshofen, Lena Wassermeier)With the foundation of Wikipedia over 20 years ago, all the knowledge in the world was supposed to be collected in a space accessible to everyone. However, „open source“ is not as open as intended. Who feels entitled to process and upload their knowledge as supposedly ‘neutral’ knowledge? The encyclopedists of the present are no longer called Diderot or d’Alembert but “geiserich75” or “hyperrolf”. Yet, up to today the world’s largest encyclopedic internet platform is white and male-dominated.
Together we will look for loopholes and productive rule violations in Wikipedia and give you insights into structural problems of Wikipedia and, above all, tools to become active editors yourself.
Please bring a laptop or other device for writing online.
Saturday, Sep. 24th, 2022
11:00 – 13:00
MAPPING ENCOUNTERS, WORKSOP WITH TOPSOIL
(Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel)“Mapping Encounters” draws from one of the techniques which have proven central to our way of working as a collective: maps. Through maps, we think together and document our collaborative processes; we try to discern the different layers and conceptual densities while visualizing the diverse ways in which our thinking and sensibilities play out.
For this hybrid workshop, we will offer that technique in order to share and reflect on the expectations, bodily sensations, questions, and thoughts that affect the collective configuration of learning spaces. We will work in small groups and build up layers of mapping the encounter of the workshop itself in dialogue with past (and possible future) learning experiences.
topsoil is a transnational curatorial and research collective formed by Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel in 2017 in London. Based in San Jose, Istanbul and Berlin, together we seek to bring into conversation our various contextual and disciplinary perspectives by threading a notion of learning through friendship. Through prolonged conversation, we ask how to work and think with each other, prioritizing care and sensibility to what drives our research and practice. We initiate long-term collaborative research projects with thinkers and practitioners to collect methods and tools that help us move towards a shared ground while being attentive to specificities.
The workshop will be in English.
Online participation possible.
14:00 – 16:30
BRACKETING KNOWLEDGE. A WORKSHOP WITH FROM WHERE I STAND
(Oona Lochner and Isabel Mehl)Which knowledge matters – and why? This feminist question converges philosophical, questions with those of writing and everyday living. With its offensive contextualization of knowledge, feminist writing comes into conflict with a still powerful claim to objectivity in the sciences and the long tradition of backgrounding certain forms of knowledge by bracketing it. Pointing to one’s own entanglement with the object of knowledge (see Haraway et al.) draws attention to the situation of writing in all its social, bodily, and affective dimensions: Am I sitting in an office or at an improvised desk in my bedroom? Is a crying baby knocking on the door? What is my gaze interested in? What noise form do I hear in the background? What experiences and whose knowledge accompany me at my table?
Which knowledge matters is a negotiation that is not only theoretical, but is a battle fought in every text. Literally bracketing something can become a gesture of indeterminacy. It delays any judgment and gives one’s writing time to allow the different moments of knowledge to come into contact with each other, to sit back and wait for a (provisional) outcome.
With writing exercises and experiments, we want to investigate our writing, its conditions and omissions. Together we look at hierarchies of knowledge and rehearse our ability to work with ambivalences, disagreements, and the provisional.
The workshop will be in German and/or English.
Unfortunately, online participation is not possible.
17:00 – 18:00
DISCUSSION
(Host: Karolin Meunier)
Public Research
Public research is a series of discursive events aiming to challenge prevailing modes of thinking and talking about research. We wish to renounce the imperatives of cognitive capitalism and escape from neoliberal demands which have hijacked our research institutions (namely the university), dictating the dynamics, modes of representation, and dissemination of research practices.
Aiming to establish new arenas for discussion and common thinking, we turn to the artistic context and gather in a performance art space – where the relations between publics and speakers are turbulent, where different modes of attention, affection, and speech are constantly being challenged.
public research constitutes a heterogeneous environment, bringing together professional and dilettante researchers, scientists and artists, different logics, languages, and ways of speech; hence, setting up favourable conditions for contamination, which according to the anthropologist Anna Tsing is transformation through encounter. We consider common thinking as live action and public event, a vital moment fuelled by the possibility of change. We trust the power of sharing questions in rendering publics, new alliances of solidarity, and resilience.
public research is continuous but not linear, thought-through but unpredictable, social but not socialized, experimental but not entrepreneurial. In order to breakaway from old patterns we create new habits.
This is how we will do it from October 2019 onwards: We meet up every third Thursday of the month
from 18h to 22h. We share research processes, discuss, read, watch, eat and articulate questions.
In the last 20 min of each session we sketch a question/ topic which will be the core of the next meeting. Together we decide who will conduct the upcoming session. We meet again.
Sessions are held in English, but other languages are welcome. Translation is our common duty.
Devised by: Dirk Cieslak, Gerko Egert, Stefan Hölscher und Netta Weiser.
With support of Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Berlin.
www.viertewelt.de
Operation|Performance (2021)
Workshop
11th-12th February, 2021 organized by Gerko Egert, Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen
The workshop addresses the relation of two concepts: Operation and Performance. Performance made its advance into theory mainly from the analysis of human action, be it in ritual, speech-acts, theater or everyday performances, esp. the performance of gender. The concept of operation has its appearance mostly in system-oriented approaches such as cybernetics and management theory. By discussing the two concepts together, the workshop asks, how the analysis of performance can profit from the concept of operation and how the analysis of operations changes, when addressing it through the lens of performance theory. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the political dimension of operation and performance by bringing the concept of operations in the field of performance studies and its engagement with gender and postcolonial theories, with questions of bodies and movement, with art and its relations to politics. How do politics operate in performance and how are the operations of performance political?
The concept of operation offers new perspectives on algorithms, affect, sense perception, logistics, mechanics, choreography, and many more to the analysis of performance. How do operational politics function in activities of capital, labor, care, education, family-living? What operators are at work in performative politics and how can one (counter-)use them (e.g., hormones as operators of gender performance (Preciado); architecture as operator of every-day living; fabulation as operator of shared collectivity)? What are the operational modes of oppression, and what are the ones of resistance? What modes of operational politics are at work in theater, performance-art, dance and other art forms?
Program
Thursday, February 11th, 2021
14:30 – 15:00 Gerko Egert: Introduction
15:00 – 16:00 Valeria Graziano/Giulia Palladini: Against a logic of scarcity: reverse strike, striking in and operations of militant abundance
16:15 – 17:15 Georg Döcker: “Struggle for life.” On operations and practice (working title)
17:30 – 18:30 Valentina Desideri: Performance Operation
Friday, Februrary 12th, 2021
15:00 – 16:00 Dennis Pohl: Simultaneous Governing: Speech and Textuality in the European Council
16:15 – 17:15 Julia Bee: Film as Operation: The politics of filming together
17:30 – 18:30 Erik Bordeleau: “Like a Tropical Storm”: Exfoliating the operations of value
Ecology of Techniques
Workshop
Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Feb. 1-2, 2019
Guests: Rose Beermann, Xavier Le Roy, Sebastian Matthias, Juli Reinartz
Techniques is what we live by. We learn how to walk, to sit, to swim, to concentrate, and to perform. Without techniques, it would be impossible for us to act, to live, and to exist. Even though most of these techniques are backgrounded and we don’t think about them in everyday live they are habitually at work in every movement. Dance, on the other side, is a field in which techniques of moving, acting, and creating are foregrounded. Here, techniques are actively and consciously learned and experimented with. They are part of the training (in schools, in workshops) as well as of production processes.
Even though everyday movements play a major role in the choreographic work over the last decades, they are often addressed as “natural” actions, only made “artificial” by the techniques of dance. In the workshop we want to follow a different path and investigate how the everyday life is as much produced by techniques as the field of dance. By this, the engagement with the “outside” of dance becomes a turn towards other techniques: How do these techniques intermingle and what is happening in the event of their interference? The ways these intersections happen can be manifold: be it in a way that we want to overcome a habitual movement to produce a different quality, or be it that we rely on the techniques of the everyday such as jumping, falling, running, in the creation of movement. One quite prominent example of an interplay of techniques is improvisation: Improvisation is itself a technique that aims to withdraw from choreographic techniques to allow the habitual techniques of everyday to take over – it is a technique of correlating techniques. We see how in improvisation but also in other forms of rehearsal and performance many techniques co-compose, intermingle and create. By taking them into different fields and bringing them into relation with each other, techniques’ creative potential re-surfaces. Instead of being an ability to master a movement they become tools of creative reproduction. Together they create an ecology of techniques.
In the workshop, we collectively investigate and experiment with this ecology of techniques. How do they relate with each other? What backgrounded techniques are at work we normally do not classify as such? How can we use the interference of techniques to un-learn habits and create different ways of moving and living? How can we open up the habitual repetitions of everyday life and insert a moment of speculation back into the operations of our techniques by bringing different types of techniques together?
For these investigation, I propose a very wide notion of techniques, that is not defined by training or authorship. Here, techniques are by no way limited to the realm of movement or body techniques. They are techniques of living and existence, techniques of getting up in the morning, techniques of hiding at a party or techniques to make (and lose) new friends. Social techniques, mental techniques, techniques of coping with pain and illness as well as techniques of avoiding or addressing power-relations, harassment and discrimination. In bringing our experiences with all these techniques together the questions therefore are: What can the interplay of techniques do, that no single technique can do alone and how can we use this interplay to create new techniques for dancing, moving, acting, living?
Ecology of Techniques II: Formats
Workshop
Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Jan. 25-26, 2020
Guests: Kai van Eikels, Stefan Hölscher, Elisa Linseisen, Anne Schuh, Lucie Tuma
The follow-up workshop revisits the discussion of the first workshop with a focus on the question of format from a performance and media-theory perspective. How do a different notion of technique (as it became popular in the recent years) also call for different formats on the level of presentation as much as on the level of production. And how can we use concepts of format/formation stemming from media theory to rethink the processes of performance art and its techniques?
Constructive Thinking
Konzept Workshop: Julia Bee, Gerko Egert, Stefan Hölscher
Zeit: 28. bis 29. September 2017Ort: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Der Workshop versammelt und tauscht Perspektiven des experimentellen, wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens aus. Es werden Impulsbeiträge gestaltet, Texte diskutiert und Praktiken erprobt.
Wir setzen uns unter dem Titel »constructive thinking« mit der Verknüpfung von wissenschaftlichem und künstlerischem Forschen auseinander. Praktiken aus dem Bauhaus oder dem Black Mountain College, in denen Kunst zu einem Experimentierfeld von Existenzweisen wurde, lassen sich als politisches, prozessuales und erfahrungsbasiertes Forschen heute aktivieren. Wie können wir heute das immanente politische Potential künstlerisch-wissenschaftlicher Praktiken in unserer alltäglichen Arbeit entfalten? Experimente der Aktivierung und des Aktivismus diesseits und jenseits der Universität nennen Fred Moten und Stephano Harney „study“: Nicht die Ergebnisse, sondern die Mikroprozesse des (künstlerischen) Forschens, seine affektiven Modulationen stehen so im Fokus. Collagieren, Mixen, Versammeln, Jammen, Singen, Fotografieren, Gärtnern (…) können Weisen der Individuation, Kollektivierungspraktiken und zugleich Formen der Wissensproduktion sein. Diese Techniken werden zu einem Milieu politischer Affekte und sind so zentral für die Hervorbringung von Existenzweisen des Lernens, Lehrens und Forschens an der Universität und darüber hinaus. Wie lassen sich heute neue Formen der Kollaboration erzeugen, wie sie z.B. von Félix Guattari anhand von u.a. Michel Foucaults und Daniel Deferts aktivistischem Forschungsprojekt Groupe d’information sur les prisons geschildert werden?
Programm
Donnerstag, 28.9.2017
13:30-14:30 Julia Bee, Gerko Egert, Stefan Hölscher
Einleitung
14:30-15:30 Diskussion. Auszüge aus Isabelle Stengers „In Catastrophic Times“Pause
16:00-17:00 Elisa Linseisen
/. Slash/Dot /. Die Konvertierung von Denk/Formaten
17:00-18:00 Maximilian Haas
Deleuzes Methode der Dramatisierung und die Künstlerische Forschung im TheaterPause
18:30-19:30 Jan Müller
›Gemeinsam denken‹? Literatur, Dialog, Theater
Freitag, 29.9.2017
9:30 -10:30 Sven Seibel
Peinliche Analogien und optimistische Pädagogik – affektive Infrastrukturen lesen mit Lauren Berlant
10:30-11:30 Katja Kynast
Sich einmischen. Gestisches Denken und Handeln, essayistisches Verstehen mit FarockiPause
12:00-13:00 Martina Ruhsam
Komposition als intra-aktives Experiment (anhand der Praxis kollektiven Schreibens)
Pause
14:00-15:00 Elena Vogman
Hubert Fichte und die Ansätze zu einer Laienanthropologie
15:00-16:00 Christoph Brunner
Activist Sense und Praktiken des Affective Relaying