On the eventfulness of assemblages
24–26 November 2014
Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)
Master of Arts in Fine Arts
Toni-Areal, Pfingstweidstrasse 96
8005 Zürich
soft.infinities.fish
In techno-environmental ecologies one could perceive how forces, functions and forms are entangling and affecting each other. Multiplicities of human and technological “subjectivities” create a non-coordinated simultaneity of things and agents. Media, as visible in-betweens with specific uses, have dispersed and become an atmospheric supply that is no longer reliant on successful communication and that situates itself often before and beside a human production of meaning.
Can these kinds of ecological textures offer entry into an experience of assemblages in which doing, comprehending and expression perhaps “lag behind” one another, and in which division, disintegration and non-simultaneity become articulable? In the symposium art practices that critically address the efficacy and temporality of assemblages were articulated and put forward for discussion. As artistic forms, assemblages crop up in contexts in which they engage, with their desire and singularized materialities, in the traversing of power relations and queering of normative spaces. Interpreting such ecologies is a question of inventing unexpected, risky and bold articulations that make humans, non-humans and their political circumstances present.
The symposium was fanned out by temporal and spatial formations in which artistic contributions were assembled. Varying forms of artistic debate, discussion, orientation, deferral and interpretation were activated and non-academic forms of undisciplined knowledge production foregrounded.
With Pedro Barateiro, Kamran Behrouz, YoHa/Graham Harwood, Suchan Kinoshita, Leila Peacock, Johannes Paul Raether, Riikka Tauriainen, Philip Ullrich/Fabian Heitzhausen, Emily Wardill.
Art works by Helen Marten, Elke Marhöfer/Mihail Lylov, Katrin Mayer, and Hannah Weinberger.
Interviews with Jasbir Puar by Emma Hedditch, and Matthew Fuller by Christoph Brunner.
Moderators: Christoph Brunner, Margarida Mendes, Romy Rüegger and Kerstin Stakemeier.
Concept and realisation: Joerg Franzbecker and Christian Huebler in collaboration with Johanna Bruckner, Angi, Isabell Bullerschen, Thomas Knüsel, Philip Matesic, Jeroen Singer, Philip Ullrich, Lauren Wildbolz and Sarah Züst.