December 8, 2025, 6:30pm
Join us for a lecture by Federico Campagna to conclude our online program ARE YOU FOR REAL: Cosmo-Clusters Activated!
How do technology, computation, and the sciences shape our understanding of the real? And how do we distinguish the real from the merely possible, the virtual, the actual, the magical? Since launching in 2020, ARE YOU FOR REAL has evolved into a resonant constellation of “cosmo-clusters” exploring technology’s infrastructural entanglements, its regenerative potential, its magical thinking, its tactical agency, its predictive ambitions, and its hauntedness. Shaped by artistic commissions of great diversity, the platform contends with digitalization and a reality irreducibly entangled with the online sphere.
We have the pleasure to invite you to a talk by Federico Campagna, a London-based Italian philosopher whose work focuses on the intersections between metaphysics, cultural history, and contemporary politics. He will explore the concept and practice of world-building, addressing questions such as: Does world-building have any fundamental rules? How does the process affect our individual and political lives? And what is the difference between a world and reality? Through a metaphysical reinterpretation of aesthetics and elegance, Campagna will suggest possible ways in which artists and philosophers might work side by side to invent new worlds.
Across the 2025 online mediation program of ARE YOU FOR REAL, a constellation of gatherings unfolded like drifting satellites, each probing how realities are made, felt, and reimagined. Nelly Y. Pinkrah opened the program by asking what reality can be when every perception fractures differently, tracing how media and technology weave the conditions through which anything becomes at all real—echoing Édouard Glissant’s soft provocation that “nothing is true, everything is alive.” Later, curators Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás guided audiences through the platform’s floating cosmo-clusters, revealing its conceptual currents—Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics, Friedrich Kittler’s spectral software, Karen Barad’s shimmering “transmatter realities.”
Artists Tatyana Zambrano and Theodolous Polyviou invited visitors into digital worlds where bodies, labor, and identities are rebuilt and renegotiated, while a speculative writing session with Moritz Jekat and Caroline Sinders opened portals to impossible terrains, non-binary logics, and fabulated futures. A listening session then shifted perception toward the vibratory and the more-than-human: Saša Spacal’s descent into biological disintegration and Zheng Maler’s bat meditation asked participants to hear—and sense—otherwise. Finally, eeefff and Sara Bezovšek walked us through web-based interventions, interactive fragments, and poetic critiques that map the strange mythologies of online life.
Initiated by ifa in 2020 and curated by Giulia Bini and Nolasco-Rózsás, with Barbara Zoé Kiolbassa as host, ARE YOU FOR REAL continues to orbit the edges of the digital, inviting audiences to inhabit realities that flicker, proliferate, and refuse to stay still.
About ifa
Together with partners, ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen champions freedom in art, research, and civil society worldwide, bringing together people who are committed to an open society. It creates analogue and digital spaces for encounter, exchange, negotiation, and co-creation. ifa lends a voice to activists, artists, scholars, and scientists, promotes cooperation, and increasingly pursues its goals jointly with partners. Using its core competencies in art, research, and civil society, ifa builds networks to achieve sustainable results. It is supported by Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart.
Press contact: presse@ifa.de
