Lectures

What does it mean to live in an Infected Planet? ​​How one can learn to think care at all scales, from the microbial to the planetary, from the personal to the political? How can we embrace self care, singing Ancient Greek hymns and dance as a political activism? During this two-day workshop, we will focus on ecofeminism, caring, maintenance as resistance This workshop held by Joulia Strauss and Elke Krasny is part of the Intersectional Workshop series with “Care Feminism and Transindigenous Knowledge”, organized by İpek Çınar (the representative of Diversity and Social Justice Unit) and transdisciplinary artist Luïza Luz, Asta UdK Berlin

https://asta-udk-berlin.de/de/artikel/intersektionelle-workshops-1/

 

Keynote Lecture at the Symposium, Teaching Artistic Strategies: Playing with Materiality, Aesthetics, and Ambiguity. Transferring Research into Academic Teaching, FNHW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, Switzerland

Research has become a still-new paradigm, which is considered central to contemporary artistic practice and to innovative and critical art making. What then makes a good research question for artistic practice? Who defines that? Who defines and who judges what is good about doing research? Research has been described as a dirty word by professor of indigenous education Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith. This lecture looks at power dimensions of research connected to the sciences, the military, the industry, and university education. Acknowledging the historical implicatedness of research in systems of violence, harm, extraction, and domination, the lecture seeks to prolong possibilities that research can be emancipatory, transformative, and of relevance to futurity and caring imaginaries for ecological and social justice. Insisting that different research questions are very much needed, the lecture argues that artistic research practices can make space and time for consciousness raising. Such an open-ended approach would disrupt managerial ontologies of research, which are managed through deadlines and expected outputs. Envisioning research as consciousness raising draws on feminist activist traditions that were collective and connected lived experience to theory and to politics. Understanding systemic conditions through sharing individual experiences was at the center of this strategy. In relation to making research the subject of artistic investigation, this can mean the following: raising awareness for what it means to live in the aftermath of research as well as to collectively mend the effects of research in order to build emancipatory and caring forms of knowing.

https://arthist.net/archive/36707/lang=de_DE

 

This workshop contributed to Avtonomi Akadimia run by artist and activist Joulia Strauss and took place in Athens in the Akadimia Platonos, now known as Akadimia Platonos Jungle, in 2022.The global Covid-19 pandemic has (re)named care as essential infrastructure. Those, who perform caring labors, were defined as living infrastructure, as care was, and is being stretched to the limits. The realities of care are defined by austerity, precarization, and exhaustion. The imaginaries of care are filled with ethics, relationality, choice, empathy or kindness. Arguing that there is still a lack of everyday language to articulate labours, experiences, and feelings of, care, and that there is furthermore a profound lack of public articulation of care, this workshop connects the widely held notion that care is invisibilized to this lack of ways of speaking care. Examining words used to speak about care, including empathy, exhaustion, choice, skills, competence, exploitation, persistence, humility, feminization, interruption, or conflict, to name but a few, the interest is on how words of care produce socio-environmental effects at the level of material semiosis and political imaginaries. This workshop collectively examines meanings, practices, ethics, politics, and imaginaries closely associated with care. Together, we will talk, write, and walk.

http://avtonomi-akadimia.net/event/elke-krasny-care-feminism-words-conversations-walks/

A discussion with Elke Krasny (Vienna), Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch (Vienna), and Mechtild Widrich (Chicago).

If monuments are public expressions of what societies care to remember, they also have to be understood as evidence to what societies choose to forget. Deadly colonial imperialism and patriarchal power glorified in stone or metal are the memory infrastructure of our cities. Can public space be freed from the violence of monuments? Can a democratic public space  become the site for representing monumental worries? We argue for an activist ethics of im/permanent material articulations, spatial and visual solidarity, shared concerns, and planetary care.

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/455557/monumental-cares-activist-ethics-and-representation-in-public-space/

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This lecture argues that we need to collectively raise awareness for the modern infrastructural condition which affects individual life and the planet as a whole. It situates infrastructure at the crucial intersection of social and environmental justice and suggests a better understanding of how the connectivity produced by infrastructure affects everyone and everything. Socio-environmental and bio-material interdependencies and responsibilities arise from this connectivity.

Lecture at the Conference: Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and CritiqueAcademy of Fine Arts Vienna, May 20, 2022

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Keynote Lecture at the FEINART Summer School

How do we learn how to mourn an exhausted planet through artistic practices and collective rituals?

How can care and healing be performed in eco-social art practices that re-situate the social within the ecological and understand humans as within nature. How does the Covid-19 pandemic raise awareness of interdependencies and help us understand that visibilization is not an answer to structural invisibility?

Recorded at the FEINART Future of Independent Art Spaces in Europe Summer School, Zeppelin University, September 2023; You can watch the lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PecFFPBT8I

Der Vortrag Architektur als Infrastruktur des Sorgetragens: an einem anderen Architekturverständnis arbeiten war ein Beitrag zu dem Panel Haltung. Die Fragen nach der Haltung in der Architektur wurde an Hand der folgenden Fragen erörtert: Wie verändert der Wandel der am Bau beteiligten Berufe hin zu mehr Diversität die Baukulturvermittlung? Welche Haltung ist für einen baukulturellen Dialog in Schule und Studium zukunftsfähig?

Programm

Recording

An online debate on Architecture of Radical Care organized and hosted by Narodowy Instytut Architektury i Urbanistyki

Dorota Lesniak and Elke Krasny in conversation on complicated, complex, and urgent questions: What is care, and what is architecture of care in the age of the Anthropocene? What has capitalism done to care work? What needs to change in our thinking about architecture in order for buildings to gain the potential to regenerate the planet? Can architects become essential workers? What aspects of architecture practise should be strengthen?

 

https://www.facebook.com/events/1073260836674382

Elke Krasny’s lecture thinks about dimensions of care in architecture, opening complex and difficult questions of power, ethics, and futurity. What can we learn from revisiting past solutions to building justice and care for public housing or public health?

Announcement

Care is critical to survivable and living with a deeply wounded planet. Architecture is implicated in, responsible for, responsible to, and entangled with producing conditions for continued livability and planetary inhabitability. Critical Care contributed to a public debate hosted by Dreyers Fond in Copenhagen. EARTH #3, the Dreyer Foundation concluded the series of events that put space, frameworks and the rights of the planet up for debate. The debate was curated by Marianne Krogh. 

Recording