Calendar

#TFTNY 14 - Propositions #9: Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars Trainings, lectures, and panel discussions, co-convened with Sven Lütticken

, Nov 2019

Trainings, lectures, and panel discussions with Bini Adamczak; Kader Attia; Tom Holert; Patricia Kaersenhout; Charl Landvreugd; Sven Lütticken; Diana McCarty; Dan McQuillan; Dina Mohamed; Johannes Paul Raether; Rose Hammer (Stacey E. Devoe, Dora Garcia, Nora Joung, Per-Oskar Leu, and Niels Munk Plum); Natascha Sadr Haghighian; Jonas Staal; Terra Critica (Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele); and Transformella Malor (Johannes Paul Raether).

Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars is a week-long series of trainings, lectures, and panel discussions that seeks to bring together artists, theorists, and writers in a range of formats, to actively reflect upon this current moment of ever-more polarizing ideological combat, also reffered to as the “culture wars.” How are these culture wars defined and waged?

The program is focused on discussing and working towards a tactical desertion from the cultural conflicts being waged today in a theater of war, demarcated by the (far-) right through aggressive hypersensitivity, injured entitlement, angry rants, and memes about “cultural Marxism,” immigration, climate change, and feminism. What possibilities would be opened by a refusal to play these war games, and commit desertion—not as a withdrawal into a realm of apolitical privacy, but as a pursuit of different strategies, tactics, and coalitions?

Rather than being merely an object of debate, an emancipatory understanding of culture is to be conceived as embodied and intersubjective, a collective performance that prevents culture from becoming a self-congratulatory exercise among like minds, but marks instead a space of enactment. How to widen this further and create overlaps and alliances? What might artists and others who are professionally engaged with images and imaginaries, narratives and assemblies, have to contribute to the collective discovery of different modes of culture?

Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars is co-convened with writer and curator Sven Lütticken as a temporary spin-off from Trainings for the Not-Yet and the ninth iteration of BAK’s long-term research series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), which seeks to collectively think and act out ways of being together otherwise.