Practice-based Forms of Reading and Writing

Launch of online publication “Imagination as a Site of Struggle”

Drinks, Snacks & Print Sprint of “Imagination as a Site of Struggle” hosted by Gabriela Aquije and Eva Weinmayr.

Performative Readings / Activation of “Imagination as a Site of Struggle” journal issue with Jackie Wang and Cassandra Troyan (facilitated by Helen Pritchard)

Jackie Wang is a poet, multimedia artist, and scholar of the history and political economy of prisons and police. She is an incoming assistant professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Her poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. Wang’s first book, Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e) Press, 2018), is a widely cited collection of essays on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is also the author of the essay and poetry hybrid books Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun (Semiotext(e) Press, 2023) and the forthcoming collection, The Collected Graces (Coffee House Press).

Cassandra Troyan is a writer, artist, designer. Their current research investigates the community-led abolitionist imaginaries that arise out of situated or land-based struggles in resistance to the “so-called” green and digital transition, and the creative practices used to articulate them. Much of their work within recent years takes the form of co-creating spaces for collaborative processes or political interventions through abolitionist approaches in projects such as, The Anti-Menagerie (2021-Ongoing), In the mouth of the polar bear (Fundacio Foto Colectania, Barcelona, 2021); GROUNDINGS (Linnaeus University, Sweden, 2022); and with the Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective. Individually, they are the author of several books of multi-genre works, wherein they explore how carcerality functions as a mechanism for control between the state, communities, and their collective forms of resistance, in, A Theory in Tears (2016), Freedom & Prostitution (2020), and Against Capture (2022). They’re currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design at Linnaeus University (LNU), researcher in the SNSF-funded project Infrastructural rehearsals: creative responses to the green and digital transition (2024–2028), a PhD candidate at the University of Westminster in The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and an associated PhD researcher in the MAKE/SENSE programme.

Hierarchies of Solidarity

Breakfast & Discussion with சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) & (Moshtari Hilal) مشترى هلال
(moderated by Jonas von Lenthe)

How does solidarity emerge? When are political alliances formed beyond differences, and why do certain struggles seem to garner more solidarity than others? What constitutes solidarity work, and what contradictions, interests and strategies shape it?

Taking their book Hierarchies of Solidarity (Wirklichkeit Books 2024) as departure point, சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) and مشترى هلال (Moshtari Hilal) jointly reflect on a practice that, as an act against oppression, manifests itself in both seemingly small, everyday gestures and global political contexts. The conversation traces the racist structures of the discourse landscape and offers alternative ways of understanding solidarity. The discussion is moderated by Jonas von Lenthe, editor of Hierarchies of Solidarity and publisher at Wirklichkeit Books.

சிிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) is a researcher and essayist based in Berlin. Having studied political geography, they now work on the subjects of statelessness, mobilities and anti-colonial resistance with a special focus on infra structures, logistics and building cultures. வரதராஜா is embedded within the Eelam Tamil liberation movement and has worked for various human and asylum rights organisations in London and Berlin over the Years. Their nonfiction book an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen (to all places that lie behind us) was published by Hanser Verlag in September 2022.

(Moshtari Hilal) مشترى هلال is an artist, researcher and curator who lives in Hamburg. She is a cofounder of the collective AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts and History) and the research project CCC (Curating Through Conflict with Care). In her work, which encompasses both artistic and discursive formats, she is concerned with beauty, ugliness, shame and power. Hilal studied Islamic Studies with a focus on gender, decolonial studies and Cultural Studies in Hamburg, Berlin and London. Her debut novel Hässlichkeit (Ugliness) was published by Hanser Verlag in September 2023.

Research-Creation: queer-feminist speculative fictioning with Sarah E. Truman
Facilitated Ines Kleesattel & Eva Weinmayr

This workshop led by Sarah E. Truman, introduces research-creation—a term for projects at the intersection of arts practice, theory, and research. Truman will discuss how they draw on queer-feminist and speculative thought as methodological framings in research-creation, sharing examples from projects focused on creative writing, multi-modal marginalia, and interdisciplinary speculative fictioning. Participants will then engage in a creative activity and group discussion on the ethics and politics of citation in relation to their own research.

Associate Professor Sarah E. Truman is a trans-disciplinary scholar in literary education, cultural studies, and the arts, and co-director the Literary Education Lab (www.LiteraryEducationLab.org) at University of Melbourne. From 2022–2025, Dr. Truman is an ARC DECRA Fellow, their project ‘Speculative Futures’ focuses on speculative fiction as an interdisciplinary method for thinking about the world and mode of literary engagement in diverse pedagogical settings (high schools, universities, and interdisciplinary scholarship). Truman is also PI on the ARC Linkage Grant ‘Reading Climate’ (2024–2026) which focuses on the relationship between Indigenous climate fictions and climate justice. Truman’s other past and ongoing artistic and scholarly collaborations include WalkingLab, a SSHRC-funded international arts collective (www.WalkingLab.Org) and Oblique Curiosities, a electro folk group (www.ObliqueCuriosities.com).

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Ways of Writing. Proposals for a Collective Exploration
Workshop hosted by Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz (facilitated by Lucie Kolb)

In artistic research, embodied experience, lived context, and the researcher’s situated perspective are central to how knowledge is generated and understood. From this standpoint, not only what we write, but how we write becomes crucial: How can we approach writing as a material, aesthetic, and embodied practice of engagement with/in the world? This workshop invites participants to experiment with a writing situation designed to explore and reflect on the potential of writing as an aesthetic practice of research. Together, we will engage writing as a relational process and further ask: How can situated writing practices be documented in ways that allow them to be shared and transferred across contexts and beyond disciplinary boundaries?

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz (F/CH) is an artist, writer and researcher. Her research focuses on writing as an aesthetic practice of research, embodied processes of sense-making and exploring relationalities within sensory entanglements through writing. A relational approach lies at the heart of her work, which involves various collaborative projects of thinking-in-the-making from a transversal perspective. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts, and lectures in the Department of Cultural Analysis at Zurich University of the Arts.

Critical Media Lab

Infocry
Workshop with fantastic little splash (facilitated by Johannes Bruder)

fantastic little splash’s Infocry project draws inspiration from the concept of the Greek chorus, a foundational element of ancient Greek tragedy that shaped Western democracy and the principles of political equality. Today, while we often perceive online voices as representing “the people,” it is crucial to recognize that some of these emotional expressions may stem from inauthentic actors, raising questions about their motives and consequences. To gather these voices, they used Osavul, an AI-powered software that analyzes vast amounts of text data, grouping similar comments together. This process allows for the identification of patterns among seemingly independent statements, revealing coordinated narratives across different users and publications. They will introduce the process and a device that they built which acts as a chorus machine for inauthentic actors’ voices.

fantastic little splash is a collective comprised of journalist/artist Lera Malchenko and artist/director Oleksandr Hants. fantastic little splash combines art practice and media studies to research collective imagination and emotions appropriation in technosocial systems. Group works with videos, texts and interactive game-based tools. Established in 2016 in Ukraine, their projects have been exhibited at events including transmediale, post.MoMA, Plokta TV, Ars Electronica, Liste Art Fair Basel, Construction festival VI x CYNETART, KISFF, and Docudays, among others. fantastic little splash – participants of the transmediale x Pro Helvetia Residency 2022, and the Cité internationale des arts residency 2023.

Drinks & Snacks Assembly
Closing remarks by Lucie Kolb