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- Convenors:
-
Nada Rosa Schroer
(Technical University Dortmund)
Joachim Baur (TU Dortmund University)
Elke Krasny (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
The panel explores unwriting as feminist curatorial research through queer and decolonial walking that pays attention to infrastructural injustice. Through 'walking with’, it reimagines hegemonic infrastructures and challenges colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal logics of knowledge production.
Long Abstract:
The panel explores unwriting as a form of feminist curatorial research and infrastructural critique through queer and decolonial walking practices. Drawing on the posthuman and materialist method of "walking with" (Sundberg, 2014), this practice is complemented by feminist curating, understood as a relational and caring process that fosters transformative social and environmental encounters (Ecologies of Care). It examines how walking as feminist research reimagines hegemonic infrastructures in urban spaces and landscapes shaped by the Anthropocene, highlighting the "infrastructural injustice as experienced when walking" (Krasny/Lingg/Lomoschitz, 2024).
Curatorial feminist walking events are understood as embodied and care-ful research and collective knowledge creation that challenge infrastructural injustice while critiquing the colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal logics of knowledge production embedded in unjust landscapes. Reflecting on the legacy of the colonial explorer and the White flâneur, walking with focuses on how "walking and the senses produce gendered, racialized, and classed bodies” (Springgay/Truman, 2018), countering the objectifying, extractivist and controlling ways in which landscapes, bodies, and movements are traditionally recorded.
Rather than accumulating observations for discretely authored writing projects, the panel aims to discuss feminist curatorial walking with as interdependent, material, and embodied knowledge creation. It invites to reflect what it means to write, rewrite unwrite through curatorial "moving constellations" (Krasny/ Lingg/ Lomoschitz 2024: 168) with an inquiry to ethical and political concerns for “the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (Barad, 2007, p. 303).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future (2019–22) was a four-year curatorial research inquiry with partner cells in Central Asia, China, the Balkans, East Africa that I initially developed in response to the geo-political framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Paper Abstract:
As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future (2019–22) was a four-year curatorial research inquiry with partner cells based in Central Asia, China, the Balkans, and East Africa that I initially developed in response to the geo-political framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
While we learned about the BRI’s impact together, we also learned from, with, and about each other via a long-term process of ‘walking with’ each other, which included regular meetings, intensive workshops, and seminars. We learned how to speak nearby (more than about) China, but also how to speak nearby each other as we searched for ethically and economically sustainable modes of working within a transnational multi-year inquiry whose partners have access to different levels of resources.
Through inquiry, i used Canadian geographer Juanita Sundberg's methodology of walking with, which she separated into two steps. The first step is the act of positioning: that involves locating my body knowledge in relation to the existing paths I know and walk. Sundberg defines the second step as walking with: ‘Walking with means “reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of organizations” involved in the struggle; in other words, respect for the multiplicity of life worlds. Step two, then, involves learning to learn about multiplicity’. Walking with is the methodology that informed and structured As you go… as a curatorial process unfolding over time and with multiple partners living and speaking from different and unequal positions.
Paper Short Abstract:
In my paper, I will explore the question of what role affects play when walking in public nocturnal (urban) space, drawing on the work 'Queer Phenomenology' (2006) by Sara Ahmed. In doing so, I will focus on a queerfeminist practice of walking (together), which I will develop based on so called Take Back the Night demonstrations. Of particular interest to me is the extent to which the affects of fear and rage influence the practice of walking.
Paper Abstract:
In my paper, I will explore the question of what role affects play when walking in public-nocturnal (urban) space. The starting point for these considerations is my dissertation project, in which I deal with the question of how the affect of fear and the public-nocturnal (urban) space are constituted in an interrelationship, also considering the resistive potential of rage and feminist enrollment in the examined space.
Of particular interest to me is the extent to which the affect of fear influences the practice of walking: the question arises as to which bodies can occupy/inhabit which spaces and which paths these bodies can take (cf. Ahmed 2006). From the point of reference of fear, I will work out how affects influence the walking practice of subjects. With a view to a queerfeminist practice of walking, I will also consider the extent to which rage can produce agency and whether subjects in contact with rage can claim other spaces for themselves and tread new paths (cf. Biwi Kefempom 2023; Ahmed 2006).
Using the annual Take Back the Night demonstrations as an example, I would like to talk about collective walking by WLINTA+ people. Based on the example I will show that walking in correlation with other factors, such as the night or being alone, is political and cannot be carried out by all people without hesitation. Boundaries between activism and performative practices are to be dissolved in the paper in order to develop a queer(ing) view of walking.
Paper Short Abstract:
Weaving Reeds Between Two Rivers focuses on the ecological constellations between nomadic pastoralists and the water bodies of Çukurova (Cilicia). Walking with the remnants of nomadic pastoralist ecologies, it assembles counter-cartography and narratives to revive multispecies living knowledge while revealing the ruptures caused by the hegemonic infrastructures.
Paper Abstract:
Weaving Reeds Between Two Rivers focuses on the ecological constellations between nomadic pastoralists and the water bodies of Çukurova (Cilicia). Walking with the remnants of nomadic pastoralist ecologies, it assembles counter-cartography and narratives to revive multi-species living knowledge while revealing the ruptures caused by the hegemonic infrastructures.
Shaped by the rivers flowing from the Taurus Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea, Çukurova was a microclimatic delta region on southern Anatoli co-habited by non-sedentary tribes and water bodies. Over the past century, Çukurova became a global agricultural zone with Turkey’s modernization. The nation-state ideal and agrarian capitalism objectified nomadic pastoralists and water bodies as unruly entities to be domesticated and exploited. Today, their remnants are disregarded and endangered.
The study unearths the seasonal routes of sedentarized nomadic tribes and water through archival and spatial analysis to reweave a meshwork ((Ingold, 2013, p.71) of coexisting ecologies. Walking the landscape with guidance from pastoralist crafts such as herding, foraging, and fermenting, and corresponding with the materials; the research reveals pastoralists’ spatial, material and seasonal interplays with water bodies. Experiencing the current condition of the land, it also investigates the outcomes of the extractivist infrastructures. It forms counter-cartography and narratives weaving the remnants and ruptures of a nomadic pastoralist knowledge situated between two rivers.
Following the post-human critique (Braidotti, 2022) and thinking-through-making (Ingold, 2013, p.21) approach, the proposal explores walking as an embodied research method to challenge exploitative structures and reclaim the memory of Çukurova’s ecology as a site of multi-species resilience and reciprocity.
Paper Short Abstract:
Informed by memory walks, sensory ethnography, oral history interviews, and archival examination of court documents, this paper tracks the establishment of an underground pipeline in a heavily industrialized coastal town in Northwestern Turkey. I follow this pipeline with Yasar and Gulten, a retired high school teacher and a former mukhtar (an elected public administrator at the scale of a neighborhood), who are residents of the coastal town and were involved in a legal battle with the gas company over rejecting the company's land grab. During a memory walk, we stop along the points of reference to examine a legal battle between Gulten, her friends, and the gas company, where the pipeline gets closest to the surface through the cracks on the asphalt. Gluten and Yasar’s memory walk around the pipeline reveals business and family histories as landscape histories, placed, and in relationship with the soil, asphalt, water, and sediment. In that, we can finally think of infrastructure not as something that conveys the already existing inequalities to places and people, but as something that makes the space not only a condition of life and liveliness, an entanglement of life and death.
Paper Abstract:
Since the early 2000s, the coastal land around the Gulf of Izmit in Northwestern Turkey has been captured and extended by global maritime industries reminiscent of imperial nodes. Heavy industries multiply and compete for land, weaving through quaint coastal towns. Informed by memory walks, sensory ethnography, and court documents, this paper tracks the construction of an underground pipeline. I walk through this pipeline with Yasar and Gulten, a retired high school teacher and a former mukhtar who proclaimed that the pipeline construction had started in conflict with municipal planning in the following weeks of a 7.1 M earthquake in the Gulf of Izmit, which created a massive infrastructural meltdown and gaps in municipal authority in 1999. Our walk along the pipeline facilitates an examination of the legal battle between Gulten, her friends, and the gas company. The walker's narratives mirror the spectral quality of the pipeline in a heterogeneous act of remembering and knowing. Although we cannot see the body of the pipes, we trace it through the cracks and bumps on the road, and the memories of lived experiences. Gluten and Yasar’s act of walking around the pipeline reveals business and family histories as landscape histories, placed and in relationship with the soil, asphalt, water, and sediment. In that, we can finally think of infrastructure not only as something that conveys the existing inequalities to places and people but as something that makes the space a condition of life and liveliness, an entanglement of life and death.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores the multi-modal method of Decolonial Flânerie developed by members of the Amo Collective Berlin. Through performative city walks in the imaginary company of 18th century Afro-German scholar Anton Wilhelm Amo, urban space is being read against the grain, shedding light on untold (hi)stories and engaging in collective future-making.
Paper Abstract:
The Institute for European Ethnology (IfEE) of Humboldt University Berlin is located in M*str. A street at the heart of Germany’s capital that has been subject to struggles for renaming for more than 3 decades. These activist-led efforts haven been joined by members of the IfEE in 2019, supporting the call for naming the street after Afro-German Enlightenment scholar Anton Wilhelm Amo. Amo, whose biography clearly illustrates the racist architecture of our society, still inscribed in urban space today, functions as an imaginary companion during performative city walks: Decolonial Flâneries.
This inventive method, developed in the context of the renaming struggles, takes a decolonial turn on the white, male bourgeoise practice of Flânerie (en vogue during Amo’s times) queering it and testing its subversive potentials. Inspired by approaches of Black Flânerie (Hill) and critical fabulation (Hartman) it reads the city against the grain of its colonial inscriptions, reimagining urban space.