Practice 3: Infrastructural Modes 

Nummer und TypMFA-MFA-Pr00.22H.003 / Moduldurchführung
ModulPractice: 
VeranstalterDepartement Fine Arts
LeitungChristian Hübler, Lorenza Longhi, Francesca Brusa
ECTS21 Credits
VoraussetzungenCourse language: English
ZielgruppenMA Fine Arts students
Open for exchange students
Lernziele / Kompetenzen
  • Engage with conceptual aspects of your artistic practice & how to share this organically.
  • Develop an awareness of the deeper context around your work.
  • Gain an understanding of new concepts of how infrastructures inform materiality, medium, and different production modes.
InhalteWhy to focus on Infrastructure, a term beloved of planners and technocrats? And why in the context of artistic practices? One might say, infrastructure is the condition of our lives: it determines spaces, discipline bodies, allocates resources and privileges. It enables intervention in living processes on all scales in previously unthinkable ways, often without any critical interrogation. Infrastructure eludes representation and one possibility of making it tangible are speculative artistic practices and imaginative invention.

The practice seminar investigates the shades of what infrastructure is, can be, with a focus on how its materiality, immateriality, its codes and rules influence and inspire artistic practices. Focusing on artistic positions and critical readings, we will reflect how the infrastructural context is inevitably intertwined with our own artistic practices, with our ways of presenting and exhibiting.

The seminar will explore artists engaging in infrastructural conditions. We will discuss artists as Andrea Fraser, Ghislaine Leung, BANK Fax-Bak Service, Dan Graham, Theaster Gates, Forensic Architecture and others We will visit exhibitions in Zurich, have group mentorates and engage in collective thinking. The ZHdK will also be a place for investigation, being itself a big algorithmic controlled infrastructure we found ourselves existing within. The second week will revolve around mentorates and “Werkdiskurse”.


About the lecturers:

Christian Hübler / knowbotiq has been experimenting with forms and medialities of knowledge, political representations and epistemic disobedience. In recent projects knowbotiq is investigating and enacting inhuman geographies with the focus on algorithmic governmentalities, libidinous and affective economies and postcolonial violence.

Lorenza Longhi is an artist who lives and works in Zurich. In her practice, using a variety of media she addresses and contests the everyday as a set of standard functional rules, codes, and forms of signification. In her practice, visual elements taken from communication strategies and objects that have a specific role within our contemporaneity are reproduced and remixed together, using laborious craft techniques as a way to complicate their primary forms, empirically test and question their assumed neutrality.

Francesca Brusa is a researcher and curator inquiring emancipatory practices in the arts with respect to labour and the social field. Her work focuses on practices that offer critical, antagonist perspectives; she sees artworks as instances that contribute to theoretical discourses like sensuous political propositions. From 2018 to 2021 she was appointed research fellow at the Faculty of Design and Art at the Free University of Bolzano. She is completing a PhD in Art Theory and Curating between Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Bibliographie / LiteraturWill be handed out during the course.
Leistungsnachweis / TestatanforderungMandatory attendance (minimum 80%); active participation; semester report
TermineTime: 10:00 - 18:00 o'clock

CW 39: 26 / 27 / 28 / 29 / 30 September
CW 48: 28 / 29 / 30 November

Critiques:
CW 48: 01 / 02 December
Bewertungsformbestanden / nicht bestanden
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