In the course of this semester we will build a world. This is very easy: Every story creates a world. Even the smallest element of a narrative hints at a broader context, an environment with its own rules, a milieu with specific inhabitants. This is also very hard: As story-telling, but also story-believing and story-sharing animals, we are not satisfied with just any other world. We want to collectively imagine stories, maps, figures, gestures, languages, games that help us to think and think with. “Think we must! (Virginia Woolf)”, exclaim Isabelle Stengers, Viciane Despret, and Donna Haraway. And also: "We need new stories!" In this seminar we'll ask: Why? How? Which ones?

Starting from and focusing on a particular place, we'll fabulate protagonists and speculate scenarios, we'll sketch possible and impossible futures, pasts and presents, we'll put layer on layer on layer and thus create a thick imaginary on and around this place. We'll investigate into what stories inspire us, what is necessary for building imaginary worlds together, and what can be shared with others. This seminar will be in workshop format, and, at the end, we’ll invite others to our world. We get help from thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Anna Tsing and Alexis Shotwell as well as from the many forms of SF; "science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact, and also, string figures" (Haraway).

Der Kurs wird beim Kick-Off der Abteilung für Ortsbezogene Kunst am Donnerstag, den 03.03.2022 um 10 Uhr am Paulusplatz 5 in 1030 Wien vorgestellt. Dort können alle Fragen den Kurs betreffend besprochen werden

Das Seminar kann in deutscher oder englischer Sprache stattfinden, je nach Präferenzen und Bedürfnissen der Gruppe (erfahrungsgemäß ist das englisch). Die zu lesenden Texte und Videos, die wir gemeinsam sehen werden, sind in englischer bzw. amerikanischer Sprache.