(This project seminar is a cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts (MA Critical Studies), the Kunsthalle Wien,

and the University of Applied Arts(KKP),Vienna, namely Anca Benera, Moira Hille, Annette Krauss, and Andrea Popelka.

- If you are interested, please contact annette.krauss@uni-ak.ac.at)

 

The project seminar proposes open study sessions as a format for learning through sharing of resistance strategies against extractive ways of relating to the world and each other. The course is addressed to students with a specific interest in pedagogy, environmental history, political ecology, decoloniality, and politics of resources, with a specific focus on extractivism in art-based research and its institutional formations.

 

Resource extraction is at the core of today's planetary crisis. It forms a complex of mentalities, behaviors and ecologies of power, socio-ecologically destructive modes of organizing life through subjugation, depletion, violence, and non-reciprocity. Therefore, the course will look at both resource extraction in terms of pulling out material resources, as well as to extractivism as a logic of capitalism. 

 

We take the practice and exhibition Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman at Kunsthalle Wien (5.10.2023-17.3.2024) - as a framework or point of departure to jointly facilitate public study sessions in which we can learn about, share, rehearse and try out practices through which we study our own complicities, and in the best sense refuse, resist and oppose modes of extractivism, both in terms of our relationships to land and resources, as well as in terms of social, imaginative, and learning spaces, collaboration and art making. 

 

Da Silva and Neuman propose a planetary view of the world as a single mass, where the human and the non-human are part of each other joined through water, clouds and movements of geological matter in constant flux, alongside questions such as displacement of people, circulation of ideologies, and aesthetics. How can artistic practices initiate, deepen and facilitate experiences of mutual interconnection? And in the words of Denise Ferreira da Silva: How can we imagine the possibilities of a world without time, measurement, or notions of value—a world free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind? (From Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman’s synopsis of their film 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy) 

 

The seminar will take place mostly in a public setting at Kunsthalle am Karlsplatz (inside of the exhibition space), which is open to all visitors and the entry is free during opening hours. External guests will join us for some sessions. While the first phases of the seminar will be prepared by the facilitators/hosts, the aim is that in the later part, in winter, students will form groups and start to work on and facilitate their own study circles (supported by the facilitators/hosts of course).Towards the end of the project seminar, as a result of sorts, the working groups will conceptualize, organize and facilitate public rehearsals / public study circles that take place at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna’s Rundgang and at the Kunsthalle Wien in the second half of January 2024. The second event at Kunsthalle Wien will be part of the educational and public program of the exhibition by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman.

- Regular attendance

- Participation in working groups

- Reading of the assigned texts

- Active participation in the public study sessions

- Facilitation of public study sessions during the semester

- Realize, i.e. conceptualize, prepare, organize, and facilitate public study sessions at the Academy of Fine Arts’ Rundgang and the Kunsthalle Wien (which will be more public and visible than the study sessions in the seminar)

The aim of the project is to deepen the students’ knowledges and practices by offering a space of reflection and experimentation and thus further developing their own practice. In this regard, we assemble various practices and methods that critically address the notion of extractivism, that propose an alternative experience of the world, that does not primarily survey, control, and monetize, but is guided by alternative senses and practices.

- Introduction to theories and practices regarding resource extraction and extractivism

- Knowledge of artistic practices and research methods

- Skills to realize, i.e. conceptualize, organize, and facilitate public study sessions and events

- Skills to collaboratively research and to present research-in-process to the seminar and to a larger public

- Contextualization of one’s own working and research methods

Schedule:

Session 1: Thurs 12. October 1-4 pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 2: Tues 17. October 18-20pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 3: Tues 24. October 16-19 pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlspl
Session 4: Thurs 9. November 13-16pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 5: Thurs 16. November 13-19 pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 6: Thurs 23. November 17-21pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 7: Tues 12. December 14-17pm ; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 8: Thurs 14. December 13-16pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 9: Tues 9. January 14-17pm; Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 10: Tues 16. January (time tbc); Location: Kunsthalle Karlsplatz
Session 11: Fri Thurs 19. January (time tbc); location: Rundgang Academy of Fine Arts