The Western official understanding of community differentiates between immunized and de-munized bodies and territories, protecting some and sacrificing others. Based on this vision of community, capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal ideology and technologies deploy a wide range of strategies so as to create borders - real and symbolic - political and ontological. They separate, isolate, sort, suppress, silence, invisibilize and kill. They consolidate already existing racisms and anti-feminisms and foster extraction and dispossession. They accelerate the threats on ecosystems and the destruction of knowledges and practices inhabiting the world differently. 

Which vocabularies, stories, narratives, and artistic practices can enable another sense of community, based on social care and environmental justice and human/more-than-human cooperation? Which languages, practices and performance(s) of emancipatory community-making will help to postpone the end of the world? Beyond naïve (but sometimes necessary) idealizations of these concepts, the residency project precisely aims at analyzing current forms of community, their “assets” and “traps”. To do just that, we will transgress competition, separation, borders, and insularization. We will browse the museum space, delve into its history, and meet the many collectives who will be living there at the same time as us. Working with diverse tools of encountering, contextualizing, mapping and putting in common, we will develop a polyphonic score, that will be incarnated in the shape of books, writings, interventions, performances. With this project, the process matters as much as its outcomes.

During our collective residency at Volkskundemuseum, as a polymorphous and unstable collective, that will come and go, that will make und unmake itself. We will explore notions of collective belongings, of what we have in common, on how to encounter, and on how to create forms and methods of allyships so as to collectively imagine emancipatory ways to belong.

The complete course will take place at Volkskundemuseum Vienna. Until July 2024, Volkskundemuseum will host a wide range of collectives who will work there. We are one of them. 

This course is the second of a two-parts seminar throughout the summer 24. We will work further on the texts and artistic practices related to the course topics, and develop methods to encounter the other collectives hosted Besides, we will realise an exhibition and / or a series of public events together with the others students of the department Artistic Strategies, at Volkskundemuseum Vienna.

The exhibition/series of performances will take place from June 3rd until June 11th. Precise dates will be specified and confirmed.

Engagement in discussions, collaboration , attendance & fulfilment over the semester

Critical research, reading, contribution and participation to the exhibition /  series of public events at the Volkskundemuseum Vienna.

The course is complementary to the course Strategies of public interventions. Please register for both courses.