This course provides versatile tools with which to develop critical thinking. The student learns to situate their own artistic practice/interest in broader contexts in the field of art and theory. The course surveys the current lexicon of art and aesthetics, and emphasizes queer feminist and decolonial perspectives that challenge existing paradigms. 

 From March to May 2024, this course will be a part of the collective residency project Under the skin of the pasts and futures or: How to inhabit a Volkskundemuseum? at Volkskundemuseum Wien by the department of Artistic Strategies. The course is a series of blocked workshop sessions that culminate in the physical realization of artistic concepts from last term, and in turn tests possibilities of display and collaboration within the site of the Museum.

The course is co-held with the other classes of the Department of Artistic Strategies and will take place at the Volkskundemuseum Wien, Laudongasse 6-8, 1080. 

Exhibition concept:

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. (Anne Faurechet)

*Please note that Introduction to Artistic Strategies (Theory) with Stephanie Misa and Introduction to Artistic Strategies (Practice) with Mika Maruyama are co-taught classes for 4 ECTS credits. Please register for both classes.