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A hybrid festival by Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Digital Solitude program in cooperation with Kunstverein Wagenhalle, Württembergischer Kunstverein, and Merz Akademie. Working with artists and experts from the Digital Solitude community, and collaborating with our local partners in Stuttgart, the festival’s thematic orientation is dedicated to various forms of solidarity, connectivity, cohesion, and togetherness within off- and online spaces. »Fragile Solidarity/Fragile Connections« explores the mutual relations of solidarity, networks, and technologies as a means beyond the so-called digital divide and the technology’s exploitative histories. The festival builds on historical instances, embodied and situated perspectives, and questions of translocal solidarity and interdependencies with technological awareness and its possibilities. It promotes solidarity as an impulse – rooted in like-mindedness, reciprocity, responsibility, and an active engagement in reaching common objectives between multiple communities that recognize unstable patterns, technologies, and connections. Indicating to connectivity, networks, and solidarity as especially fragile agreements, feelings, or movements that are often conveyed through empty declarations – are likely to reproduce similar patterns of erasure and complicity they are attempting to resist. The festival asks: What does a delicate, devoted, and fragile network look like from a critically engaged point of view? What are models for solidarity and lateral exchange online and beyond? What moves people to off- and online networks, and under which urgencies? How can we revisit the term solidarity from critical perspective with feminist, queer, and decolonial influences? The festival consists of various online and offline workshops, an exhibition, and an accompanying forum with screenings, artist talks, lectures, and performances. Parts of the program will be streamed live from Stuttgart’s Kunstverein Wagenhalle, the main venue of the festival, and is designed by the artist duo Blaue Distanz. The festival was curated together with the Digital Solitude Network
