Status Updates From Promiscuous Infrastructures...

The feminist imagination carves out a site of agency that forms the impetus for action. It […] enables resistant acts to take place by dismantling hegemonic notions of what is permissible under current conditions. The imagination is central to the cultural production of revolutionary movements; its primary role is to signal what could be. […] It is an unwieldy phenomenon, and its currency is chaos.”

“I think poetry is a method. A way of writing. But also a way of being that I need to be and stay close to. I would like to free poetics from the discipline of poetry. To claim poetics without claiming poet. I have never felt comfortable or confident with the label poet. I think there are poetic ways of seeing which transcend the functions of our eyes, that require us whole, present, in the world […].”

“I want knowledge you can sit a while in, knowledge that won't expel you for pontificating knowledge that knows there is no certitude in a political economy that wants you dead or worked to death or alive but not really here, or banished, […], or preoccupied with the violence done unto you […], or trapped by something as arbitrary as a border. Sorry, if the fantastic seems appealing. We're alive there.”

“We believe that conflict is not an aggression […], and that conflict is a necessity and an opportunity to do justice together and avoid polarization. And to also avoid the temptation to take justice into one's own hands, because that kind of situation displays or reconstructs violence, which is not acceptable for us. We think that we really have a collective responsibility when there is conflict.”

“The institution will always keep you busy, which keeps you away from the actual work.”

„I have broken the process of making work down into five distinct phases. […] The idea is that each phase, even if artificial, demands a different way of thinking and therefore a different way of collaborating.

These 5 phases are as follows:
1. Collaboratively conceptualizing work
2. Practical making
3. Documentation of process and work
4. Curatorial editing / Post-production
5. Exhibition & Dissemination“

„On questioning: Bayo Akomolafe writes about the potential of generative and humbling questions. Rather than using questions as a logical means to solving the world's problems, Akomolafe offers questioning as means of opening up to how we are already mattering and showing up in the world.“

„If our world is dying piece by piece without our publicity and collectively expressing our grief, we might easily assume that these losses aren't important.

When I speak of our heartbrokenness, I am trying to capture this sorrow that moves between individual grief and the consciousness of all that is so broken in our world [...] I don't believe we can build a different, better world without being heartbroken.“

„Dominant narratives about grief have turned gaslighting into an art form […]. At every turn, we are persuaded that grief is a wild, unacceptable emotion that must be handled, managed, overwritten, and hidden. We are pressured by political and even physical force to prioritize productivity over personal wellbeing, to seek eternity over embodied presence, even as we live through the most traumatic losses.“

„Translated into modern health and mental health practices, pain becomes a condition of individual problems and the elimination of it is the pathway to individual wellbeing and quality of life. You understand this as dominant ways of dealing with embodied problems where pain becomes an unwelcome presence in everyday life that must be regulated, managed, numbed, and eliminated.“

„The garden as a space of disturbance and colonial legacies:

[…] The garden is a heap of disturbance, and it maybe that my particular history, the history I share with millions of people, begins with our ancestors' violent removal from an Eden. The regions of Africa from which they came would have been Eden-like, and the horror that met them in that "New World" could certainly be seen as the Fall.“

„How should we teach? What do we need to learn?

Voice of an Other Education: How about holding a space for long processes of relation-building based on trust, respect, reciprocity and accountability, and through difficulties? For building the capacity for resiliency for holding difficulty while also building the capacity to dream collectively. Put that on your recruitment brochure.“

„Voice of an Other Education: It's as though you are saying that in order to build a better world, we must first completely destroy the Amazon Rainforest because we can then devise innovative reforestation programs... The way I see it, there is an emergency in our systems of learning, and not in what we are learning about.
Your approach loves symptoms and hates root causes.
You keep on making the same mistakes.“

Turning toward education, we see how learning is evermore oriented toward a unipolar notion of "progress" or "development," determined by individual mastery, market competition and profit. We ask instead if higher education could make space for collective practices of critical generosity, reciprocity, respect, and togetherness? Can it hold space for social learning around how to hold each other through uncertainty?

„Rather than modeling education around a heroic narrative of individuals overcoming challenges, towards unquestioning progress, we think about how learning can be oriented towards learning together in difference. By facing it, we wonder how uncertainty can be embraced, or, at worst, how we can avoid panic around uncertainty.“

What you found here was more than you could have known. What happened to you has itself become another porous zone of formless words made of air, legible by those who know, those whose air stories float nearby. They come together and form an airborne archipelago: an archive. An atmospheric singularity — it may be invisible and soundless, but it provides navigation referents for other seafarers of that airy archive.

"In the landscape of silence, the three realms might be: silence imposed from within; silence imposed from without; and silence that exists around what has not yet been named, recognized, described, or admitted. But they are not distinct; they feed each other; and what is unsayable becomes unknowable and vice versa, until something breaks."

The immune system is a kind of memory bank that requires encounters with antigens in order to identify threats correctly. […] Rupa Marya and Raj Patel critique the dominant militaristic description of the immune system to 'fight off' infection and instead articulate it as a complex and nuanced, adaptive and acquired system which is highly dependent and attuned to its specific exposome (incl. social environments).

“Autoarachnology is devoted to change, to continue looping and flattening, knotting and solving, loosening and tightening, playing with the tension of the strings. It is not that the tension is never right, but that 'right' is a process, not a point. […] Every account of the web is a snapshot, a moment frozen in time, while the web is already on the verge of becoming something else.”

“Non-binary resistance requires deconditioning oneself from what Mark Fisher has termed "depressive hedonia" — an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. Being happy is a way of life, not a goal that capitalism disseminates and promises to fulfil. Being happy is a practice of de-alienation and rehumanisation.”

Durability requires maintenance. Maintenance requires commitment, and maybe a shift away from wanting to be the individual-the hero, the innovator, the main character. A shift towards the sidelines, out of visibility, to the tedious, boring, repetitious, repetitive. […] The hardest part in cultivating different ways of being together, in building otherwise webs, is to not see them as a one-time experiment […].

“Differing from the constant need for the new that the art world and capitalism thrive upon, care doesn't seek to innovate, but gives attention to and maintains that which is already there. Often delegated to the private, caring as a reproductive activity is essentially unpaid, not considered labor, and still mostly performed by women.”

“"To care" describes a state of emotional affectabil-ity, of being touched, set in motion, by something or someone. Caring, in its non-institutionalised forms, means to refuse indifference. It means to refuse looking away. […] Caring means acknowledging this responsibility, or as Donna Haraway would say, response-ability for forming conditions in which human and non-human beings can thrive.”

“Joy is the opposite of Mark Fisher's depressive hedonia, the constant search for superficial pleasures and excitements in the form of entertainment and consumption, accompanied by a feeling of resignation and powerlessness with regards to the injustices of our systems. […] Spinoza uses the term sadness to describe a state of passivity, a loss in capacity to be affected, […] and to affect things in turn.”

“Joy is not a feeling of bliss or happiness, but a feeling of collective agency, an ability to be affected by others, and to affect others in turn. bergman and Montgomery see mutual relationships of love, care, and trust, rather than abstract ideologies as prerequisites for joined struggle. Joy is about embodiment, about physically being part of something, about giving up control and critical distance.”

“For me, the word "amateur" harnesses the affective side of doing things for collective pleasure/joy while resisting the dull practice of professionalism and business as usual. […]
An amateur is passionate, but doesn't claim expertise, doesn't reaffirm the categories created by specialization and the alienation and separation that come along with it. The amateur steals from disciplines and the undisciplinary.”

“In autoarachnology the auto refers to a self entangled in and constituted through its environments and experiences. Autoarachnology is not concerned with identity or the consolidated self. It understands the self as intrinsically linked to its context, constructed through its relations. […] "The self-enclosed individual is a fiction of Empire, just like the State. 'I' am already a crowd, enmeshed in others."”

The concept of autoarachnology emerged as […] a model for situating myself within all these entangled practices. Autoarachnology is the study of the self as a spider in a web of interrelated concerns, interests, activities, and urgencies. This self is not confined to this body, and certainly not to this mind. It emerges along the lines of an intersubjective web, through encounters with others, human, and non-human.