An Archive of Escape Fantasies
[1]This collective visualization represents the workshop’s attempt to create its own archive on escape fantasies, inspired through theory and practice of the workshop sessions, which featured several interview with local Berlin artists and curators. In order to view all the details, you can also download and view the entire map on your own device.
- This contribution is published as the workshop findings of “An Archive of Escape Fantasies”. The workshop was convened by Viola Hildebrand-Schat and Paul Wiersbinski and took place online from October 2021 – March 2022 as part of the Whole Life Academy Berlin. ↑
This contribution is published in the framework of the Whole Life Academy as part of the workshop “An Archive of Escape Fantasies”.
Connected Material
Archives are often perceived as somewhat static. They look back, they conserve, they remember. But the thinking that was present in the pieces of the Pinkus Archive all addressed ecology, extinction, and political agency in ways that not only extend into our present, but into our future.
This essay explores the plural notion of “ethnofuturisms” by employing a comparative approach. The cultural and political vicissitudes of “futurist” tropes are traced in literary and audiovisual creations that engage with the national, ethnic, and/or racial contexts of the Middle East, African diaspora, East Asia, and former Eastern Bloc.
Epistolary narrative, dialogism, intertextuality, speculative narrative — we imagine this text to be letters between the two of us across different temporalities, making use of a speculative and fragmented narrative in line with the themes we explore in our work: archiving the unarchivable, emotions, memories, and other human conditions within the horizon of extinction.
Chto Delat’s installation Canary Archives employs the imagery of the canary in the coal mine, once used to alarm miners when carbon monoxide levels rose. Where is the canary today, that tells us wether the danger is real? It seems to have gone silent, the sharpest signal it can send. In an emergency newspaper issue under the impression of the Russian war on Ukraine, Chto Delat assembles anti-war views of artists and critics and expresses their solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
The legacy of anti-colonial leader and Pan-Africanist revolutionary Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973) still calls for cultural readings, and not strictly political ones. Contemporary art, so-called “artistic research” and critical theory will benefit from a cross-disciplinary approach which puts Cabral as relevant to art or which turns Cabral’s many contributions into tools.
The video explores the encounter (digital and analogue) between the body and the archive.
Interrogating the archive of “green” extractivism is not just about uncovering access to knowledge, legal knowledge, for example, that can help expose (ecological and economic) crime and that can thus be a starting point for empowering true alternatives and thus alternative ways of living and organizing economic processes. It is also about creating a resonant space for shared thinking and reflection.
CLEPTOCRAZIA is an art and science festival curated by Valeria D’Ambrosio at Villa Romana in Florence. The project aims to disseminate knowledge on the roots of the environmental crisis through a cycle of lectures, screenings and performances with the contribution of international artists and scientists.
The Perverted Archival Image workshop centered on and tentacled off from Studio Baalbeck. The workshop participants created an audio montage of recordings to accompany some of the visual archive material.
This collective chain uses multiple entry points to reflect on the encounter of archival practices, objects and material with non-linear timelines.