8. 8 November 19, 8 pm

   Venue: KW Studio, Front building, 1st floor

   In English

Public reading with Heike Geißler as the fifth part of Rachal Bradley’s program series The Erotics of Infrastructure taking place from 29 October – 8 November 19 at KW

I lie down on the protective grating of all demonstrations. I lie there as presence, as burden, as product. I lie there as the result of the demonstrations and the disappointed hope for stagings where reality prevails. Reality is a performance I want to call off.

– In: Heike Geißler, Memento Mori – My First Film, 2019

Heike Geißler’s book Seasonal Associate (originally published in German in 2014) is one of the most discussed literary accounts of temporary employment in a post-capitalist labor market in recent years. As part of the program series The Erotics of Infrastructure, Geißler will read from a new text published in 2019 that describes various moments of pausing within contemporary states of exhaustion caused by #MeToo, climate protests, economic poverty, fake news or precarious labor conditions. Geißler proposes a fictional film script that emanates from moments of “lying down”, asking about our empathy vis-à-vis everyday scenarios and different conditions of living as well as strategies that might currently resist the capitalization of experience.

Heike Geißler (born in 1977) is a writer and lecturer living and working in Leipzig. Published writing includes Rosa (2002), Nichts, was tragisch wäre (2007), Fragen für alle (2016), mani bucate money fest (2017), Seasonal Associate (2018, originally published in German in 2014). Geißler is co-publisher of the magazine series Lücken kann man lesen and part of the performance collective George Bele. She is the 2017 recipient of the Villa Massimo grant.

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The Erotics of Infrastructure is a series of workshops, readings, and talks conceived by artist Rachal Bradley (born in 1979, Blackpool, GB) to constitute a discursive body. This proposes an erotics of infrastructure in the sense of Audre Lorde—primarily in, but also outside of the arts. If infrastructure can be understood as obliquely involved in processes of conditioning and regulation, the program examines where and how the idea of the erotic might serve as an approach to sustain and regain agency.

“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need – the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value and life appeal and fulfilment.“ 

– In: Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Kore Press, 2012

Over the course of five events, the discourse evolving at KW will explore how the pleasurable, the charged, and the circuitous might recalibrate infrastructure from a non-neutral to a negotiable framework underlying our perception and our behavior in manifold ways. As such, it is suggested as highly inter-dependent with the people and things inhabiting it. The Erotics of Infrastructure is the second, Berlin-specific iteration of an ongoing program that began at Gasworks, London, in 2017.

The Erotics of Infrastructure is curated by Kathrin Bentele as part of the exhibition The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue.