29 October 19, 10 am–7 pm
In English

Workshop with Ernest Ah, Rosa Aiello, Kathrin Bentele, Gerry Bibby, Rachal Bradley, Timothy Davies, Parr Wei Geng, and Laurie Rojas, as the first part of Rachal Bradley’s program series The Erotics of Infrastructure taking place from 29 October – 8 November 19 at KW.

The Erotics of Infrastructure is a series of workshops, readings, and talks conceived by artist Rachal Bradley (*1979 in 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.

This first event, organized as a one-day workshop, invites a closed group of artists, writers, curators, activists, employees of KW and theorists to present research material on and around infrastructure that will provide a basis of discussion for the following four public events. For the different contributors, this will take various forms; from artworks and moving image to the provision of utilities and models for social organization. Infrastructure is being addressed from positions and practices operating through and concerned with language, writing, art, architecture, technology, biology, ethics and social activism.

Rosa Aiello is an artist working with video, computer generated imagery and text, often looking at the way language, narrative devices, domestic architecture and other structural parameters are involved in processes of socialization.

Gerry Bibby is an artist and writer living in Berlin.

Timothy Davies’ art practice operates through inter-textual relations, matchmaking unprecedented conjugations between found and slightly modified objects, motifs and images. It does not so much present new information as point to the contingencies of what is seemingly “given”.

Parr Wei Geng is a biochemist-turned artist and researcher whose interests span from interspecies communication and synthetic biology to the uncanny cognitive dissonance caused by encounters between “Metis” and “Techne”.

Laurie Rojas is an art critic and Senior Editor at Spike Art Magazine, Berlin. Her writing has appeared in The Art Newspaper, Artsy, Artnet, Arts of the Working Class, Caesura, focusing, among others, on socially-engaged art, ambivalence in artworks, art criticism after its eclipse, and questions of social emancipation.

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