31 October 19, 2–6 pm
Venue: KW Studio, Front building, 1st floor

In English


Limited capacity, please RSVP to reservation@kw-berlin.de prior to the event.

Semi-public seminar with Diakron (DK) and Sam Hart as the second part of Rachal Bradley’s program series The Erotics of Infrastructure taking place from 29 October – 8 November 19 at KW.

This semi-public seminar brings together participants from Part I with two new positions to expand on the topics carved out in the first seminar and introduces new aspects of the conversation on and around infrastructure. Participants from the first part give way to new while the former sit as a Chorus in the forum, besides the public audience (and KW’s permanent employees) who is invited to partake in the discussion.

Scholar Aslak Aamot Kjærulff from Diakron, a Copenhagen based studio for transdisciplinary research and practice, will introduce his work with developing ‘Primer’. Primer is a platform for artistic and organizational development, developed in collaboration with Aquaporin, a global water technology company. Aquaporin develops water purification technologies, utilizing the water channel protein named aquaporin. Primer is a learning experiment, with the mission of exploring what we might learn from crafting new processes across a research-driven technology company and a network of artists, social scientists, philosophers, and more, engaged in discussions of techno-diversity.

Sam Hart is a scientist, strategist and editor working across computational biology and distributed publishing. His current research critically examines the evolutionary metaphor in technological development and the organizational logic of markets.

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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.

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