5 November 19, 11 am–5 pm

Venue: KW Studio, Front building, 1st floor 

In English


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

Public workshop as the fourth part of Rachal Bradley’s program series The Erotics of Infrastructure taking place from October 29–November 9, 2019 at KW.

Digital capitalism seeks as its fuel the body of the producer-consumer. 24/7 streaming services, shopping opportunities, information and data mining, online-banking, flexible and casual employment, emotional labor – the rhythms of the human body vital for the nervous, endocrine and immune system as well as for the consolidation and recovery today seem interrupted and disturbed. The frazzled neo-liberal body remains simultaneously wired and fatigued, stimulated and numb, free and restricted.

This one-day workshop offers participants a practical demonstration of the preparation of herbal medicine. Medical herbalist Lucie Bradley will discuss the history of the use of specific herbs such as marigold to address the bio-chemical production of the neo-liberal body and how these herbs can work on a somatic physiological level to help the body find its homeostatic dynamic equilibrium.

Lucie Bradley is a professionally trained, registered Medical Herbalist with 11 years clinical experience, educated to Master’s degree level. She is a clinical practitioner in Glasgow, Scotland with an extensive herbal apothecary at her home. She is a business-woman and entrepreneur with a niche product range of off the shelf pre-blended, organic, therapeutic grade plant-based remedies. She is a mother and passionate custodian and curator of herbal medicine with a focus on body autonomy and health sovereignty.

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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.