Affairs Chapter II

Anorak presents Affairs, a two-part workshop programme dedicated to the open relationships and loose ends within collective artistic processes. In the second chapter, artists, cultural workers and researchers will share their practice in a series of cross-genre workshops to explore spaces of collaborative agency, resistance and obligation that emerge from the exchange with others.

There is a limited number of participants for the workshops. Please register for the workshops via jule@anorakanorak.com.

Affairs is a project by anorak and is realised in cooperation with HuMBase, Kunstbuero of Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.

Workshop

The Good Bread

w/ Verlag für Handbücher and Lukas Ludwig

Friday 20 August, 6–9pm | Saturday 21 August, 10am–6pm | Sunday 22 August, noon–8pm, in German and English

The metaphor is the sourdough’s worst enemy. Beyond the comfort of petty-bourgeois vintage-baking, sourdough bread has fallen by the wayside of history. Modernity’s roadkill, it was displaced by isolated yeast cultures that more efficiently fed the newly alienated masses post 1800. Today, sourdough is fetishised as a pre-modern fantasy of self-sufficiency. This workshop will revolve around The Good Bread: starting, feeding, oven knowledge and baking. In between, meanwhile and beyond, we will touch on the societal, economic and social conditions of nutrition.

Verlag für Handbücher (Björn Kühn & Anna Schiefer) works with issues of ‘use’ in artistic practice by means of performance and publishing.

Lukas Ludwig is a freelance curator, lecturer and cook. He is interested in collaborative practices, donkeys and the melancholic-depressive complex in a present of continuous crisis.

Workshop

Second Orality and Internet Folklore

w/ Florian Model and Tommaso Venturini

Friday 20 August, 6–9pm | Saturday 21 August, 10am–6pm | Sunday 22 August, 10am–8pm, in English

“Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It … creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice … Radio is … a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and animosities …” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964. p. 306)

Once again, the prophecies of McLuhan seem to be vindicated and amplified by digital media. The Great Meme War, Pizzagate, QAnon, but also several less toxic phenomena such as LOL Cats and Flat Earthers, all seem to point at the rise of a new media genre: a weird mix of inconsistent stories, trolling jokes, hate speech, flame wars very different from previous media narratives, comparable to McLuhan’s proclaimed oral cultures.

In this workshop, instead of dismissing it as fringe internet folklore, we will consider it as a twisted (yet creative) form of cultural production in a communicational environment and experimenting with its strategies.

Florian Model is an artist whose practice meanders between curation and art. He’s interested in the influence of everyday technology on our daily lives and society as a whole by approximating the consequences of these complex systems.

Tommaso Venturini is a researcher at the CNRS Centre for Internet and Society. He is also associate researcher at INRIA and at the médialab of Sciences Po Paris as well as a founding member of the Public Data Lab, focusing on digital methods, media studies, controversy mapping and social modernisation.

Workshop

As if I had been there

w/ HuM-Collective

Saturday 21 August, 10am–6pm | Sunday 22 August, 10am–8pm, in German

How can we authentically reproduce what has been sensed? Does documentation have the potential to be more than just a static image – and what does design have to do with that?

As if I had been there is a workshop about the design of experience and narration. Collectively, we will explore how design can combine and preserve the subjective experiences of an event. This will be tested and implemented by the example of experimental documentation of the workshop programme Affairs.

HuM-Collective (Hannah Häußer & Max Borchert) is a collective for visual communication and transformative design practice. Key aspects to their work are designing collaborative platforms and researching transdisciplinary ways of working as designers.

Performative Intervention

The Red Light Piano

w/ Manuel Pessoa de Lima

Friday 20–Sunday 22 August 2021, sunset to sunrise

In The Red Light Piano, the pianist “lives” in the performance space with a piano while sharing the following on hookup apps: “I am a pianist and I am looking for someone to perform for, in exchange for your audio messages about open relationships that will be broadcast during the performance”. The pianist plays the piano while the received audio messages are played in the background, but also stops once in a while to discuss alternative relationship contracts.

Manuel Pessoa de Lima is a Brazilian performer-composer who works with the color red, is interested in the theme of failure and creates site-specific performances with confessional elements.

Closing event

All for Nothing and Nothing for All

Sunday 22 August 2021, from 5pm

On the last day of Affairs, the workshop participants invite you to an open presentation and reflection on the processes and experiences of the previous days.