Unfamiliar Ties: Hypercultural Conversations

Once a month, we invite to get together with changing guest, discussing hypercultural forms of political, cultural, and non-identarian links, ties, and alliances.

As long as we continue to think, feel and act in terms of “our own” and “their foreign” culture, we contribute to creating, prolonging or deepening mistrust, projection, and reification of others – and thereby contribute to structural violence through exclusion and depreciation, as well as to real violence.
Instead of holding on to the phantasm of a mysteriously intrinsic authenticity of cultures, forever incomprehensible to those, who have not been born into it, we propose to seek out vicinities, affinities, and intimacies with thoughts, experiences and practices of singular persons and people from anywhere.
This doesn’t contradict the necessity to understand and respect specific historical and political struggles in its context, of which art and theory also should bear witness – on the contrary: It is its basis. And, the closer we look, we will also find out that we don’t know who we are. That is why we not only alienate others, but also ourselves, as long as we follow the logic of some generalized projection of “them” and “us, ” without looking closely. Couldn’t it be a good starting point to leave the false promise of identarian certainty behind? How could, to put it in Arendt’s terms, a space of appearance look like, which enables us to get in touch with the “who” and not with the “what” of me, of us, of you, of others?