with: Pedro Oliveira, Teresa Dillon, Possible Bodies, Sumugan Sivanesan & Irina Mutt, Adriana Knouf

With the recent corona crisis, the world felt fragmented and connected at the same time. As borders closed and people found themselves grounded, ways of remote communication and work prevailed. Popular apps and platforms kept individuals, families, communities and teams together with the screen becoming the context and the stage. A new »safe« connected reality came in contrast with an »outside« world where anxiety and mistrust for physical encounters emerged, and forms of discrimination and racism were strengthened. The new practices of quarantine quickly raised questions: What changes if (or once) localities, languages and habits meet [only] in the virtual sphere, and how would this shape forms of resistance and solidarity? How do sovereign technological infrastructures affect our ways of relating? Which networks and tools can be used to empower new forms of world-building and life-making?

Nepantlas is a cluster of online talks focusing on »architectures« and infrastructures – social and technological – based on relations of care, respect and interdependence. The title is inspired by the work of Gloria Andalzúa who uses the Nahuatl word Nepantla to express the potential of spaces lying in between, at the cracks between worlds. A nepantla operates as a bridge and allows scenarios to merge, perspectives to shift, and affective bonds to be made. Wishing to explore the possibilities of such spaces within today’s fragmented world, the program turns its attention to initiatives that aim to provoke change and empower social transformation. Feminist and queer infrastructures, machinic and living networks, pirate media and end to end protocols will be revisited and discussed as examples of systems that create relations within and among communities, temporalities and cultures. In accordance with its topic on transformation for the 30 year anniversary, the Akademie Schloss Solitude invites former fellows and special guests to discuss models that help in articulating new realities and encourage one to move within and between territories, networks and worlds.

Nepantlas is a monthly event, taking place online.