Resilient infrastructures course

Resilient infrastructures course, workshop and research unit at Kabelvåg School of Moving Images, lead by Pelin Tan and Katya Sander

FOOD AND WAYS OF KNOWING: SITE-VISITS, STORY-TELLING, ENTANGLEMENTS

Resilient Infrastructures is a research unit at NFKS aiming at investigating instances of infrastructures for food and food-cultures, seen through the prism of the Anthropocene in relation to specific localities. We investigate our local surroundings in relation to global networks, and develop artistic research through methodologies from art and film, as well as from architecture, sociology, theory and activism.

The Resilient Infrastructures research-hub is shaped by a number of related ambitions: to pursue and learn about entanglements by following very concrete instances of food and its infrastructures, but also to pursue and experiment with ways of knowing; ways of formal­ising knowledge in our everyday lives, as well as within science, and thus also pedagogics. Through dialogues with related scientific communities surrounding us, we seek to research not only what these sciences know, but how they know it: What forms their knowledge is allowed to take, and how these forms are passed on.

By the Anthropocene we mean the current geological age, understood as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment, leading to the beginning of what is termed the 6th mass-extinction. Human beings have for the first time become the primary agents of change on a planetary scale, and the undeniable impacts on the environment makes us the first species that’s become a planet-scale influence – and is aware of that reality.

By entanglements we understand in the light of Karen Barads ideas, where entanglements are not relations between units, as the ones we have seen mapped in eco-system-diagrams in school. Rather, entanglements should be understood as the complicated mesh of involvements and dependencies which do not only “affect”, but rather constitute us and our surroundings.

Through continuous dialogues with food-practitioners surrounding us, especially through site-visits – visiting both traditional, historical, industrial, as well as new and alternative foot-producers and distributers – we follow paths and routes via their entanglements. Story-telling and moving images are central for our investigative methodology, providing ways of interacting, recording and collecting documents, thereby also opening potentials for further interaction. In our presentations, we operate with story-telling as a format that always implies an active and present narrator, but also – along with Donna Haraway – and active and present listener.

The research unit is lead by Katya Sander and Pelin Tan, but consists of teachers, guests and interested students. The activities of the research-hub deliberately involes researchers external as well as internal to the school, together with guests and students from all years, mixing experiences and levels of knowledge in order to experiment and develop pedagogical models for involvment in artistic research from the very beginning of the artistic education.

Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian. She is a member of the Artıkişler Collective and The Silent University, and is involved in artistic and architectural projects that focus on urban conflict, territorial politics, and conditions of labor. She has co-directed films with artist Anton Vidokle on the future of art and society. She has been visiting Professor at NKFS, research fellow in BAK-Utrecht with the theme “Propositions for Non-Fascist Living”, research fellow with The Japan Foundation, doing video interviews about alternative activist and artist run spaces in Japan. She was receiver of Hong Kong Design Trust grant, doing field research and video interviews in the fishing villages and infrastructure in the Pearl River Delta region of China. She has furthermore been research fellow at the Center for the Arts, Design and Social Research in Boston, researcher in the Art History Program at the Istanbul Technical University, Associate Professor and Vice-Dean in the Faculty of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University, visiting Associate Professor at PolyU School of Design of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and more. She has participated in showing or creating exhibitions at places such as the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Istanbul Biennial, the Biennale de Montréal, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Katya Sander is Professor at NKFS. Her artistic practice is conceptually-based, often involving text, photography, film, architecture and interventions. Her work is about production and circulation of social imaginaries: Structures, models and images through which we imagine ourselves as groups, communities and societies – and through which we also imagine what we can do. In Sanders work the imaginary is not only subjective ideas, but also shared, collective articulations and projections of what is possible and what can be imagined. Her work has been exhibited at vendues such as documenta12 in Kassel, Tate Modern in London, MoMa (NY), Red Cat (LA), the Taipei Biennial, MuMok (Vienna), the Danish National Museum (Cph), and others.