Alle Dinge können anders gedacht werden. Luce Irigaray

Beim Feminist Server Gettogether Exchange Meeting, das im Rahmen des Projektes ZERSTÖREN im esc medien kunst labor stattfindet, werden HackerInnen Entwicklungen rund um Server-Infrastrukturen und deren Nutzung und Veränderbarkeit erörtern.
In einem informellen Setting präsentieren Anne Goldenberg, Ellen Foster, Femke Snelting, Ushi Reiter und Künstlerinnen des Projektes ZERSTÖREN ihre Ansätze im Umgang mit Technologie und diskutieren alte und neue Strategien der täglichen Nutzung des Internets.

Meeting in englischer Sprache.

Anne Goldenberg:

DESTROY / CONSTELLATE

To destroy refers to an action to anhilate, to make something disappear, to bring to a complete end the physical soundness, existence, or usefulness of something seen as undesirable.

To constellate is a practice that allows us to make sense, to allign ourselves (Estela López Solís), or eventually to add stars in a sky already deprived of light (Adrienne Maree Brown, citing Martin Luther King)

A constellation is an ensemble of stars whose appearance from a specific/situated position make them look visibily close enough that civilisations draw links between them, creating meaningful shapes.

A gendered socialisation has associated virility with expertise of destruction and feminity with skills for caring, healing and reconstructing.

Feminist epistemologies have often use deconstructive approaches in order to critic and dismantle the long lasting patterns of power and domination dynamics between genders (machism), but also toward ecosystems (specism). In this mindset, technologies are seens as an extension of dominitation or exploitation, and a result of logical systematic rational efforts. In 1991, in her feminist, antispecist and socialist cyborg manifesto, Donna Haraway proposed the reunion, or more so a recogintion of the fallacy, of those long-standing artificial divisions. If they are united, always already as entwined relations, if there is no war here, what is left for feminism to destroy / deconstruct / unbuild ? Is destruction a virile attribute ? Can feminism be officialy rageous ? And happily killing, opening, destroying unwanted structures, imposed joyfulness (Sara Ahmed) and unclosed toys (Nancy Mauro Flude, 2008). Or is it in particular, exploitative patterns that feminism aims to destroy, in order to rebuild revolutionary structures and other forms of collective beings? From a tactical perspective, Octavia Butler has powerfully depicted this battle between healing vs destroying practices within a patriarcial exploitative structure (Wild Seed) : feminist thought would need to bear some oppressive structures in order to navigate, transform and create new strengths. In order to bring circularity in this process, I'd like to referee to a buddhist or dharma art perspective (Trungpa), where destruction is seen as the last of the 4 kharmic actions (pacifying / enriching / magnetising / destroying)... Destruction becomes the last stage of what resists to the other ones.

If we look at destruction and constellation as circular practices, what guides us to choose what to destroy, create, magnetise, constellate ?

How does contemporary technofeminism enact the destruction of oppressive patterns, while generating a constellation of hopes, solidarities and intersiticial practices, in order to dance forward to a desirable future ?

Destroy | Constellate aims at deepening the practices of destruction and the art of constellating from a decolonial, healing, and technofeminist perspective


A Feminist Server: http://esc.mur.at/de/node/1234
Are you being served? http://vj14.constantvzw.org/
Destroy - Constellate: https://antonieta.vedetas.org/p/a_possible_constellation