Worldbuilding in an era of extreme fragmentation

This one-day conference is an interdisciplinary event taking as its starting point the fragmentation thesis, based on the observation that our political conversations online – in forums, social media platforms, or discussion sites – are secluded into ideologically uniform groups. This tendency towards homophily is nothing new yet it has dramatically taken speed recently, to the point that it can be seen as a planetary condition of our times. The infrastructural changes in our digital networks – privatization, tracking, and algorithmic rationality – are not the sole explanatory factors. Finance capitalism, genocidal conflicts, climate crisis, as well as ambient anxiety all trigger responses that tend to favor withdrawal strategies.

The common and the 99% now tend to give ground to decentered small-scale, semi-private, invite-only forms of thinking, making, connecting, and building – in art, activism, fandom and worldbuilding alike. This strategy is certainly the most realistic: it acknowledges the impossibility of a direct opposition to platform monopolies, just as it inherits the failures of trying to repurpose mainstream corporate media in the previous decade. But where does it leave the emancipatory gestures, the utopian acts of worldbuilding, the exhilarated gambles on futurity? Can post-individualist fictioning, weirded narratives, cyber-imaginaries or emancipatory e-deologies still sustain collective horizons? We will ask ourselves how artists and arts practitioners respond to our era of extreme fragmentation, where they organize, what forms these alter-imaginaries can take, and which kind of practices they might produce.

From 9 am to 4 pm

9:00 - Welcome coffee

9:30 - Introduction by Ingrid Luquet-Gad

10:00 - Helen Hester

10:40 - OMSK Social Club

11:45 - Q&A

12:40 - 14:00 - Lunch break 

14:00 - Bassam El Baroni

14:40 - Josèfa Ntjam

15:20 - 16:00 - Q&A

Ingrid Luquet-Gad is an art critic, researcher and lecturer based in Paris. She is currently a doctoral candidate in art history and media theory at UNIL – Université de Lausanne and at Université Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint Denis where she works on a collectivist, para-institutional history of post-internet art. She oversaw the arts section of Les Inrockuptibles and has been a regular contributor to Artforum, Cura, Flash Art International, or Spike Art Magazine. She writes about emerging or overlooked artists for exhibition catalogues and artists books, most recently for Fondation Cartier, Julia Stoschek Foundation and MUDAM Luxembourg. She teaches at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and at ÉCAL/École cantonale d’art de Lausanne.

Helen Hester, is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction. Her latest book, Post-Work: What it is, why it matters, and how we get there (written with Will Stronge), was released in February. Her other books include After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (2023, with Nick Srnicek), Xenofeminism (2018) and Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (2014).

Bassam El Baroni Bassam El Baroni is a curator, writer, and associate professor in curating and mediating art at Aalto University, Finland. His work explores the intersections of curatorial practice, technology, political economy, and activism. Key curatorial projects include Infrahauntologies (Oldenburg, DE & Bourges FR, 2021–2022), What Hope Looks Like After Hope (Home Works 7, Beirut, 2015), Agitationism (Eva International - Ireland’s Biennial, 2014), and Manifesta 8 (Murcia, 2010–2011, co-curator). Recent publications include Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (editor, Sternberg, 2022).

OMSK Social Club is a stewarded and sprawling collective whose artistic practice is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one, creating a chasm of enquiry that takes the form of a specific immersive methodology they coined in 2017, called Real Game Play: collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, media relics are harvested such as films, scripts and large-scale installations invoking states and gateways that could potentially be a fiction or a yet, unlived reality. 

They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theatres and off-sites such as Martin Gropius Bau, House of Electronic Kunst Basel, HKW, Berlin, MUDAM, Luxemburg, La Casa Encendida, Madrid and Light Art Space Berlin. They have been included in CTM Festival (2021), 34th Ljubljana Biennial (2021) 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018) and Impakt Festival (2018). In 2021 they co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.

Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Gleaning the raw material of her work from the internet, books on natural sciences and photographic archives, Ntjam uses assemblage – of images, words, sounds, and stories – as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying hegemonic discourses on origin, identity and race. Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions and philosophical concepts, to which she confronts references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism and science-fiction. These apparently heterogeneous discourses and iconographies are marshalled together in an effort to re-appropriate History while speculating on not-yet-determined space-times – interstitial worlds where systems of perception and naming of fixed (id)entities no longer operate. From there, Ntjam composes utopian cartographies and ontological fictions in which technological fantasy, intergalactic voyages and hypothetical underwater civilizations become the matrix for a practice of emancipation that promotes the emergence of inclusive, processual and resilient communities.

Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz, France, and currently lives and works in Saint-Étienne, France. She studied in Amiens, France, Dakar, Senegal (Cheikh Anta Diop University) and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges, France (2015), and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy, France (2017). 

Orgnized by Ingrid Luquet-Gad