Moderation: Cord Riechelmann
Part of the festival “The Mole Keeps on Digging. Animals / Politics / Performance”
The presentation will depart from the imaginary of the underground as a refuge and as a place of resistance building. The solitary figure of the mole will accompany a series of excursuses through the chthonic propensities of cultural and activist practices, seen on the backdrop of and opposed to a battle for the sun and the upper land. There will be wandering in the depths of post-apocalyptic shelters and wondering why there is not more passion in the claim of the 99% for the light. Other figures from the mole’s peers within darkness, such as the rat and the bat, will be summoned to a discussion on how to develop other senses when sight is obscured and how to invoke the good spirits of the underworlds. Examples will range from precarious art spaces relegated to unhealthy, potentially lethal basements to tunnel-boring machines named after Orthodox saints; from a giant mole as a manifestation of punishment for greed to people standing united against darkness in the City of Ember; and from the figures of solitary hackers working in remote, anonymous places to their ways of network-operating and infiltrating, teaching us possible modes of being in the future. Whether this future will be bright or lived under the constant menace of blackout, the possibility for its very existence seems to be configured only in and by a horizon of collectiveness.
Supported by the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
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