Bojana Kunst

What is the future of criticism?

It seems obvious to ask Bojana Kunst this question, because that is precisely what she develops: new forms of critical practice which steer a path between science and art.

In addition to Ljubljana University and the interdisciplinary performance magazine “MASKA”, this also involves international networks, artistic platforms and virtual spaces.

Complicities

The alliances – or rather the complicities – that arise from these movements between discourses, institutions, disciplines and media are never merely a means to an end, but always experimental arrangements.

Since, for Bojana Kunst the decisive factor in the development of critical practices is the question of what forms of cooperation emerge from them. She is concerned with collaboration between radically different knowledge forms, the backgrounds to cultural and historic experience, interest groups etc.: What protocols can affect this collaboration? And which forms of collaboration are able to produce temporarily inhabitable spaces?

Materialism of cooperation

Bojana Kunst is not scared of redefining what materialism actually is, namely

not a materialistic awareness of historical and ideological discourses, but rather a constant physical connecting of collaborative protocols of knowledge production, bodily experiences and inhabitations.

She is concerned here with creating “in-between spaces” and new forms of publicity.

Could this then be the future of criticism? Bojana Kunst thinks not, being generally sceptical about any questions regarding the future. Yet does this question not appear primarily to trigger the impulse to conceptualise oneself as an efficient future factor, i.e. to view oneself as capital that must be productively invested?

Incorporating and giving in to this impulse would then imply that ‘our’ future is always transformed into a capitalist future as soon as we seek to realise it. In this way the future of criticism becomes criticism of the future:

The important question is not really the question of future, which has already been appropriated by the more powerful discourse of global capital. It is much more important to open up the questions of different temporalities […].

Collective movements instead of a stable “we”

Why is this more important? Because the question about the future, our future, always assumes a certain we and thus construes something that cannot be accounted for.

In contrast, examining new forms of collaboration means questioning precisely this axiomatic we and the putative synchronous time that it determines.

Or to put it another way: if a ‘we’ has a future, or perhaps several, is a matter of movement. Seen thus, the ‘in-between spaces’ which Bojana Kunst is interested in, are to be regarded as intersections of various times which meet without fully synchronising.

This must be explored in more detail. We are asking Bojana Kunst to make a prognosis on the future of collaboration. We suspect that this prognosis will at the same time indicate something of the role of ‘future’ and ‘movement’ when people attempt to work together, in other words, when the question is if and how a we is produced. And: do these roles change?

What future has the future here?

We Will Be Together Group

It comes as no surprise to us that Bojana Kunst is to create her prognosis as an experimental collaboration, as a case and movement study, which will itself become the object of investigation:

The prognosis will be done as a case study of We Will Be Together group. With the case study I would like to open up the insight in the complex issue of collaboration, the formation of the plural subjects and the relationship between movement and the group in the future. The formation of the group can disclose us different protocols and technologies of being together in the future, which are tightly linked to the conceptualisation of movement. There is no WE which is not at the same time on the move – the articulation of »plurality« is always connected with the certain notion of movement.

Bojana Kunst announces her presentation When Will We Work Together?:

»She is on the horizon…I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and then the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? It’s good for walking.« With the words of Eduardo Galeano I can at most precise way describe the method of prognosis I would like to use in my talk. Prognosis as a kind of exeprimental excercise, a way how to, as bolivian feminist activist Maria Galindo said, »we place ourselves next to one another, back to back, one in front of the other, according to the necessities of each specific struggle.” Prognosis as a kind of physical reorganisation of the space and time of being together, which is with its imagination of the future activity also directly influencing the modes of reality. I will be one, but how can I speak of many?

In the prognosis I will deal especially with the specifics and proposals of collaboration between art and theory. I would like to walk in-between different ways of being together, trying to grab words and means with which we will work together. Is it possible to create paralel protocols of being together? Can we through work articulate new conditions of artistic practices, new ways of work and articulations of community? And when do we reach them, how do we know? What kind of trace that leaves on us? Can we inflict change? What can we propose about reality? And what can we say to each other about truth?
Featured future guest: Ivana Muller