Grammar of Urgencies

Grammar of Urgencies (GoU), a long-term rearch project initiated by curator Maren Richter and artist Klaus Schafler, is intrigued by the growing recognition of the geological forces, which shape the “now” in more direct and urgent ways. The GoU, conceived as a critical observatory, is triggering situational and negotiation instruments, on the theoretical, scientific and political conception of the era as well as the paradigm of the Anthropocene, which we define as a method of periodizing the transition from humanity understood as a “biological agent” into a “geological agent”....

GoU responds to the arena with an experimentation forum which enacts a collaborative mode of thinking and creates physical and discursive space and time for negotiation between different agents from academic and non-academic, disciplinary and inter/non/disciplinary fields, artistic and activists’ practice. Assembled as a form of a collaborative knowledge building process GoU draws on the diversity of a group engaged in researching, critiquing, doing and synthesizing in order to evolve a body of theory and practice—a method which is often utilized in social sciences to trace hidden instrumentalizations of inequalities.

The research draws attention to possible counter-imaginary of the ‘Eco-Eco’ paradigm, the commodification of ecology, which produces a permanent mode of urgencies/crises. Urgency can only become a serious force – as we argue- when it poses the possibility of thinking the present as interval/transition between the “now and then”, “here and there”. This space can be thought as a productive field, also as one of the anexact – theorized by Deleuze as the essentially but not accidentally unexact. GoU investigates the passage in its representational syntax as well as in its subversive potentiality- to become a point of departure for creating different grammars of criticality of what “urgencies” are on a non/representational and non/universal discourse of in/finitude. What kinds of local narratives and fields of ‘Handlung’ arise in the new alliance of Eco-Eco with the either named Anthropocene, the Post-Anthropocene or the Post-Human, which seems to be a device to map the loss of control of the ‘Eco-Eco’ power?

GoU creates space and time for negotiation and exchange between residents, artists, activists, researchers and theorists in different places and different modes of localities and ecologies for conceptualizing, imagining, and ‘de-naturalizing’ time, space and language. One can say GoU is employed as an operating concept of a critical practice –that shapes an experimental space for a rite of passage.

[Quelle: https://grammarofurgencies.wordpress.com/]