It has now been five years since the publication of the vehemently anti-naturalistic xenofeminist manifesto. Laboria Cuboniks, the authors of the manifest, claims that nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’ – neither material conditions nor social forms. 

One of Laboria Cuboniks members, Diann Bauer, is a British artist and writer, whose focus of research has recently shifted from an "alternative" and "anti-natural" feminism to a broader category – time. She is currently a researcher at Westminster University working on questions regarding the discrepancy between the time at extra-human scale and the linear persistence of temporality, focusing on what this discrepancy means for how we understand ourselves as a species in relation to the Anthropocene. 

Anna Engelhardt, a digital artist working with web platforms as dynamic time loops, shares Diann’s perspective. Anna will talk to Diann about different non-linear ways of structuring time. Together they will try to answer the question of what xenotemporality is and how we define time without treating it as something natural?   

The faces of Anna and Diann will be covered with masks created by Anna in collaboration with artist Medina  Bazargali within their project Machinic Infrastructures of Truth.

SPEAKERS

Anna Engelhardt is a digital artist and decolonial researcher. She holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London. Anna creates web platforms using infrastructure as a conceptual frame and a research method. She is currently working on the Machinic Infrastructures of  Truth platform as part of the Garage.Digital program. Her recent projects include Caring for the Shaky Ground cognitive mapping, Adversarial Infrastructure project and Intermodal Terminal web platform.  

Diann Bauer is an artist and writer based in London. She studied both art and architecture at the Cooper Union in NY and Goldsmiths College, London. She has taught and lectured widely at universities and cultural institutions including Cornell University, Yale University, the New School and Cooper Union (US), HKW (Germany), ETH (Switzerland), DAI (Netherlands), Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon), The Tate and the ICA London. Diann is a member of Laboria Cuboniks, with whom she collaboratively wrote and published “Xenofeminism, A Politics for Alienation” in 2015. She also participates in A.S.T. (the Alliance of the Southern Triangle), a working group of artists, architects and curators that use the art field as a platform to broaden interdisciplinary collaboration with a focus on urbanism and climate change. Bauer works have been screened and exhibited independently at Tate Britain, The ICA, The Showroom and FACT Liverpool, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum, and Socrates sculpture park, New York. She has recently completed a project with Arts at CERN and is currently working as part of a team on the German Pavilion for the 2020 Architecture Biennale in Venice.