HOLDING SPACES, MAKING CONDITIONS:
Rethinking Infrastructures
Fri 23 May, 5 p.m.

 

Guest event

Part of the Symposium HOLDING SPACES, MAKING CONDITIONS, 22—24 May.
For more info and the full programme click here.

A cooperation of the Society of Artistic Research (gkfd) with the Laboratory of Art and Research (University of Cologne), Transversal Design MA (Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW) and Temporary Gallery.

Infrastructures do not simply provide the conditions for artistic practices—they actively perform and participate in shaping them. As funding landscapes across both cultural and academic sectors contract, this performativity becomes increasingly consequential. Practices situated at the intersection of art, research, and organisation—often processual, durational, and resistant to object-based output—are particularly exposed to structural fragility. This symposium convenes artists, curators, theorists, and cultural producers—to engage with the critical question of how infrastructures for transversal artistic practices might be sustained, collectively built or reimagined. 

Central to the discussion are questions such as: Through which formats and spatial strategies does artistic research create a public? What tensions exist between institutional frameworks and self-organised initiatives? What mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion, and precaritization are at play? Where can we locate zones of agency or resistance—conceptual, material, or infrastructural?

By centering these questions, we aim not only to critique existing conditions but to articulate shared imaginaries and experimental infrastructures that could support the continued unfolding of artistic research. In doing so, we recognize infrastructure as a critical terrain—one that requires ongoing maintenance, care, and collective authorship.

Concept and organisation: Karina Nimmerfall, Lucie Kolb and Leon Filter.


Friday, 23 May
Location: Temporary Gallery

5 p.m. EXHIBITION TOUR
With artistic director (interim) Lisa Klosterkötter

6—9 p.m. PUBLIC PROGRAMME

6 p.m. Welcome and introduction
by Karina Nimmerfall and Lucie Kolb

6:20 p.m. From “Functional Sites” to “Infrastructures for Life”
by Sabeth Buchmann

6:40 p.m. Semi-Formal: Stuck Between an Institution and a Self-organised Place
by Isabelle Sully

7 p.m. Bureaucracy Studies
by Matthias Sohr

7:30 p.m. Panel with Isabelle Sully, Matthias Sohr, Sabeth Buchmann
moderated by Lilian Haberer

8:30 p.m. Who is You: A Letter to the Editors
performed by Leon Filter