Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

What is the political potential of enactments of a distributed agency? Many theoretical movements and experimental artistic practices explore(d) the agency of (partly) autonomous things and nonhuman bodies – in a highly digitized socio-economic context that encourages endless performances of the self and in which self-sufficiency is prioritized while nonhuman bodies are degraded to profitable ressources. In this lecture the theoretician Martina Ruhsam will talk about posthumanist performances that reimagine the relationship of the human body and a more than human world in order to propose a political reading of several concepts developed in New Materialism. Does a new „politics of materiality“ take shape and can choreography – referring to the Agential Realism developed by Karen Barad – be regarded as intra-action? What would be the political potential of such a definition?