Rahel Spöhrer - Haptic Academia
Public Workshop
November 13, 4pm
Universities are known as environments hostile to the body and affect with a primary focus on cognitive, rational, and critical thought. They are also sites of disciplinary power, inequalities, discrimination, and abuse. At the same time, the bodies that move through these institutions experience their constitution through the skin: the negation of the body becomes a tactile experience within that very institution.
Against the backdrop of this ambivalent reality, the workshop Haptic Academia examines the tactile encounters that shape everyday life on campus. Following a written conversation between Laura U. Marks, who researches and writes about haptic relations, and Rahel Spöhrer, participants are invited to rethink and renarrate campus life from the place of the body, affect and touch.
In short readings, walks, and a series of writing exercises, participants will explore what the university, dedicated to the production and transfer of knowledge, is and becomes when we consider the touchy aspects of this environment, and attend possible modes of responding to and ultimately resisting the tactile hostility of the Institution.
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Rahel Gloria Spöhrer works as a curator, dramaturge and lecturer at the intersection of performance and visual arts.
Since 2021 she is curatorial head of the artsprogram at Zeppelin University. In this context, she has curated exhibitions with Candice Breitz, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Katharina Pia Schütz and organized interdisciplinary programs with Eva von Redecker, Maria Hlavajova, Asal Dardan, Milo Probst, Nazanin Noori, Max Linz and many others. She is active in a range of research projects, networks and collaborations between art and academia. This includes the European training program FEINART, which explores the future of independent art spaces in Europe (2022-2025). As a mentor she is part of the cultural production and policy network تواصل [Tawasol] focusing on the role of the arts in society (2023-2025). During the lockdown she co-founded „h a p t i c a f f i n i t i e s“ a study group on touch, haptic aesthetics and intimacy in the arts. She is further part of of the founding team of “Future Art Education”, a research project on the issue of extradisciplinary teaching and critical pedagogy in art schools at Athens School of Fine Arts (2020-2022). She is co-founder of the performance group THE AGENCY, which has been developing immersive performances that have been shown internationally (2015 - 2022).
In her multifaceted practice she is increasingly concerned with the role, negotiation and im|possibilities of conflict in artistic collaborations, cultural organizations and society.
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Laura U. Marks works in media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus and small footprint media. She programs experimental media for venues around the world. Marks is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. A Grant Strate University Professor, she teaches at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, Canada, on the unrecognized Coast Salish Territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó: lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. She is also active in the SFU Faculty for Palestine and the SFU Council Against Islamophobia.
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