Thinking Together
Ideas about co-existence
Thursday, July 31 – Saturday, August 09
day-to-day, Osthang campus
theory-related format
As a temporary venue for exchanging experience and knowledge, the Osthang Project brings together people who, in theory and practice, address alternative ‘co-existence’ models: members of artistic and activist collectives as well as self-organized groups that experiment with alternative production and cooperation practices; developers of viable models in the fields of business, finance, technology, ecology, architecture, urban planning and agriculture.
The ‘Thinking Together’ format is intended to provide the invited international guests as well as local and visiting guests with plenty of time for an intensive exchange of ideas beyond conventional knowledge transfer formats.
For three to four days they are each invited to spend time on the Osthang Campus to work on core questions about the relation between space, art, society, and culture. The focus of the international participants’ works are in each case intended to serve as a point of departure for further discourse.
‘Thinking Together’ was curated by Berno Odo Polzer. From 2000 to 2009 the Austrian was curator and Artistic Director of the Wien Modern Festival. Since 2010 he has been concentrating on freelance artistic and curating projects, as well as his PhD thesis in International Relations at the University of Lapland. As of 2015 he will be Artistic Director of ‘MaerzMusik’, the contemporary music festival at the Berliner Festspiele.
Polzer about ‘Thinking Together’:
„’Thinking Together’ is a transdisciplinary platform for ‘political imagination’: ‘political’ because it is concerned with the way in which we organize the resources, spaces, practices and lives that we share, locally as well as globally; ‘imagination’ because it is aimed at forming new ideas and imaginaries about how to do so. The main theory-related format of the Osthang Project is thus focused on rethinking future modes of living together in a pluricentric world.
The project is set up as a public forum composed of informal seminars, lectures, discussions, film screenings, artistic projects and cooking.
‘Thinking Together’ wants to pay due attention to fundamental transformations currently unfolding in diverse parts of globalised societies: acknowledge them, question them, think with them, understand and learn from them, in order to build on future-oriented imaginaries, practices and strategies.
The format is set to give time and space for unplanned exchange and unprojectable initiatives. Its program structure provides for planned free spaces within which the momentum of ‘Thinking Together’ can unfold. On location a public calendar will inform about short term projects, film programs, discussions, lectures or other interventions.“
