Location: RRRIOT HQ, Apollogasse 19, 1070 Wien
Participants: Anne Faucheret (curator), Katrin Hornek (artist), Anne Juren (dancer and choreographer), Vanessa Joan Müller (curator), Marlies Pöschl (artist)
A clubhouse, in French, is among other things a tiny house or shed planted at the back of a garden where all kinds of tools related to building, fixing and gardening may be stored. One can find; shovels, spades, hammers, perhaps a table and some chairs there. Sometimes a clubhouse is also the meeting point for gatherings over beers in the summer. This space and its contents are commonly understood and marked as masculine.
In and outside the clubhouse, technology excludes and discriminates people, cutting through the social fabric according to access, literacy, skills, as well as with respect to the performance of gender. There is an enduring force of identification between technology and manliness—which is the result of the long-standing complex historical and cultural constructions of gender.
In Unlocking the Clubhouse, we will not directly address the discriminations caused by gender bias—impregnating technology from its production to its use—instead we will focus an attack on one of the principle foundations that grounds this form of gender stereotyping: the vision of technology as a masculine culture. We will speak about the inscriptions in technical objects of gendered horizons and functions, participating in the shaping of masculinities and femininities.
One dancer and choreographer, two visual artists and the curators of the exhibition Hysterical Mining. Vienna Biennale 2019, which opens on May 28, at Kunsthalle Wien, discuss and reflect on these issues. Departing from concrete technical objects that we use in our work, from the settings they are originally supposed to be part of, the artists unfold new strategies that could rethink and enable us to use them in other ways, providing them with new meanings, and inscribing them in a new semiotics—able to move from signs and back to reality.
In reference to Madeleine Akrich: we will speak of the scripts embroiled in technical objects as the inscription of projected uses in an object’s design by the engineer; we will speak about the affordances, allowances, prescription and proscription coming from the devices and limiting the uses of the actors they anticipate; we may speak of subscription and the opposite, de-inscription, as the reaction of the anticipated actants to what is prescribed or proscribed to them; we will also speak of shifting out and in, interfacing and plugging in/out, alongside other tactics deployed by the artists invited to unlock the clubhouse!
The talk is part of the Rrriot Festival and organized by Kunsthalle Wien.
Free entry, no registration needed.
