Speculative Spaces

Hopscotch Reading Room – Free admission – Start 7 pm

Kurfürstenstraße 14/Haus B, 10785 Berlin, U-Kurfüstenstrasse

On digital decentralization and imperialism – artist talk with Gabriella Torres-Ferrer.

Strategic Auto-Exoticisation
Screening of the film “Your exoticism is my daily bread” and Artist talk with Mukenge/Schellhammer

On digital decentralization and imperialism – artist talk with Gabriella Torres-Ferrer.

What are the capitalist-colonial entanglements behind the promises of interconnectivity, technological decentralization and our everyday digital lives? These are core questions to Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s practice. The artist will present and attempt to contextualize Untitled (What a Crypton), a living sculpture that cross-examine global fintech dreams of deregulated empowerment and sovereignty and what that means for the so-called global south. The work comprises a contemplation that explores the far flung corners of crypto havens, ‘disruptive’ technologies, and the realities of countries striving to synchronize their ‘unstable’ economies to the rhythms of global accumulation circuits.

Strategic Auto-Exoticisation
Artist talk with Mukenge/Schellhammer

The word “exotic” refers to that which is foreign or external to the subject and therefore touches on the image of the Other, the notion, stereotypes and norms of representation. Many thinkers have reflected on images of the Other, stereotypes and norms that are a form of denial of reality. The construction of the Other reflects a hierarchical position: far from understanding the Other, the construction of the Other serves to construct oneself and justify one’s own ideas about the world.
Mukenge/Schellhammer work on the layers of real and imaginary imagery that shape our (un)consciousness. They develop artistic strategies that subvert and deconstruct dynamics of power and hierarchies of representation and imagination resulting from the Western imaginary construct of an elsewhere.