DAI and Platform BK proudly present Sex, Poetry And Nothing: Abolition Salon, Roaming Assembly #19 curated by Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier. Vishmidt and Stakemeier have invited one group and two individual contributors whose inputs will aim at decentering both the concept of autonomy and of reproduction.
With contributions from: The Sexual Aesthetics Group (Luisa Lorenza Corna, Jenny Nachtigall, Hannah Proctor, Kerstin Stakemeier), Bill Dietz, Ciarán Finalyson & DAI-students (with Mercedes Azpilicueta (in absentia) and Joram Kraaijeveld)
Sunday 18 February, 14:00-18:30, Schunck, Glass Palace, Bongerd 18 in Heerlen
Introduction
Starting from their joint publication Reproducing Autonomy, Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier have started to rethink the relation of those two concepts with regard to their political and aesthetic roles within the systemic developments of the last years. Reproduction served as an immanently affirmative concept that 1970s Marxist feminists inserted into the critiques of capital in order to socialize them. Yet lately it had come to resurface as the figure of an unwanted return, a reproduction that is not only against the system of capital but also one that risks naturalizing its given forms. Vishmidt and Stakemeier have, in their individual work, come to engage a series of constellations that look to disintegrate this connection: looking at the degeneration of reproduction (Stakemeier) and the transvaluation of reproduction (Vishmidt), they have started to reconnect their thinking, seeking out the potential forms of autonomies these processes could enable. In their Roaming Assembly at the DAI Vishmidt and Stakemeier have invited one group and two individual contributors whose inputs will aim at decentering both the concept of autonomy and of reproduction. The contributions will intersect on the terrain of degeneracy as an approach to labour, value, art and emancipation which does not eclipse power and totality but grips its materiality with figures of negation and singularization.
The day will be divided into two thematic strands which will be tightly and unpredictably interwoven: sexual aesthetics and abolition. By ‘sexual aesthetics’ we mean historical examples of aesthetic practices which deliberately break into the modern standards of the ethical life of sexualization, seeking not so much to widen those standards, but to erode its reproductive function within life under capitalism, and ‘abolition’ invokes both practices and the imperative to negate that is informed by material histories of struggle and that can take ontological, aesthetic and political forms.
Program
14:00 Welcome
18:30 Drinks
Practical information 
When: February 18, 2018
Admission is free ~ but please join the event on facebook ~
All lectures and talks will be in English. 
If you wish to join our communal dinner around 19:00, please be sure to make a reservation before Friday, February 16 you are welcome to contact Nikos Doulos.
This edition of the Roaming Assembly is generously hosted by Schunck and will take place in the awesome Glass Palace, Bongerd 18 in Heerlen at less than 5 minutes walking distance from the local train station. 
WALTER books will join Roaming Assembly#19 with a careful selection of books on offer, including Reproducing Autonomy by Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier.
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The Roaming  Assembly, a recurring public symposium scheduled to take place once a month, functioning as it were as the DAI-week’s ‘centerfold’ event. This state-of-the-art speculative and hybrid program explores specific themes and topics of contemporary relevance to the thinking of art in the world today. 
Although closely interlinked with the DAI’s curriculum, Roaming Assembly editions are not conceived as plain extensions of the regular DAI classes and seminars, but rather envisioned as sovereign happenings, designed to mobilize our bodies, our intelligences.
Initiator and curator-in-chief Planetary Campus: Gabriëlle Schleijpen
Senior coordinator Planetary Campus: Nikos Doulos
Documentation: Silvia Ulloa; see our Video Archive
Communication design: Lauren Alexander/Foundland
If you want to receive our DAI-BULLETIN on a monthly base you are welcome to register here.
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This public symposium has been made possible with the support of: