• with Tekla Aslanishvili, João Enxuto, Erica Love,
moderated by Sybille Neumeyer
What are the flows of material and social infrastructures, political and physical borders and practices of statecraft? What are the economic currents between art institutions and energy companies?
In this conversation artists and filmmakers Erica Love, João Enxuto and Tekla Aslanishvili will address the potential of artistic media film and animation to capture the complex, spatially and temporally distributed processes involved in making large-scale infrastructures into a cohesive cinematic timeline. Beyond the political, financial, legal frameworks the authors will discuss the historical role of culture in creating an ‘enchanting aura’ around the territories and technologies of extraction, transit, and energy, which fosters collective investment in uncertain futures (see Harvey & Knox, 2012¹). Finally, the discussion will delve into how these material structures function as organizational tools beyond their intended purposes, shaping the production of knowledge, state borders, and statecraft practices.
Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her practice examines multiscalar socio-economic and ecological transformations through the lens of large infrastructure projects. She holds a Master of Arts in Experimental Film and New Media from the Berlin University of the Arts. Tekla was a 2019 Digital Earth Fellow, a nominee for the Ars-Viva Art Prize 2021, and the recipient of the 2020 Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award. She is currently a fellow at the Graduate School of the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences (BAS) at UdK-Berlin.
João Enxuto and Erica Love are artists who collaborate on projects about the dynamics of creative labor and value. Together they were fellows at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and were awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship (2023 & 2017), and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. They have exhibited work at the Whitney Museum of Art, New Museum, Walker Art Center, Centre Pompidou, Edith-Russ-Haus, among other venues. Enxuto and Love’s writing has been published by Verso Books, MIT Press, Sternberg Press, Mousse, and elsewhere. They are currently on the Board of Advisors of Weird Economies and fellows at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
event in collaboration with Graduate School, UdK Berlin
1 Harvey, P., & Knox, H. (2012). The Enchantments of Infrastructure. Mobilities, 7(4), 521–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2012.718935]