The Department Handlungspotential is a thought experiment that looks into fairer forms of future co-existence and possible and necessary components of socially committed action from a queer perspective. How can established ways of life be modified or rethought? Which values and lines of action are relevant? Department Handlungspotential representative and artist Franziska Goralski invites participation in the search for possible answers and exploring new spaces.
A potential for action (Handlungspotential) is the potential that enables an action. Everything starts with an idea, but it takes an impulse to start an action. Potential for action is the affective space that exists just before an action begins.
At the moment, the Department Handlungspotential focuses on shaping and developing a learning environment and practices that are based on notations of queer commoning. It facilitates (un-)learning opportunities.
Commoning is the collective and need-oriented maintenance, production, cultivation, and/or usage of natural resources like air, water, or land, but also of cultural resources like knowledge, time, or code. The Department Handlungspotential extends the discourse on commons to include queer perspectives. By looking into queer commoning, the Department seeks to research our society, our environment, and so-called norms on a structural level.
The Department Handlungspotential’s temporary field office at D21 Artspace Leipzig welcomes all kinds of exchange. Drop by and dive into figures of thought! You might encounter an exception from the state of things – or even an exceptional state.
The Department Handlungspotential, founded by Fransiska Goralski (FG) in 2016, creates cross-media works and participatory settings through process-oriented and socially committed artistic practices. FG’s transdisciplinary works are research-based and concept-driven. They look into different mental frameworks and question normative categories and power structures. Franziska Goralski joins up with Anna Erdman to form die Blaue Distanz. Their artistic collaboration focuses on queer ways of living, (digital) feminist perspectives, the possibility of low-hierarchy spaces and the visibility of underrepresented decisions.
FG currently lives and works in Dresden and Amsterdam. FG holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Dresden University of Fine Arts and graduated from the temporary programme The Commoners’ Society at the Sandberg Institut in Amsterdam.
*Beverly Glenn-Copeland
