ORIENTierungsplan is a series of discussions in collaboration with ACUD MACHT NEU that decentre Euro-American productions of knowledge as the norm of focus, instead opting to spotlight voices from a region regularly finding itself at the periphery of conversation: West Asia and North Africa (or MENA). Curated and chaired by Erkan Affan, ORIENTierungsplan is a monthly discussion in which activists, artists and researchers living in Berlin will be invited to speak on a field in which they organize, create and work; subverting Western discursive supremacy and instead focusing on alternative productions, analyses and pedagogies of #KNOWLEDGE.
The population of countries and societies belonging to the predominant Western world and culture has been summarized under the acronym WEIRD – “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”—however, the members of these WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations in the world in terms of numbers.
With its exploration called #KNOWLEDGES, the COLLECTIVE PRACTICES program at ACUD MACHT NEU puts its focus on practices that question and turn WEIRD paradigms upside down, break up and recombine them, bring together different cultural approaches to knowledge generation, and address questions such as (among others) how to critically question established hegemonic Western methods (primarily visual and discursively defined) and processes of knowledge production.
In the series COLLECTIVE PRACTICES spanning several months, Andrea Goetzke, Daniela Silvestrin, Inga Seidler and their team of cultural producers will examine “collective practice” as it relates to artistic creation, cultural organizing and social coexistence. Invited to this exploration are scientists, artists and researchers. Originally conceived as an experiment to gain more experience with the topic, the project is now caught up in a global pandemic in which our interdependence is becoming that much more evident. As the topic of “collective practices” has now taken on a whole new dimension and relevance, we are reformatting the program so that it can already begin online.
Since 2014 the initiative ACUD MACHT NEU operates three spaces at Kunsthaus ACUD. The aim is to offer room for discourse, exchange and experimental artistic formats. Further projects of Acud Macht Neu are: the artist development program Amplify and the discussion series Kapsel about science fiction literature from China.