Phantasmography II

SPACES OF ACCUMULATION

14.00—18.00

Michael Hirschbichler

11 ADP

ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION

The studio PHANTASMOGRAPHY II continues our critical engagement with the phantoms and phantasms that shape contemporary spaces and landscapes. While we dealt with spaces of extraction in the past semester, we will now focus on spaces of accumulation. Simply put, everything we make and build happens in a space between extraction and accumulation – between taking something away from somewhere, and gathering it somewhere (else). Extraction and accumulation thus mark the poles of our cultural, political and economic life, and underpin all forms of spatial production. Processes of extraction and accumulation therefore pertain to material resources, commodities, capital,1 living and dead people (human and nonhuman), ideas, histories, etc. To explore such spaces of accumulation, we will work with various landscapes and buildings, warehouses and fulfilment centres, graveyards and dumping grounds, bank vaults and the seemingly immaterial storage spaces of cryptocurrency, museums, collections and archives – with repositories of wealth, objects, bodies, hopes, dreams and fears.

In doing so, we will employ and further develop the approach of “Phantasmography”,2 which combines methods and techniques from architecture, art and anthropology. Following Anna Tsing and others,3 we embrace ghosts and phantoms as useful concepts that help us navigate between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Starting with “research”4 and gradually turning to its speculative transformation (design), we will use reason and imagination to develop strong critical projects that bring manifold phantoms and phantasms to light, and offer new insights into contemporary production of space through accumulation.

The studio will be accompanied by a seminar hosting leading national and international contributors, so as to develop a multifaceted discourse, and anchor our studio work between critical thinking and critical making.

Spirit Cloths, 2021. Photo: Michael Hirschbichler Spirit Cloths, Michael Hirschbichler, 2021 1 See Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Part VII: The Accumulation of Capital, 1867. 2 Building upon and expanding on: Robert Desjarlais, “Phantasmography”, in American Anthropologist 118 (2): 400407. 3 Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 4 Tim Ingold, “Anthropology Between Art and Science: An Essay on the Meaning of Research”, in FIELD Journal 11, Fall 2018.