GROUNDWERK

Whatever the future we are building is going to look like, the basic needs of human survival – nourishment, intimacy, excrement, rest and shelter, movement, social bonds / love and creativity – are not going to change. This is the starting point of GROUNDWERK, a platform for exchanging artful tools, practices and concepts for future reproduction. GROUNDWERK investigates the reproductive sphere and its radical re-organisation and re-contextualisation in order to generate possibilities of future-oriented, urgently needed change.
How does a present and future look like in which we refuse to base our ways of living on extraction, exploitation and the suffering of others – human or other-than-human; in which – as Silvia Federici put it – we refuse to see ourselves as separated from them?
Reproductive movements are daily rituals we repeat in order to maintain our lives and the lives of others. They are our connection to the web of life and hold the key to how we are with the world. We easily hit our limits when it comes to transforming the How and the What of our day-to-day practices – yet they are the very possibility to rehearse change, gradually transforming our relation to the world and enabling macro-political, infrastructural transformation. The sphere of reproduction is a gateway into a future that grows from relations that insist on connection – on material, erotic, embodied and embedded agency – instead of division, exploitation and extraction.
GROUNDWERK / Daniela Bershan invites Deborah Birch, Laura Burns, Fi James, Roni Katz, Sheena McGrandles, Xenia Taniko, Louise Trueheart for three sessions of sharing tools, practices and concepts for future worldings. In this experimental workgroup they collectively delve into analysis, meditations, resonance spaces, storytelling, dreamwork and conversations oriented towards reproductive futures.