Deserting from the Culture Wars

From November 13 to 17, BAK in Utrecht will be hosting Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars, a week-long series of trainings, lectures, and panel discussions that I curated.

The program seeks—through forms of enactment and performative approaches—to actively evade the current moment of ever-more polarized ideological combat, often characterized as a return of the “culture wars.” Propositions #9 brings together artists, theorists, and writers in a range of formats to actively reflect upon and work toward a tactical desertion from the cultural conflicts being waged today in a theater of war demarcated by the (far-) right through aggressive hypersensitivity, injured entitlement, angry rants, and memes about “cultural Marxism,” immigration, climate change, and feminism. What possibilities would be opened by a refusal to play these war games, and commit desertion—not as a withdrawal into a realm of apolitical privacy, but as a pursuit of different strategies, tactics, and coalitions?

Deserting from the Culture Wars is a “temporary spin off” from Jeanne van Heeswijk’s ongoing BAK project Trainings for the Not-Yet. The full programme is here.