Conviviality as Potentiality: From Amnesia and Pandemic towards a Convivial Epistemology

"Conviviality as Potentiality: From Amnesia and Pandemic towards a Convivial Epistemology" proposes a new and topical focus on the concept of conviviality, emphasizing the pandemic as impediment to convivial life. The 21st century can be described as a pandemic century, where conviviality is marked by the global narrative of the pandemic and the social order of distance, contagiousness and isolation. This reconfiguration of spatial and temporal dimensions will not only have implications in terms of how we (re)construct memory and history but also, most importantly, for future conviviality as such.

The aim of this project is to engage in processes of co-establishment with artists in order to establish and share what will be called "convivial epistemologies." In order to attain convivial practices of living together it is necessary to find a new common epistemological ground.

The question of conviviality as potentiality will be researched in connection to relevant predicaments in South Africa, Australia, Lebanon and Austria:

Decolonial practices from LGBT*QIA+ communities for new society formations in the post-apartheid regime in South Africa; refugee and native community activism against nationalist isolationism and white regimes of power in the context of the violent recurrence of coloniality in Australia; the enhancing of community through images and taxonomies of the material in a public image archival space, in the shadow of war in Lebanon; and the conceptualization of convivial epistemologies in exchange with artistic grass-root collectives and art students, migrant organizations and LGBT*QIA+ communities in the context of the anti-migration and anti-refugee regime in Austria.

With local and international artists and research partners, this project seeks to co-develop a new definition and practice of conviviality as positive, affirmative action of doing in the form of changing.