geopolitical imagination ∞ community kitchen
Students of the MA Critical Studies together with different communities in Vienna.
A project in the context of the focus Academy | Art | Public Sphere at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
A series of events and conversations dedicated to the issue of geopolitical imagination that seeks to provide a collective space of care and thought through the sharing of food.
This project consists of a series of community kitchen events and conversations dedicated to the issue of geopolitical imagination. It seeks to provide a collective non-commercial space of care and thought in connection with various communities in Vienna, as well as to create a process of sense-making and critical analysis of current (geopolitical) situations.
The project arose as a reaction to the intensification of the Russian military attack in Ukraine, the return of Cold War logics, the double standards of humanitarian action and the racist parameters of solidarity at play. It also started as a collective urge to make sense and to find ways in which we – a group of students from the Master in Critical Studies – together with a range of communities and initiatives in Vienna, could actively engage and facilitate a space for solidarity and critical analysis in the cultural field. As the situation develops, the geopolitical landscape changes at fast pace – and so does our understanding of it. While developing the project, we seek to reflect more and more on what is left out in the prevailing public discourses, and to shift the focus away from the “West” to reconnect with a larger landscape of conflict and neo-colonial/extractivist/imperialist world power relations. This description is intently a work in progress. We see our programme as one which needs to adapt to new questions and critical issues that may appear as diverse geopolitical tensions unfold.