pleasure is usually spoken of like a climate occasion—passing, unpredictable, fleeting.
as if it have been one thing short-lived, with a strictly given temporality.
as if a restricted lifespan have been the precise situation for its existence.
as if an excessive amount of pleasure would develop into poisonous or dangerous,
and one would should be vaccinated in opposition to it already in early childhood.
some say that happiness is a prolongation of pleasure.
however then advertising and marketing corporations took over
and made happiness an important ingredient of each natural smoothie and gymnasium subscription—
taking happiness off the desk in any critical dialogue.
pleasure has been thought of a significant instrument of experiencing, communication, communal constructing, and even resistance. pleasure is definitely a mandatory aspect of any resistance,
alongside rightful anger, disillusionment, or just the lack to soak up all of the normalizing bullshit of a societal management prioritizing the so-called majority over others—made Others.
pleasure has a really particular place amongst all these states of thoughts.
it’s doable to get up each morning with anger in your chest and nonetheless preserve going,
however with out not less than a spark of pleasure—as motivation, as treatment, as navigation instrument—
it’s laborious to maintain convincing oneself what is smart and what doesn’t anymore.
pleasure appears to be a key to many issues,
but to contain them consciously and on demand proves virtually unattainable—
one can self-medicate, one can take pleasure in short-term dopamine kicks
from a plethora of doable addictions our industries are supplying us with to select from—
even communal pleasure has its direct shops by way of all of the raves turning into totally mainstream—
lose your self to bounce comes proper after that scrumptious smoothie lately.
however find out how to entry pleasure that isn’t designed, packaged, and streamed on demand?
i’ve been looking for a second to write down joyfully about pleasure and to date, not a lot luck.
as an alternative, i’m simply somewhat unhappy, melancholic, or just irritated—worn out and drifting,
pleasure is just too slippery to remain nonetheless and simply hover between my eyes and the display screen,
or glue itself to my fingertips hitting the keyboard.
no, pleasure comes unannounced. and that’s okay.
this area is strictly short-term in nature.
it opens. and it closes some months after.
and that’s completely okay.
***
17(Pleasure) is a brand new artwork area in Vienna, initiated by an invite from Ines Lombardi to jen kratochvil to curate a brief undertaking inside one of many areas of Galerie Lombardi—Kargl, beforehand often known as Georg Kargl Everlasting—or somewhat merely, 17. kratochvil’s idea for 17(Pleasure) and its programming aligns with their longstanding curiosity in institutional buildings, energy distribution, and hierarchies throughout the artwork world. this imaginative and prescient is formed by their expertise as director of Kunsthalle Bratislava, a place that led to early 2024 following an autocratic determination by the Slovak Ministry of Tradition, concentrating on the kunsthalle’s queer feminist programming. since then, established establishments have been defunded, handed over to politically appointed management, or hollowed out and stripped of autonomy. folks have been arrested in broad daylight for his or her beliefs, graduates have had visas revoked and diplomas withheld, others brutally deported. in different elements of the world, hunger is used as a weapon of warfare. and regardless that that is unfolding not far-off, however throughout the former strongholds of the liberal democratic order, we nonetheless have a tendency to think about it as fleeting, distant, by some means unrelated—an excessive amount of to completely soak up.
17(Pleasure) is a platform far faraway from the facility to implement actual change. and elevating consciousness now not appears sufficient. but, right here we’re, making an attempt anyway. its programming emerges from an aching sensation of deadlock—from a necessity to collect, to debate, to share experiences and instruments that supply methods of coping, resisting, and constructing structural responses to the present political local weather. all of this takes place throughout the sphere of up to date artwork, whereas on the identical time remaining totally conscious of its limitations—its extremely centered attain, its area of interest audiences, its tendency towards self-referentiality.
it’s inside this rigidity that 17(Pleasure) positions itself—as a web site of convergence for various institutional experiences, bringing collectively curators, artists, artwork theorists, non-art professionals, and the general public. this intersection will take form by way of 5 initiatives, starting in early summer time 2025 and persevering with by way of spring 2026. in its first section, the main focus lies in collaborating with curators somewhat than particular person artists, together with Adelina Luft, Stella Rollig, Ekaterina Degot, Ji-Yoon Han, and Sebastian Cichocki. the presence of Pleasure—fastidiously contained inside parentheses to keep away from getting too excited—shall be visualized and echoed by way of an ongoing sequence of interventions by the artist Martins Kohout.
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“Pleasure. They aren’t an individual or concept, they’re in parenthesis, they’re a reminder of the period of irony actualized by the desperation of the second and the seeming boundlessness of potentialities given by the exhausted international cultural sector, by tradition beneath menace, by the burning fatigue of endlessly enthusiastic artwork employees working on fumes. Pleasure is an archetype of nonexistent origin. Pleasure is a platform, a platform of miscalculated optimism, inserting itself into 17.”
—jen
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In 2025, the exhibition area at Schleifmühlgasse 17 in Vienna begins its transformation into 17 (Pleasure)—a web site for curatorial interventions initiated by Jen Kratochvil and hosted by Lombardi Kargl. This ongoing undertaking proposes JOY as a framework for conviviality and collective resistance, bringing collectively gestures and practices that defy the isolating forces of rising far-right politics, financial precarity, and cultural disenfranchisement.
The present second reaffirms a bigger predicament—felt in a wider European context—of (in)accessibility to areas and the gradual exclusion from a fast-growing city setting by way of the shrinkage and minimization of help for inventive and cultural work. The present political and financial local weather of unregulated actual property markets, institutional disinterest in sustaining non-capitalist infrastructures for the humanities, together with the dearth of authorized buildings to implement types of commoning and participatory democracy for residents, is compelling artists and cultural employees to function throughout the identical aggressive logics of neoliberal markets (licensed because the inventive industries) that favor materials productiveness and particular person prowess—or slowly pushes them in direction of the cities’ margins, if not even into the countryside. Occupying, securing, or sustaining areas for cultural and inventive manufacturing amidst a heightened political hostility in direction of the sector has develop into more and more tough not just for unbiased teams and artists but additionally for personal and governmental establishments, organizations, and museums of various scales.
This sense of precarity and instability of our working grounds can’t be extrapolated (anymore) from the instabilities which are generated by the ecological disaster and ongoing local weather disruptions. The cultural and local weather crises are slowly converging into an inseparable actuality that mirrors our collective precariousness and has generated, albeit on a small scale, a shift in how we view, think about, and observe sustainability—each for human and more-than-human worlds. This shared fragility with the dwelling world allows us to reorient our premises and modes of spatial manufacturing and governance in an effort to rethink processes of coexistence in a long-term durational timeframe, the place what’s safeguarded isn’t just the pure world, however our widespread areas. Our activity now could be to rethink infrastructures not as given, built-in environments, however as websites for regenerative cultures—as areas of transition and turning into, of grounding thought and of performing to safeguard, restore, and take care of multispecies communities. Shifting the paradigm from a social-centric survival to at least one that features a multispecies cohabitation for mutual reinforcement means practising new methods of relating by way of care and restore of biodiversity, cultivating life by way of cross-disciplinary exchanges and methods of being collectively, rescaling inventive manufacturing in relation to limiting sources, practising localized types of commoning, or connecting struggles throughout decolonial, non-capitalist, and non-extractivist horizons. Altogether, they contribute to organising extra sturdy areas for sustaining life and inventive manufacturing which are envisioned to supply long-term change.
In 2022, along with the tranzit.ro/Bucharest affiliation, we started to map a listing of organizations and artists from Romania who’ve taken a leap of religion and moved or initiated new platforms within the village or in nature, pushed by totally different motives—each out of financial constraints or private contingencies, and from a need to rethink inventive work to the advanced interdependencies present in nature. We started with the native context and expanded with extra entries from the area by way of peer-to-peer suggestions, or by assembly neighborhood leaders in worldwide seminars, exhibitions, or undertaking networks. Having been concerned with The Experimental Station for Analysis on Artwork and Life close to Bucharest for the previous three years, I’ve come nearer to a community of organizations with associated practices and goals, working throughout the area of arts and tradition between a rural-urban dynamic. These organizations have been creating hands-on packages of cultivating, handcrafting, developing primary infrastructures, gardening, and collaborating throughout disciplines to share experience and data with architects, biologists, farmers, artists, Indigenous thinkers, and others—by way of a transgenerational passing of data and by together with various and heterogeneous publics. It’s a observe that strikes past the now mainstream tutorial propositions of more-than-human ontologies and integrates each discursive and sensible methodologies of testing and experimenting with real-life circumstances. These realities fluctuate in keeping with scale and geographic specificities, rural and concrete circumstances, entry to totally different materials and immaterial sources, and the way they’re politically imagined or conceived.
The organizations I’ve invited to be offered on this exhibition are initiatives I’ve immediately labored with or met over the previous years by way of totally different collaborations. They’re primarily based in a selected geography, of a Central and Japanese European positionality, which has implicitly directed the chances of their turning into and the circumstances through which they function. Every initiative has been shaped comparatively not too long ago (2018 onwards), working at a unique tempo and creating initiatives as they navigate the world of funding functions, particular person exterior work pooled again into the initiative, or by way of collective and trans-local community help. Whereas the kinds of initiatives every group is creating deserve way more consideration and dialogue, it’s equally essential to acknowledge the authorized and administrative frameworks and negotiations that have been at play in every particular context for claiming the land parcels from the place they function right this moment. These plots of land have been “secured” by way of totally different means out there throughout the present authorized system and are considered in a framework of commoning that not solely issues a neighborhood of individuals or the equal sharing of sources, however one which begins from the shared widespread area, one that’s relational and relative. In Stavrides’ phrases, as these plots of land develop into “widespread areas,” they “form commoning practices in addition to the themes of commoning,” and thus they’ll suggest their definition of what widespread is, in keeping with every one’s scale, geographic, and cultural specificities.
This exhibition needs to focus on an acceptance of fragility—of working from throughout the margins of inventive and cultural manufacturing and that of the dwelling world—from an area of experimentation, of testing inventive approaches to supply options and new fashions of schooling for cultural change. Every initiative rethinks native historic legacies, the relation between city and rural, and frequently defines its positionality with the lands it stewards, discovering ingenious options to safe, albeit quickly or with none certainty, a parcel of land for collectively instituting their cultural organizations. These examples are just a few from a large number of comparable initiatives which are rising right into a community of trans-local and interconnected practices. Such exhibitions are meant not solely to deliver visibility to their observe, however to extend collaboration and new networks, and to offer examples for others to think about their very own fascinating methods of life.
***
The Experimental Station for Analysis on Artwork and Life is a collective undertaking of a gaggle of cultural employees who, along with tranzit.ro Affiliation, co-own and co-manage a plot of land within the village of Siliștea Snagovului, 40 km north of Bucharest, Romania’s capital. The Station goals, by way of an open, participative technique of constructing and contextualization, to develop into a spot for analysis and/of the dwelling, located in a post-development narrative and primarily based on ecological and moral rules. Within the neighborhood of a pure reserve (comprising a lake and a 500-year-old forest, with many endangered botanical and animal species), the Station builds a biodiversity backyard on a former intensively agricultural area and creates an infrastructure that considers the shortage of sources (particularly water) and the cascading results of local weather disruptions. As a prototype for a way a cultural establishment may perform sustainably, the Station challenges artists to conceive their work in accordance with materials manufacturing. It additionally brings questions of neighborhood, rurality, and the commons to the foreground of its scope.
The Station is the results of the shared needs and beliefs of a small neighborhood constructed over years, round values comparable to love of artwork, respect for nature, friendship, perception in emancipatory practices, sharing of sources, mutual belief. The Experimental Station for Analysis is collective work that addresses our limits in addition to our needs. It’s a studying web site, the place we attempt to act on what we preach, and a take a look at web site, the place we don’t should continually produce and ship. It is a undertaking, a web site and the expression of a utopia. It’s a wager and a promise, an experiment and an funding right into a future we will nonetheless form.1
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ssesi (pronounced /ˈsasi/ as in “sassy”) is a cross-sectional cultural organisation freely traversing codecs and disciplines. ssesi is planted on the steep hills of the Svratka River in Brno, Czechia, on the land of former communal gardens that at the moment are rewilding. It connects artists, architects, environmental scientists, and engaged publics with the context of those former city gardens, their cultures, and more-than-human specificities. ssesi’s founding rules suggest (1) creating and holding secure, inclusive, and non-judgemental areas for open exploration; (2) encouraging vigorous interdisciplinary trade; and (3) re-inventing and activating public area by virtues of wittiness, playfulness, and empathy.2
ssesi is polyfocal and will materialise anyplace these rules are noticed. At its present base within the former neighborhood gardens, the cultural and the pure work their manner round one another continually. A lot of their initiative on this context gravitates in direction of numerous methods of exploring, listening to, and appreciating the more-than-human actants they collectively navigate these steep hills with.
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What Might Ought to Curating Do was established in 2018. WCSCD is an try in direction of instituting tongue-in-cheek. By doing so, WCSCD pertains to traditions of artists/establishments all through historical past. It additionally makes use of the technique of performing the soundness that establishments undertaking by defining themselves as such—and that very picture, when revealed to the skin world, offers it freedom to deprave expectations towards that definition. WCSCD developed from an annual academic program for artists and curators as a proposal in direction of collective studying on strategies of instituting. WCSCD’s predominant program focus is an academic program and long-term inquiry into decolonizing modes of relationality throughout the arts.
From 2023, What Might Ought to Curating Do started a self-reflective technique of creating a mannequin of establishment between city and rural ecologies, linked to a plot of land in central Serbia. It requested: What does it imply for an artwork establishment to develop into the custodian of the land? What sustainable practices replicate the act of caring for land and for tradition? This course of is realized by way of its academic program and the long-term engagement of mentors, invited collaborators, contributors, native communities, and WCSCD alumni. 3
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Krater is an rising manufacturing area for transdisciplinary practices, which sprouted from a uncared for, crater-resembling building web site close to the town middle of Ljubljana. By exploring the potential for world-making initiatives on the lands of anthropogenic ruins, Krater acts because the located prototype of a terraforming company. Web site-specific manufacturing stations—papermaking workshop, wooden workshop, and myco-design lab—comprise open-access, ever-evolving workshop areas that create dialogue with the impoverished crust of earth colonised by invasive and different feral vegetation.
Taking the regenerative capacities of those pioneering species as its inspiration, three organisations—Trajna, the Slovenian Affiliation for Permaculture, and prostoRož—produce environmentally acutely aware supplies, practices, and alliances that invite city communities to open their eyes to the land and to one another anew. In doing so, Krater invitations us to reimagine wastelands as spontaneous gardens of human-plant companionships, working collectively towards extra interconnected futures.4
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Kollektiv Kaorle is a Vienna-based, self-organized and multidisciplinary collective based in 2020. Rooted in practices of shared studying and community-based making, the collective prompts areas on the intersection of cultural work, city observe, and grassroots participation. Their work spans from constructing infrastructures for collective use and fascinating in spatial interventions in public area to internet hosting collaborative packages. With an emphasis on co-creation and non-commercial use of area, Kollektiv Kaorle transforms short-term makes use of, city gaps, and uncared for locations into platforms for inclusive and democratic cultural trade.
Kollektiv Kaorle’s residence base is a collectively managed interim area in Ottakring, the place cultural packages, happenings, and gatherings are designed to be accessible, intersectional, and transdisciplinary. In parallel, the collective engages in city commoning initiatives throughout Vienna, together with the community-run public area “Alsergarten” on the Danube Canal. Right here, by way of the long-term undertaking Paradiesl – Motor für eine ko-produzierte Stadt (Paradiesl – Engine for a Co-Produced Metropolis), the collective co-designed a modular and open infrastructure for inventive and civic use. Packages like Baustelle als Diskursraum (building web site as area of discourse), Flinta*Area, and Kaorle Reisen discover the relationality between space-making, care, resistance, and collective company.5
at Lombardi—Kargl | 17 (Pleasure), Vienna
till July 7, 2025
