Conviviality as Potentiality

In May 2021, Prof. Marina Gržinic and her research team, Dr. Sophie Uitz and Dr. Jovita Pristovšek, are launching a new FWF-PEEK project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. As a work of artistic and theoretical research, Conviviality as Potentiality: From Amnesia and Pandemic towards a Convivial Epistemology builds on the findings of their still ongoing PEEK project, led by Prof. Gržinic, called Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (2018-2021). Genealogy of Amnesia focused on three European territories and their traumatic pasts (Austria and antisemitism, Belgium and colonialism, and former Yugoslavia and turbo-nationalism), emphasizing amnesia as impediment to convivial life and researching the closure of experiences, memory and history, constituted by the genealogy of amnesia in Europe. The new project Conviviality as Potentiality proposes a new focus on conviviality, expanding the scope to outside of Europe and widening the analysis of conviviality by shifting from amnesia to the notion of pandemic. If the 20th century can be called an amnesic century in terms of the suppression of traumatic pasts in the European context, then the 21 st century can be described as a pandemic century, where conviviality is marked not only by its relation to amnesia and oblivion, but to 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; 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.

The results of the 4-year art-based research project "Conviviality as Potentiality: From Amnesia to Pandemic towards Convivial Epistemologies" (FWF-PEEK AR 679, 2021-25), which was carried out at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, are inter- and transdisciplinary. The research project started in May 2021 with Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić and her research team, Dr. Sophie Uitz and Dr. Jovita Pristovšek, who were supported throughout 2024 until the end of the project by the predocs Asma Aiad, MA, and Anahita Neghabat, MA. They brought convivial and community practices from various artistic and social projects. To achieve convivial practices of living together, it is necessary to find a new common epistemological ground; therefore, we need to engage in processes of collaborative work that we call "convivial epistemologies." The question of conviviality as a potentiality was explored through the corresponding problems in South Africa, Australia, Lebanon, Israel, Northern Ireland, and Austria. We reflected on: 1) decolonial practices of LGBT*QIA+ communities for new social formations in post-apartheid South Africa; 2) refugee and Indigenous community activism against nationalist isolationism; and White power regimes in the context of the violent return of coloniality in Australia; 3) the empowerment of communities through images and taxonomies of material in a public image archive in the shadow of the war in Lebanon; 4) the conflict in the Middle East and the reality of conviviality in Northern Ireland after the Troubles; 5) the conceptualization of convivial epistemologies in exchange with grassroots artistic collectives and art students, migrant organizations and LGBT*QIA+ communities in the context of the anti-migration and anti-refugee regime in Austria.