spring*meeting 12 –18 May, 2025 :: O, stone, be not sO :: On attachments to infrastructure ::

After last year's spring*meeting on ‘materials that resist us’, this year, we turn our attention to ‘infrastructure’, considering it a register to speak about the institutionalised conditions of possibility for art today. Recent questions of institutional failure or the stagnation of art in the exhibition space, including the dead end of institutional critique, are prompted by a concern with the wider conditions of reproduction, of social life more generally, and what is excluded or concealed within it. As the convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that repeat and hold the world up, infrastructure is a broad category and can be addressed in many registers. Logistical and architectural, cold and serious, for instance, then it sounds so concrete and immediate. The social tradition of the aesthetic is crowded and disjointed. Can we offer a different approach, one that more intimately inflects the necessary with the desired? Using the term "infrastructure", what is gained? Why now? What is it with our attachments to it?

Attending to the secret and emergent arrangements infrastructures produce, we aim to trace the subtle textures that shape the attachments and gestures constituting our modes of rehearsing the social. The mundane and material, yes, but without the mystifying attachment to thinking that everyday life is distinct from mediation. ‘Infrastructural critique’ invokes the interventionist register of the historical artistic avant-gardes, the desire to affirm both art and life, dissolving their distinction. However, it does so under new conditions of ‘the contemporary’: a historically specific experience grounded in what is understood as global capital's spatialisation of times – the false equivalence between different temporalities and the prioritisation of the here and ‘now’ by devouring, erasing or neglecting pasts and futures. Consider how ‘Socially engaged art’ and ‘Institutional critique’ have become sub-genres of art alongside undying traditions rather than social and political challenges that all relevant art must engage to transcend purely institutional or market legitimation. Perhaps this ‘genrefication’ stems less from artistic practices than the nullifying inclinations of the art world's infrastructures, or those of this world itself. So, lose your attachments to reproducing compromised conditions of possibility: O, stone, be not so!

We are excited to think about these matters with, and through the work of:

~Noor Abed works at the intersection of performance and film. Through a process of image making, she creates situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. With an urgency to establish a new representational mode of documentary intertwined with the imaginary and the mythical, her work conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act. The peripheral, as an intrusion into mainstream history, becomes a way to overturn the characteristics of dominant discourse, and rewrite reality. In 2020, she co-founded the School of Intrusions with Lara Khaldi, an independent pedagogical platform born in the artist’s native Palestine, where participants intrude, gather and discuss site-based learning, community formation, collectivism, and alternative economic models. Encroaching actively upon public and private space, the School operates with the belief that place, time, knowledge, and tradition are resources that belong to everybody.

"Collaboration, in its different forms, assists me in furthering my critical dialogue and understanding within the structures that the work inhabits. My broader research framework delves into notions of Social Choreography and the imaginary relationships of individuals, mostly questioning the ways we can analyse political and social ideologies through notions of choreography. It is an observation of collective social order and the practices of collective movement. I feel that the origin of my research interest is a collective one in the first place. Besides, both practices of performance/ or choreography, and filmmaking are collaborative on a structural level."

~Danny Hayward produces and sporadically circulates poetry. He jerry-rigged an archive of this material at the website Free Trials . Recently, he's mostly been working with Larne Abse Gogarty and Kerstin Stakemeier on a book by his late partner and comrade Marina Vishmidt, Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition (Verso, 2025). Separately, he is also working on the publication Marina's Cues: Infrastructures of Dis-alienation together with Kerstin Stakemeier.

“The two of us, together with Larne Abse Gogarty, are currently at work on a synthesis of Marina's writings with the title Infrastructural Critique. This work radicalises institutional critique by theorising its material conditions, stripping the institution down to its bare infrastructural bones and posing the testingly unprejudiced question of what is it good for. A second, smaller publication, titled Marina's Cues: Infrastructures of Dis-alienation, will flank this one. [...] The book will now contain the writings by Marina that were destined for it, as well as a larger conversation bringing in a group of friends and collaborators, taking up, and taking on, Marina's cues.
Her ‘infrastructural critique’ brings into focus ‘that which is beyond representation or relation, a common world’, anatomising the infrastructures of representation in order to produce a balance sheet of the conditions of self-activity within them, in a period in which representation is abundant and common worlds are in ever shorter supply.”

~The work of Iris Touliatou attends to intimate and systemic scales by way of using ready-made infrastructures and protocols, imbricating the emotional and economic, the personal and bureaucratic, without foreclosing or predicting an outcome. For her solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel in 2023, Touliatou used the production budget for the show to take out a life insurance to be paid on the event of her death to the 1,344 members of the Swiss institution. Entitling the exhibition Gift, meaning ‘present’ in English and ‘poison’ in German, the artist bonded her own body (valued at €100,000, the amount that notably mirrors Kunsthalle Basel's annual liability reserve) to the institution's complex administrative corpus. Another work, SCORE FOR TONE CHANGE (2023-2024), is a subtle intervention into institutional protocols, which consists of a software that is installed on the office computers of the art institution, integrating into their default dictionary. The programme uses Cynthia Wissell's Dictionary of Affect in Language, and - in effect across the English-language communication, it negotiates the liminal space between the publicity of the exhibition and the privacy of its administration, "a kind of an insider's tonal shift that becomes public."

"Through subtle redistributions of objects, economies, human relationships, and production processes in economies of circulation – replacement, maintenance, repair – my practice contours the structures of a contemporary condition. [...] By examining infrastructures and their functions, attachments and desires, and the public and private, I explore the relationships between social structures and people's practices and raise questions on the conditions of artistic production and the institutional frames within which it exists."

~Geo Wyex is an artist and educator based in Rotterdam and NYC, working mostly in music, performance, sound and poetry. Their most recent exhibition, Nobody Wade Never Too Much (2024), was at JOAN Gallery in Los Angeles, and part of a serial open body of work called Muck Studies Dept. - a constellational narrative framework, and an imaginary city agent surveying the bottom of low-lying water areas, "looking for stars out of what stinks." Muck Study thinks along with black feminist narrative strategies, open fielding, and techniques of investigative journalism as part of a larger creative practice involving performance and sound. The project moves with mud, water, metal gas, ass, rocks, coins, keys, extractive industry, and a sensual excess from that flood. Research areas include New Orleans, New York, and the Netherlands. Like any kind of exposure or revelation concerning whatever is at the bottom of whatever this muck is would simultaneously be a moment of realising that neither exposure nor revelation hold any weight.

Geo was a Rijksakademie resident in Amsterdam from 2015-2016. He teaches performance workshops with worldwide shipping. Recent financial support from the Mondriaan Fonds, the Dolf Henkes Prijs, and the Hartwig Art Production Collection Fund. Ongoing collaborations with S*an D. Henry-Smith, Every Ocean Hughes, Will Rawls, Constantina Zavitsanos, Colin Self, Tourmaline and Jay Tan.

"I performed a bunch in the early and mid-2000s in NYC, alongside a slew of Cabaret and alt-drag performers––the community I feel closest to. Performing in bars, we were inspired by people like The Blow, contemporaries like Colin Self, and by experimental, feminist theatre in New York from the '80s and '90s, people like Peggy Shaw and Split Britches, as well as black feminist innovators of poetic and theatrical forms, like Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange. I'm interested in mood and in value. I've been thinking a lot about cultivating enjoyment by feeling bad and good at the same time as a kind of long-term survival strategy. 'A bad mood that persists.' People encounter liberation in all manners of violent systems."

PRACTICALITIES
spring*meeting 2025 begins on Monday evening (May 12th), with an apéro and introduction before dinner. The 18th is a departure day following collective cleaning in which we remove our traces from PAF and leave the building in impeccable condition. Beyond this we do not announce the schedule in advance as we hope for engagement in the meeting and with the topic as a whole, as an ensemble, and not just with specific moments or guests. There are always spaces for participants to make their own contributions to the programme and to share work as part of the schedule.

Coming to PAF
Check pa-f.net/basics/directions

Accessibility notes
Here is the state of our accessibility rider working document.
Please let us know your accessibility needs (if you come with children, if you have mobility requirements, or acute allergies…) when booking as this helps us better organize the event to work for everyone. We will try to accommodate your needs as best we can.

Payments
PAF implements a sliding-scale payment system as part of an extensive effort to make PAF more accessible. We encourage you to pay as much as you can so that we can address structural asymmetries among PAF users.
18€ per night is the basic fee; combined with the volunteer efforts of all PAF users, it has enabled PAF, as a project, to stay afloat for the last few years. You can keep paying 18 euros per night if your financial situation is fragile, and a higher nightly price would prevent you from coming to PAF.
20€ is the advised base price per night.
20 - 25€ or more if you have a stable income, institutional funding, property or family wealth.

♡ If you come with children: nightly fee is age X 1€ + daily food is age X 1€. No membership is needed but a disclaimer must be signed.
PAF will not ask you about your financial situation; you will evaluate the price to pay yourself.

Other expenses include a 20€ annual membership fee and 16€ per day for three meals prepared in our exquisite kitchen by chefs Giulia Tognon and Georgia Lahiff with everybody’s help. There will be an excellent team of cooks who will need help from all of us. We can only accept payments in cash (or French chèques), so bring it along (there is an ATM in the village).

All contributions above 18€ per night will go to The Mattress Fund (see PAF's website for more info). They will help PAF to host users who are in various ways made precarious by neoliberal regimes, racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

If you would like to participate in spring*meeting but do not have the financial means to do so, please let us know, and we will find a way to support you. Please write to us at pafspringmeeting@gmail.com

PAF gets very full these days, sometimes overly, so book early; we'd like you to be there.

Reservations: contact@pa-f.net

Organisers: Stefa Govaart, Steph Holl-Trieu, Andrea Rodrigo, Nikhil Vettukattil