Activities in May 2021 / intervention en ligne en Français (Mai 2021) sur Soundcloud

Sacha Kagan was a guest speaker at two public events in May 2021 (one in presence and one virtual):

On May 5th 2021, at the Serralves Foundation in Porto (in presence, and streamed to online participants), he was a guest speaker within the Panel on “Culture and Environmental Sustainability”, at the Conference “Culture, Cohesion and Social Impact” by the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union (PPUE). The conference program in English is available here: http://ppue.gepac.gov.pt/conferencias-cult-en?name=Conference%20Culture%20Cohesion%20e%20Social%20Impact

On May 11th 2021, he was (virtually via Zoom online) the “guest intellectual” for an edition of the Public Meetings organized by “La Marmite” in Switzerland, in French language. Sacha talked about the themes of ecological art, queer ecologies and art, spaces of possibility and spaces of potentiality. La Marmite is a nomadic Popular University in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, which focuses on participants from various precarious situations.
En Français: Le 11 Mai 2021 a eu lieu la “Rencontre Publique avec Sacha Kagan: Vers un art écologique”, dans le cadre des “Conférences Populaires de La Marmite”, Genève, en collaboration avec le Théâtre des Osses de Givisiez (Suisse). Cette rencontre a eu lieu en ligne via Zoom (en raison du Covid). Un enregistrement audio de cet événement est disponible sur Soundcloud, ci-dessous (ou lien direct: ici). La description et programme de l’événement est sur le site web de La Marmite: http://lamarmite.org/evenements/les-conferences-populaires/sacha-kagan-2021/

Association La Marmite · Rencontre publique avec Sacha Kagan

Berlin Petition: “For the preservation and promotion of sexual culture and sex-positive spaces in Berlin”

I was among the ‘first signatories’ of this petition initiated by Felix Ruckert, and I encourage everyone sharing the concerns expressed in the petition, in this context of Pandemic, to both sign it with your name and spread it as widely as you can (for example through social media).

Find the petition here (in both German and English languages): https://www.change.org/p/f%C3%BCr-die-erhaltung-und-f%C3%B6rderung-sexueller-kultur-und-sexpositiver-r%C3%A4ume-in-berlin

Cities of Emergent Wisdom – upcoming talk at the “Cambridge City Seminar”

On Tuesday March 9th 2021 at 18:30 CET (5:30 PM UTC), Sacha Kagan will give an online talk at the “Cambridge City Seminar”, via Zoom. To listen in, you need to register in advance on Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cambridge-city-seminar-cities-of-emergent-wisdom-registration-143703167041?aff=erelexpmlt

Cities of Emergent Wisdom: Urban Spaces of Possibility for Sustainable Urban Development

Dominant conceptions of sustainable urban development are rooted in a universalist definition of sustainability, whose thin goals are pursued through cybernetic apparatuses of control (lately in the guise of so-called smart cities). However, alternatives to this nefarious social imaginary of planned sustainability do also flourish around the world, which will be the focus of this talk. A procedural definition of sustainability, whereby desirable futures emerge as they are imagined and negotiated through collaboration, restores the generative spaces of culture, social creativity and politics of cooperation.

In his talk, Kagan will share empirical research into the qualities of urban spaces of possibility for sustainable urban development: local and translocal spaces of challenging experience, imagination, experimentation and ‘Gestaltung’ (making/designing/crafting).

In these spaces, the processes of imagination, creativity and experimentation are related to politics of cooperation that navigate between dialectic and dialogic forms (as discussed in Richard Sennett’s book Together).

The talk will also consider how some of these urban spaces of possibility are supported by specific forms of digital collaborative spaces and what kinds of virtual networks are involved. This will further lead to the legal-economic question of property regimes in relation to emergent spaces of possibility.

The talk will evoke the connection between the local level (or rather “nearby scale”, to take up the expression by Biao Xiang in his talk at this season’s Cambridge City Seminar) of urban spaces of possibility, and the wider whole-city scale of institutional innovation, through transversal and trans-sectoral agencies.

Time allowing, the talk may also include Kagan’s newest reflection on a difference between “spaces of possibility” and more elusive, suppressed and queering “spaces of potentiality”.

Urban spaces of possibility (and spaces of potentiality) may then contribute to cities of emergent wisdom, a counter-model to the “brave new world” of the smart city. More generally, this approach points to creative cultures of sustainability, informed by aesthetics of qualitative complexity (i.e. a deepening of ecologization of thinking beyond merely cybernetic complexity).

Upcoming: Talk at the 3rd World Congress of Transdisciplinarity (online)

I will be contributing a talk (viewable live on youtube) at a roundtable on January 20th 2021 (at 18:00 CET, 19:00 in Romania, 11:00 in Mexico) that is convened by Cristian Ungureanu, Vice-Rector of the George Enescu National University of Arts in Iasi (Romania) in collaboration with the CIRET in Paris (France). This event is part of the online format of the 3rd World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, organized from Mexico.

Youtube Links:

• January 20th:

• January 22nd:

Video Lecture: Introduction to Walking with Video

In February 2020, Dr. Sacha Kagan produced a series of three video lectures for the “Performing Sustainability: Cultures and Development in West-Africa” Graduate School, by the University of Hildesheim (Germany), the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria) and the University of Cape Coast (Ghana). February 2020.

I am now releasing publically on Youtube the second video: “Introduction to Walking with Video”

The third video will be released in a few weeks. Come back here to find it soon… 🙂

To find out more about the Graduate School, visit https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/sustainability/https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/sustainability/