INFRA at Westminster Reference Library, London
INFRA will present the outcome of the Group’s research on Saturday, May 31,with a series of lectures and the launch of a publication taking place at London’s Westminster Reference Library from 5-8pm.
INFRA is an artistic research project devised by Anna Gritz and Fatos Ustek produced in collaboration with a group of artists comprising of Aura Satz, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry and Ian Wittlesea, who took part in a one and a half year long interdisciplinary research endeavor.
Employing the idea of the infra as the guiding principle, the group took a closer look at the below, the underneath, the underlying, and maybe even the subterranean. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s observations about the infra-mince, the infra is considered as something that cannot be captured through definition, but solely through examples. (Most memorably certainly Duchamp’s description of the infra-mince as the difference in weight between a clean and a worn shirt or the lint in our pockets.) Comprising of a series of regular group sit ins into educational formats across the spectrum of knowledge production the project aims to alter our constellation of reference points through introducing prior unfamiliar subjects and activities. It appropriated the format of the sit in as a critical method and strategy that functions as a stumbling stone, and a disruption in the flow of a given scenario. As a strategy of claiming space and access to otherwise exclusive environments it was adapted as an adequate critical method for knowledge generation in times where the university, such as other facilities for learning are becoming increasingly unattainable and highly isolated. Through sitting in, the project argues for accessibility and diversity in the educational sector. It claims a form of access that generates an interdisciplinary exchange and that slows down the accelerated mode of learning prevalent today, to allow for investigations on the margins of the beaten academic track and to promote an integral approach to research and browsing that opens wide the possibility of discovery, chance and encountering the unexpected apart from professional development.
Address: Westminster Reference Library 35 St Martin’s St, London, London Chinatown WC2H 7HP