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diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie

@diffrakt.space

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collective | project space
art | science | society | philosophy | theory
Crellestraße 22, 10827 Berlin
also @aperfectst0rm
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“Dear Environment, There Is Something Left Over”Thursday, 22 October 2026, 7.30 pm diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery Screening and conversation with Caroline Adler | Anna Zett @zwerran’s films explore the affective and abject remnants of the GDR in the body and the political matrix, drawing on 1980s archives of the East German environmental, civil rights, and punk movements and on footage of the “remediated” landfills of Bitterfeld-Wolfen. The dump emerges as a utopian (non-)place of the abject: what we want to get rid of, and what remains and takes on a life of its own. In ENDARCHIV (2019, 18 min), gravel piles become a repository for words and political feelings, and a site for contacting an ecosystem through language. The performance intertwines with Klaus Freymuth’s footage of artists painting the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and of border police painting over it. FREIHEIT 3 (2019, 30 min) is an audiovisual poem on the toxic remnants of GDR industry: a landfill tour with a former Treuhand manager meets environmental and civil rights archives and poems from East Berlin readings in 1986. Language is a cause of damage and a medium of processing. Afterwards, Anna and @c__a_ will discuss the East German environmental movement’s legacies, forgetting, and the composting of the archive. The event is part of our series #damageddeliberations. The film will be shown in German with English subtitles. #Deponie #Umweltbewegung #diffrakt
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Up next with the #sofar reading group – two crash-landing stories with alien encounters, almost 70 years apart: • Damon Knight, The Enemy (1957) • Jeff Vandermeer, Constellations (2026) If you’d like to join us, whether this time or for a future session, please send a brief note to mail@diffrakt.space with the subject line “SO FAR”. Meetings of the group take place on Monday evenings every three weeks, sometimes at diffrakt, always online, and discussions are normally in English. #sciencefiction #speculativefiction @jeff_vandermeer123 #bookstagram #diffrakt
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Demokratie im Klimawandel Dienstag, 6. Oktober 2026, 19:30 Uhr diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische Peripherie Gespräch mit Jacob Blumenfeld | Morten Paul | Daniela Russ Während Europa in einem beispiellosen Hitzesommer brennt, scheint der Klimawandel aus der öffentlichen Debatte und dem politischen Handeln weitgehend verschwunden. Dabei ist es erst sieben Jahre her, dass weltweit sechs Millionen Menschen bei Klimastreiks für einen grundlegenden Wandel demonstrierten. Mit den Protesten verband sich die Hoffnung, nicht nur die Klimakrise zu bekämpfen, sondern auch den neoliberalen Status quo, globale Ungleichheit und die Macht fossiler Wirtschaftsinteressen infrage zu stellen. Im Rahmen der Reihe #damageddeliberations fragen wir, was aus diesen Hoffnungen geworden ist. Heute scheint sich die Lage grundlegend verschoben zu haben: Klimaschutz wird zunehmend als Bedrohung individueller Freiheit inszeniert, während Regierungen auf Wachstum, technologische Innovation und nationale Abschottung setzen. Rechte Antworten auf die Klimakrise gewinnen an Gewicht. Doch auch auf der Linken zeigen sich Spannungen. Manche setzen angesichts des Versagens liberaler Institutionen selbst auf autoritäre staatliche Eingriffe und Planung, andere bereiten sich mit Konzepten der Kollapsologie und Praktiken des solidarischen Preppens auf das Überleben in einer Katastrophe vor, die vielerorts längst Realität ist. Klimaschutz, soziale Gerechtigkeit, demokratische Mitbestimmung und individuelle Freiheit scheinen immer stärker zu Gegensätzen zu werden. Daniela Russ und Jacob Blumenfeld zeichnen die Vorgeschichte dieser Entwicklung nach und diskutieren, ob sich in der Geschichte andere politische Abzweigungen finden lassen: alternative Vorstellungen von Freiheit, Wohlstand, Energie und Natur ebenso wie lange verdrängte Konzepte ökonomischer Planung und Sozialisierung. Wie könnte ein Umgang mit der Klimakrise aussehen, der sie eindämmt, ihre Folgen gerecht bewältigt, ohne Demokratie und Freiheit preiszugeben? Welche politischen Begriffe und Institutionen brauchen wir, um dem scheinbar alternativlosen „Weiter so“ etwas entgegenzusetzen? #klimawandel #demokratie #diffrakt
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Continuing with the #counterinfrastructures reading group: • Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) “Education […] becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (p. 72) If you’d like to join us (whether now or in the future), please send a brief note to mail@diffrakt.space with the subject line “counter | infrastructures”. Meetings of the reading group take place on Tuesday evenings every three weeks, at diffrakt and online, and discussions are normally in English. #pedagogy #emancipation #readinggroup #diffrakt
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After a slightly extended summer break, the #storytellings reading group returns, picking up on previous discussions around the writing of history with: • Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) “The intervention made here is an attempt to recast the past, guided by the conundrums and compulsions of our contemporary crisis: the hope for social transformation in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the quixotic search for a subject capable of world-historical action, and the despair induced by the lack of one. In this regard, it is hoped that the instances of insurgency and contestation narrated herein and the relentless proliferation of small acts of resistance perhaps offer some small measure of encouragement and serve to remind us that the failures of Reconstruction still haunt us, which in part explains why the grand narratives continue to hold sway over our imagination. Therefore, while I acknowledge history’s ‘fiction of factual representation,’ to use Hayden White’s term, I also recognize the political utility and ethical necessity of historical fiction. As Walter Benjamin remarked, ‘Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe if the enemy wins.’” (p. 14) If you would like to join us, whether now or in the future, please send a short note to mail@diffrakt.space with the subject line “Storytellings”. Meetings of the reading group take place on Monday evenings every three weeks, at diffrakt and online, and discussions are normally in English. #historiography #resistance #saidiyahartman #diffrakt
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Slowly returning to IG after the summer break, this is just a documentary post. On Monday evening, the #sofar reading group discussed • Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio (1913) We’ll reconvene in three weeks, and a post about it will be coming soonish, so stay tuned! If you’d like to join us for a future session, please send a brief note to mail@diffrakt.space with the subject line “SO FAR”. Meetings of the group take place on Monday evenings every three weeks, sometimes at diffrakt, always online, and discussions are normally in English. #sciencefiction #speculativefiction #bookstagram #diffrakt
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Political Samples A Workshop on Waste and Chemical Relations Thursday, 10 September 2026, 2–6 pm diffrakt | center for theoretical periphery Workshop with Kylie Crane | Baldeep Kaur | Bonnie McClellan #damageddeliberations is a two-year project that invites multidisciplinary conversations, screenings and workshops to debate, create in, and relate to the contemporary crisis of climate, which increasingly also seems to be a crisis of democracy. As the summer wanes, Damaged Deliberations turns to questions of discarding, and how what is thrown away is rarely a question of objects, but rather a relinquishing of responsibility and care, a calibration of the known. How does chemical testing make our surroundings knowable? In testing for some things and not others, which social relations go undetected? How do chemical molecules translate into a safe or unsafe landscape? Join us in working through these questions and complicating terms like samples, thresholds, contamination, remediation and recovery. We will start the workshop with a collective reading and research session with writing by anti-colonial feminist writers like Max Liboiron, Michelle Murphy, Angeliki Balyannis and Gabrielle Hecht. Based on this we propose a creative exercise in ‘testing’ our surroundings for more-than-chemical traces and forms of collective life that cannot be easily protocolled. For example, how do we test a space for anti-racism? What factors signal the political ideology of a city administration? Going into the relationship between waste, toxicity, and social space, the workshop seeks to gather collective responses to problems that reveal themselves as increasingly structural, but also increasingly close to home. Since spots are limited, please register for this workshop by 7 September 2026. To register, please send an email to mail@diffrakt.space with “Political Samples” in the subject line. #waste #pollutioniscolonialism #politicalsamples
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Kann Theorie Antifa? Montag, 27. Juli 2026, 19.30 Uhr diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie Gespräch mit Patrick Eiden-Offe | Enis Maci | Morten Paul Wenn Regierungen Bücher verbieten, ist Bücher Schreiben dann schon Widerstand? Der Lesekreis jeden Donnerstagabend Teil der neuen Mixed Martial Arts gegen die Slopaganda? Wie hängen der Cage Fight vor dem Weißen Haus zusammen mit den kleinen und großen Käfigen der um sich greifenden Einhegung und Enteignung? Wem gehört dieser Wasserlauf und wem dieser Server? Wem meine Wörter und wem meine Faust? Ist der in letztere verkeilte, grelle Textmarker wirklich schon Teil jener Handarbeit, die Antifa ist? Oder hilft gegen ein Paar Fäuste nur ein zweites? Die Faschismen haben sich längst zu einem einzigen, erdöldunklen Schlick wermengt, der nicht abgehen will, egal wie doll man schrubbt. Gibt es das überhaupt, saubere Waffen im schmutzigen Meme-War? Historisch war Theoriearbeit für antifaschistische Bewegungen zentral: Genaues Wissen, so die Hoffnung, erlaubt präzise Gegenwehr. Trotzdem war das Verhältnis von Theorie zu Praxis nie konfliktfrei. Was gilt es zu verstehen angesichts roher Gewalt und Niedertracht? Was haben antifaschistische Texte mit der Welt zu tun, von der sie handeln? Wie wollen sie wirken und wie wirken sie wirklich? Aus dem rasant wachsenden faschismustheoretischen Bücherstapel der Gegenwart ist jedenfalls bis jetzt noch keine antifaschistische Brandmauer geworden. Was können wir den algorithmschen Reaktionsregimen entgegensetzen? @enis_maci (Eiscafe Europa, Pando) und @paul.morten (Was war Faschismustheorie?) fragen im Gespräch mit Patrick Eiden-Offe (Poesie der Klasse, Was ist Faschisierung?) danach, welche Verknüpfungen zwischen Handeln und Erkennen, zwischen Lesen und Protestieren, Schreiben und Sabotieren, Dekonstruieren und Organisieren, welche Verbindungen aus Einbildungskraft und Beobachtungsgabe, Spontanität und Disziplin in der Vergangenheit produktiv waren; welche in Sackgassen führten; aber auch, welche (bis jetzt) noch gar nicht ausprobiert worden sind: Denn möglicherweise wissen wir noch nicht einmal, was Theorie so alles vermag. #theorie #handarbeit #ko
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A new book with the #counterinfrastructures reading group: • Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself. Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (2021), with a preface by Marc Herbst (@time_forevero2) “Despite the collective joy and the victories that resulted from many of the movements we were entangled with, we often felt a kind of emptiness in between the adventures. Like a sort of activist comedown. It took years to realize that perhaps this was linked to the fact that these actions somehow never seemed totally embedded into our everyday lives. They felt separate from the neighborhood that we lived in, as if floating above our daily needs. We were radical activist artists, but we still had that sensation of being detached from worlds, moving from one place to another, from event to event, activist camps to theater festivals, giving conferences in one place, teaching in art schools in another, shutting down an open cast coal mine elsewhere, always returning to the suffocating concrete of London, where home had become a mere landing pad. Like so many captured by the metropolitan logic, we were body-minds without anchor, we were discombobulated beings who had lost any true sense of place.” (p. 23) If you’d like to join us (whether now or in the future), please send a brief note to mail@diffrakt.space with the subject line “counter | infrastructures”. Meetings of the reading group take place on Tuesday evenings every three weeks, at diffrakt and online, and discussions are normally in English. We got our first copy of the book from @max.haiven when he brought @labofii to diffrakt, then passed it on to @r_o_b_i_d_a when we first visited them in Topolò, and now @vidarucli took a picture for us with Pičič in the background. Meanwhile, we’ve picked up another copy from @zabriskiebuchladen, where you might find one too. #zad #readinggroup #bookstagram #diffrakt
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Non-Digital Encryption | Strategies of Concealment Friday, 31 July 2026, 7.30 to 9.30 pm diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery Workshop with Michael Marder After the national liberation struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (many still unfinished), the telluric character of partisans is as requisite as ever in the twenty-first century. Perhaps the new partisans will be cryptobionts, whether digital or analog. They will take the side of dormant seeds and that of life itself, veiled in its emergences. Surveillance technologies, including online tracking and monitoring, advanced biometric data collection, CCTV and facial recognition cameras, satellites and drones diminish the prospects of hiddenness for everyone within their reach, even as whoever or whatever does the tracking, spying, or monitoring remains hidden. The complex of micro-power and psycho-power, which Michel Foucault described in his oeuvre, serves a political regime that uncovers everything but stays undercover or, in the shapeless shape of Big Data, is altogether indifferent to the uncovered. The digital panopticon, the confession (often, removed from its religious context, digitally mediated, and so addictive as to encompass every bit of the confessor’s life), and the apparatus of modern science are instrumental for the consolidation of power, notably the power to draw out of hiding, to induce apocalypses, large and small. In this workshop with Michael Marder, we will discuss the strategies of concealment – of becoming political cryptobionts – that may be one of the keys to resistance in the new global regime now taking shape. Participation in the workshop is limited. To register, please send a short message to mail@diffrakt.space. This workshop is organised with the help of @pennybirdy as well as with the generous support of The Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec). Image by Penny Yiou Peng. #michaelmarder #hideandseek #encryption #concealment #diffrakt
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Two robot stories, coming up with the #sofar reading group: • Jack Williamson, With Folded Hands (1947) • Alec Nevala-Lee, At the Fall (2019) If you’d like to join us for a future session, please send a brief note to mail@diffrakt.space with the subject line “SO FAR”. Meetings of the group take place on Monday evenings every three weeks, at diffrakt and online, and discussions are normally in English. #sciencefiction #speculativefiction #bookstagram #diffrakt
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Reproduction Revisited Thursday, 16 July 2026, 7.30 pm diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery Workshop-conversation with Alyssa Battistoni | Gala Rexer | Hannah Wallenfels Feminist scholarship and movements have long recognized the reproductive body as a site of politics. From demands for wages for housework, to access to various reproductive technologies, to struggles over air pollution and reproductive health, activists, theorists, and birthing people insist that what sustains life must be protected and shared. The reproductive body and reproductive labor reveal what is taken for granted, invisibilized, and naturalized in capitalist societies and an increasingly fractured world order. How can we theorize reproduction at a time of overlapping crises, ecological breakdown, rising authoritarianism, and the ongoing devaluation of care? This evening brings together @alybatt and @gala.antea to discuss what feminist theory, environmental humanities, and Marxist or (new) materialist thought offer us to revisit reproduction. It will proceed in a spirit of sympathetic critique, taking the inherited frameworks of feminist theory seriously while asking where they may need to be revisited or sharpened to better account for the current moment. In doing so, the evening engages a question at the heart of series Damaged Deliberations: How might we imagine forms of community that do not rest on exclusion and invisibilization but on an expansion of participation and responsibility toward both the human and the more-than-human world? The evening is organized as a series of short impulses, alternating with open moments for questions and contributions from the audience. While the presentations and discussion will be held in English, questions and contributions in German are welcome and will be translated. © image: @carmen.winant, My Birth (2018), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Modern Women’s Fund. #ecology #feminism #reproductiverights #damageddeliberations #diffrakt
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