In these times, when utilization, (digital) networking and (media) presence is an almost omnipresent demand, protective spaces take on a new significance. The World Wide Web is used as a shelter, at the same time it enables the perfection of surveillance, control and regulation. Collective, self-governed spaces such as those established by the social movements of the 1970s and 80s are being rediscovered. However, such gains are also questioned: critics find fault with their mechanics of exclusion and call for more “diversity” and “transparency”. Spaces offering freedom, and practices of exclusion are near neighbors, even mutually dependent. Strategies of retreat can be the result of threats, fear, exhaustion or listlessness – or an expression of ennui, disobedience and concentration. And a person who uses a shelter for napping is perhaps the herald of a rebellion?
Thealit Lab 2013 aims to explore, question, discuss, conceive, construct and walk through various “protective spaces”. What are the ways and purposes of creating shelters? Which aspects of criticism or self-criticism are taken into account? What are the reasons for retreat as an activist, artistic strategy, and how is it experienced? Are the really good shelters traceable at all? And when does the time come to exit a shelter?
>Protective Space< Politics Aesthetics Media is curated by Kea Wienand and Monika Wucher.

thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor.www.thealit.de