Fahim Amir

At the Gates of Utopia: Nature, Art, Solidarity

7 June 2023

In this talk I want to share some thoughts about problems, practices and questions that I’ve been involved in over the past few years. These include making sense of the dystopian qualities of inhabiting paracolonial life worlds, and of their legacies and entanglements in contemporary theory, art and politics. We will also deal with the utopian promises and worldly challenges of cohabitation in urban contexts, will complicate some comtemporary notions of solidarity and will ask what “other” perspectives on nature and aesthetics could look and feel like — in Vienna and elsewhere.

Required Reading: Matthew Hyland: Self-Insufficiency Fahim Amir: Cloudy Swords https://www.e-flux.com/journal/115/374863/cloudy-swords/

Fahim Amir is a philosopher and author living in Vienna and teaching at universities and art academies in Europe and the Americas. Amirs research areas are naturecultures and urbanism, art and utopia, and questions of coloniality, cohabitation and transculturality. Amir co-edited Transcultural Modernisms (Sternberg Press, 2013) and wrote the afterword to the German translation of Donna Haraways Companions Species Manifesto (Merve, 2016). His book Schwein and Zeit (Being and Swine) has been translated amongst others into English (2020), Persian (2021) and French (2022). As a theorist and writer Amir is frequently in intense forms of collaboration with artists, curators and cultural producers. Recent publications include the manifesto of the arch+ exhibition Cohabitation (Berlin, 2021) and contributions for the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, 2022), the 58th Carnegie International Exhibition (Pittsburgh, 2022), and the mumok (Vienna, 2022).