Markus Miessen - Welcome to Harmonistan!

Vortrag leider abgesagt!

Over the last decade, the term “participation” has become increasingly overused. When everyone has been turned into a participant, the often uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term has become frightening. Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility. Similar to the notion of an independent politician dissociated from a specific party, Miessen encourages the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change.

Miessen argues for an urgent inversion of participation, a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, Miessen candidly reflects on the limits and traps of its real motivations. Rather than breeding the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, he argues for conflict as an enabling, instead of disabling, force. He calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.

Markus Miessen (*1978) is an architect and writer. In various collaborations, Miessen has published, amongst other titles: Actors, Agents and Attendants (Sternberg/SKOR, 2011), Waking Up From The Nightmare of Participation (Expodium, 2011), The Nightmare of Participation (Sternberg, 2010), Institution Building (Sternberg, 2009), East Coast Europe (Sternberg, 2008), The Violence of Participation (Sternberg, 2007), With/Without: Spatial Products, Practices, and Politics in the Middle East (Bidoun, 2007), and Did Someone Say Participate? (MIT, 2006). His work has been published and exhibited widely, including at the Lyon, Venice, Performa, Manifesta, Gwangju, and Shenzhen Biennials. Architectural projects (with nOffice) include LU Arts Centre & Radar Hub (UK), Gwangju Biennial Hub (Korea), Performa Hub (US), and the reappropriation of a former post-office for Manifesta 8 (Spain). In 2008, he founded the Winter School Middle East (Dubai/Kuwait). As Visiting Professor, he has taught at the AA, London (2004–08), Berlage Institute, Rotterdam (2009–10) and HfG Karlsruhe (2010-11). Miessen is now a professor for Critical Spatial Practice at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and guest professor at HEAD Geneva as well as USC Los Angeles.