Design Displacement Group

Marthe Prins | Benedikt Weishaup

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Marthe Prins (Amsterdam, NL) and Benedikt Weishaupt (Berlin, D) have been working together since 2014. The topics of their work are investigative practices on the design language of privatized border security (Frontex), alternative W-LAN infrastructures and the optimization of individual wage labor.

Their first joint work Why One Internet - The Power of Mesh is a speculative exploration of alternative wireless network infrastructures developed by NGOs, which often hide  the geopolitical agendas of soft power and neo-feudalism behind their altruistic appearance. (with Gilles de Brock)

Through a performative lecture at the Royal College of Arts in London (with the Design Displacement Group), they reflected on their way of working in times of optimization and automation of workflows in the age of networked capitalism, in which companies try to spiritualize work efficiency through quantified meditations and so-called productivity parties. The Design Displacement Group, a collective of 14 individuals, pursues an approach of collaborative production as a form of rejection and protest against individualized labor, thus undermining individual authorship.

For and with We Are Here, a group of undocumented fugitives, Weishaupt and Prins have investigated the contradictory legal systems to which "rejected" fugitives are subjected and have devised a strategy for making them visible.

During the Dialogfelder, Prins and Weishaupt examine the concepts of "chaos" (female) "order" (male) in contemporary right-wing rhetoric and examine their links to Joseph A. Schumpeter's work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Particular attention will be paid to the interpretation of Schumpeter's "entrepreneurial spirit" by neoliberal and new-right intellectuals. Prins and Weishaupt will question the "chaos theories" of star intellectuals such as Richard Florida and Jordan Peterson and their role in the normalization of aestheticized politics. Both bestselling academics make use of functioning academic models of the machine-indices, classes, and plans-and construct theories through speculation and apospheric inventions of meaning. In discussing the role of poetry and performance within today's intellectualized right-wing agendas, Peterson, who has been called upon many times to intellectually underpin them, comes into play.

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designdisplacementgroup.com