At global dis:connect, we study dis:connectivity through six interrelated focal points. Absences highlight gaps and exclusions; detours reveal delays and circuitous pathways; interruptions expose breaks in integration. Laboratories identify contexts where dis:connective dynamics become especially visible. Cultural infrastructures examine the frameworks that enable or constrain artistic and cultural practices. Temporalities explore how different conceptions of past, present, and future shape – and are shaped by – connections and disconnections.
These approaches provide a flexible conceptual framework that encourages interdisciplinary methods and international exchange, allowing us to analyse the complex dynamics of globalisation in depth.
ABSENCES
Absence marks processes of globalisation as much as presence, invisibility as much as visibility. As the connections that drive technological and economic globalisation become tighter and more diverse, they broaden the resulting gaps and marginalisations.
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DETOURS
A detour is an undesired, often unintended, longer and usually more arduous route to a destination. Detours coincide with stagnation, delay and waiting. They come into sharp relief in the history of migration, which shows that detours and the impeded mobility they induce inhere in all migratory movements of the past and present.
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INTERRUPTIONS
Hardly any global connection is continuously, uniformly enduring. Most processes of integration are cyclical, sometimes gathering momentum rapidly, sometimes slowly, and sometimes losing momentum entirely. Connections might serve only a single purpose, but not others, or they can be utterly and radically terminated.
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LABORATORIES OF DIS:CONNECTIVITY
Laboratories of dis:connectivity are easily graspable and manageable units in which complex phenomena, such as interruptions and the absence of global connections, become visible in their concrete meaning. They can be ‘stabilised’ or ‘frozen’, so to speak, for the period of investigation.
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CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURES
Cultural infrastructure refers to the tangible, intangible and institutional elements that support and facilitate cultural, particularly artistic, activities and experiences in a society. the term encompasses a range of components that contribute to the development, preservation and dissemination of cultural assets. It can include organisations, activities and spaces.
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TEMPORALITIES
Dis:connectivity applies not only to spatial phenomena but to ‘transtemporal’ relationships as well. Globalisation processes act on disparate spaces where there are often highly divergent understandings of the past, present and future.
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