Curated by Inga Seidler

Data, goods, money, and people are constantly circulating within transportation infrastructures, logistical, and communication networks. While borders remain an essential—and often violent— method for organizing and defining space, long-known geographies of state territories are easily transgressed by transnational corporations, banking networks, and supply chains. As they cut across frontiers, these infrastructures carry with them new forms of securitization and legal exceptions: around the world, physical and virtual corridors as well as sealed-off territories are created in which laws and taxation, civil rights, and other forms of national regulation are suspended in order to facilitate free trade.

Territories of Complicity takes the free port as referential starting point to explore how covert systems, technological infrastructures, and zones of exception shape our economic, socio-political realities. As a dynamic crossroads for global circulatory systems, with its camouflaged jurisdictions and opportunistic exemptions, the free port not only refers to the state’s complicity in authorizing and securing global capitalism, but also functions as a counter-image to the stalled movements of migration. Against the backdrop of increasing nationalism and populist demands for immigration caps and walls—ostensibly to protect national economies and values—the featured projects investigate the long-standing relations between the organization of space, accumulation of wealth, and racialized control of bodies.

In an environment that emulates the logistic setup of the free port, the exhibition architecture fuses installations, artistic research, and live project presentations. Throughout the festival the artists unpack, extend, and activate their projects in the form of screenings, performances, workshops, and discussions. Employing forensic methods, speculative approaches, appropriation and experimentation, they question today’s dominant neoliberal narratives and challenge our notions of value and belonging.

Territories of Complicity was coproduced with Abandon Normal Devices, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, The Influencers, and STRP as part of the New Networked Normal with the support of the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

Opening Hours Exhibition

31.01.: 19:00–23:00
01.02.–04.02.: 11:00–22:00