What Does It Mean to Change?

According to Cornelius Castoriadis, change emerges from the exercise of radical imagination, which allows individuals and societies to envision and create new possibilities beyond the constraints of existing structures and norms, transforming both their inner world and the social order. 

This elective explores change as a poethical, material, political, and affective process within contemporary art practice. To change is never merely to become different, to go from one discrete state to another, change always leaves a trace. Within art practices it can entails to reconfigure relations, to try new mediums and techniques, to place oneself in settings, alter what can be seen, said, and felt. But what are the conditions, the desires and the impositions to change, to transform, or to move? Change also entails destruction, abolition, forces of old forms to make new possible? And what is really new, how do we know if change has occured? 

Through artistic experimentation, supported by collective readings, site visits and experimentation this course asks: How does art practice and research relate to change? What changes change, and what refuses it? What are the conditions under which change becomes possible, desirable, or even thinkable? How is change imagines, and  

Drawing from decolonial, feminist, queer, ecocritical and transmarxist sources, the course engages key concepts and texts that question the conditions of transformation. Students will develop artistic works and discuss strategies for change within their own practice, propose performative propositions that respond to the central question – What does it mean to change? –  in relation to their own practice and the collective processes of the group. 

The electable is organised as a series of 4-6 one-to-two-day seminars and workshops at GU and KKH over a whole semester. Each occasion departs from an artistic practice from diverse fields. 

Instituting Imaginaries 
(Castoriadis) 
Examines how collective imagination grounds new institutions and social forms. Through readings and discussions, participants explore how imagination operates as a material and political force in shaping collective life and instituting alternatives to dominant structures. 

Plasticity 
(Malabou) 
Investigates form, transformation, and the dialectic of destruction and creation through the concept of plasticity. Participants explore how plasticity bridges biology, politics, and aesthetics, and what it means to think change as both potential and rupture. 

Transmarxism 
(Preciado, Edelman, Muñoz, Raha) 
Rethinks class, labor, and sexuality through trans and queer lenses. The seminar revisits Marxist categories of production, reproduction, and surplus in light of queer and trans theories of embodiment, temporality, and refusal. 

Abolition 
(Davis, Moten, Harney) 
Examines the dismantling of carceral logics in art and society. Readings and discussions trace abolition as both a practical and imaginative project, engaging with artistic practices that reconfigure justice, care, and social reproduction. 

Psychic Revolt 
(Guattari, Basaglia) 
Draws from anti-psychiatry and social psychology to explore revolt as a collective process of subjectivation. Practices from community theatre and therapeutic collectivities are engaged as models for reclaiming the psyche as a site of resistance and care. 

Sympoiesis 
(Haraway) 
Considers the concept of “making-with” as a way of thinking collective survival and interdependence. Through Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis, the seminar examines ecological, technological, and artistic entanglements that challenge human exceptionalism and invite new imaginaries of kinship. 

Poethics 
(da Silva, Glissant) 
Explores the entanglement of ethics and poetics in the making of worlds. Through the lens of da Silva’s “blacklight poethics” and Glissant’s “poetics of relation,” participants engage practices of opacity, resonance, and relational aesthetics as modes of ethical and political thought. 

Organising Change: Resistance, Refusal, Strike 
Revisits micro-histories and practices from union tactics, strike actions, and other forms of collective refusal. Participants are invited to situate these histories within their own artistic and institutional contexts, developing strategies for instituting change within and against existing structures. 

• Understand artistic practice as a transformative and instituting process. 

• Engage with contemporary philosophical and political conceptions of the political imaginary related to change and transformation. 

• Develop an work or that explores transformation through material, process or concept. 

• Cultivate critical and collective forms of reflection on change in art as pedagogy, material, practice. 

Conditions for Participation

Participation is free. 7,5 ECTS credits will be awarded. 

Application Procedure  

Admission by letter of motivation sent to michele.masucci@kkh.se