Cultural production is often mostly drawing from pre-existing concepts – worlds that are forced on us – conforming to the rules of some kind of Big Other, worshipped by editors with a regular income. But is „being critical“ really just about snapping at the world just to catch it in an already exposed lie? With Norient, we attempt to find ways of writing and making that avoids a constant genre-referencing or scholarly masturbation, and intensify rather than ignore affective and utopian qualities of music or other cultural phenomena. In this writing/thinking/recording "workshop“, I would like to ask questions such as:

How to make texts, audio essays or sound pieces that tell new stories about the world in which thinking does not derive its concepts from an exterior “verified knowledge”?

How to think and produce together while maintaining individual energies?

How to bypass the usual jump-cut of relating phenomena to overarching systems (capitalism, climate change) and instead focus on ordinary and fragmented experiences of everyday life as an integral site of cultural politics?

I don't have a clue, but I'd love to figure things out together. To start, I would like to read together some sections of a book that might be helpful: "The Hundreds" by Lauren Berlant & Kathleen Stewart. Drawing from Berlant's notion of worlding as „informed by our turning of attention to a certain experience, place or encounter and our active engagement with the materiality and context in which events and interactions occur“, this „workshop“ attempts to figure things out, reading and listening to things, going for a walk, discussing, maybe even writing stuff, without the urge to come up with sth. particular.