UMBAU is proud to host Barcelona-based curator and educator Bani Brusadin, member of the Transmediale 2023 curatorial team and co-founder of The Influencers festival. Bani is presenting his book "The Fog of Systems", which surveys artistic strategies to rebuild orientation and expose new frontiers in a planetary-scale system that is increasingly disposed towards invisibility. The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with UMBAU & special guest Jules Buchholz.

Bani Brusadin: "The Fog of Systems“ (Aksioma 2021)

Highways, antennas, channels, containers, storehouses, pipes, submarine cables, sensors: the word infrastructure usually refers to the material systems that allow for the movement of stuff and bodies, as well as human expression, ultimately making human activity possible. They are designed to remain invisible and below (infra), to avoid subjective meaning and to let the value associated to those transactions emerge. What may appear at first sight a dull territory for an artist, actually provoked a huge shift in something that lies at the core of human imagination: the balance between what can be seen and what is not immediately apparent, what is left unsaid, what is disturbingly opaque, or what is plain and simply concealed for political, economic or cultural reasons. A new generation of artists, most of whom were raised between the end of the analogue media era and the beginning of the age of ubiquitous digital quantification, have begun to explore (sometimes in unusual ways) the vast network of infrastructures that wire the planet we inhabit, a monstrous and fascinating construction that is made of human technologies, as well as natural resources, non-human lifeforms, and other forms of intentionality that may be built by humans, but whose procedures exceed the capacities of any of us.