Electric Delight
Towards a Politics of Transindividuation
J.L. Schäfer (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M.G. Vink – Mentor (TU Delft - History, Form & Aesthetics)
R.R. van den Ban – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
S. Kousoulas – Mentor (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
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Abstract
The proposal incites the collectivisation of maintenance and organisation of the electricity grid in Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam Zuid.
In times of unproductive polarisation along a ‚Political Spectrum’ and the proliferation of a reactive subjectivity that lacks contextual attunement, the citizen appears to become incrementally more a consumer of politics rather than a productive participant in the organisation of our togetherness.
As the progressive automation of our lives intensifies the general proletarianisation of the citizen, the capacity to productively participate in politics turns quite literally forgotten and invites for determinate governmentality to continue its recursion.
Drawing from Schizoanalysis, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, and care ethics, the research focuses on the exploration of libidinal, political, and energetic engagement with the formulation of individual and collective desires, beliefs, futures, and values through our environments.
Questioning the degree and value of the automations that surround us in our daily lives, the project aims to integrate the subject with (locally to globally) outsourced problems that it has progressively been alienated from and turn the paranoid architecture of electricity into a convivial tool that allows for the experience of collectivity, work as leisure, and political participation on a daily basis.
Through the necessity that is electricity as a collective (political) problem individuals can learn about parts-to-whole relations and dependencies. Via participatory spatial production, immediate material engagement, and the making sense-able of day-to-day automations, the project turns the inaccessible and intangible local electricity grid and transformer station of Afrikaanderwijk into a didactic environment to learn to care and to problematise desire as well as the coming together of individual and collective. It is a plea for an architectural process rather than product that is assisting in the emergence of literate, active subjects that can productively inform local and global collective efforts and challenges via a politics of transindividuation.