30 January 
17:00 - 18:30
KQB Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin

A Giant on the Bridge: Between Prison and Return
Lecture by Jo Collinson Scott, featuring Jo Mango 

Distant Voices: Coming Home is a 3-year long research project taking place in the United Kingdom (funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council), that pairs Scottish songwriters and musicians with people with experience of the criminal justice system to write songs in and of those liminal spaces.

This includes those currently within the criminal justice system, those having returned from it, those helping others make that transition, those affected by issues with relation to crime, or those attempting to facilitate dialogue and restoration. This presentation will combine live performance of some of these songs (drawn from a collection of over 200) with discussion of what we learn from them about the experience of liminality in spaces of incarceration, transition, and attempted restoration.

30 January 
15:00 - 16:30
KQB Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin

On K-Punk: Egress & The Fisher-Function
Panel with Lisa Blanning, Matt Colquhoun, and Steven Warwick, moderated by Terence Sharpe

For Fisher the idea of world-building came with responsibility, something his work takes into great consideration with very sincere care. As he described in his later writings, the socio-political disease of our time is that of pervasive stasis in a rapidly accelerated culture. If we take the liminal as that which can occupy either side of a boundary, that which acknowledges complexity, then we see an opportunity perhaps to the deadlock of binaries presented by the worst trapping of the contemporary right and left.

This panel takes as its kernel the concept of Egress, a word used by Fisher to describe the exiting of the current cultural malaise through analysing the politics of teleology and collectivism. Liminality itself must be critiqued with the urgent need for determinacy in mind. Perhaps a solution to the pitfalls of liminality is that of determinacy, that cultural production must operate within a strong pedagogical model if it is to make its way out of its liminality. Fisher postulated that what was required for real transgression was a reprisal of the spirit of a world that could be free, to go beyond the beyond the pleasure principle.

30 January 
17:00 - 18:30
KQB Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin

After K-Punk: Labour, Death & Cultural Artefacts
Panel with Dane Sutherland, Dhanveer Singh Brar, moderated by Terence Sharpe

What kind of cultural logic produces a turn? With evolution comes culture, and with culture comes cultural logic, and with cultural logics come fields of knowledge—ones that compete against one another. And it is in the delineating of these lines, and perhaps even producing them, through clarifying complexity, that perhaps cultural criticism needs to take its next turn. How can we splice the DNA of cultural production and criticism in an age where music's turns are emergent and occupy a complex horizon of possibility?

Throughout the K-Punk project, we find cultural artefacts analysed with a sense and appreciation of compulsion and pathology, both adopted and generated. Given Mark Fisher’s now seminal examinations of the capital's cultural logic through to his desire that mass culture return to being a terrain of struggle rather than a dominion of capital, this panel attempts to draw preliminary lines across what cultural logic can do and how, what it cannot do and why, and what would be needed to change these conditions.

The events are included in E2E and Connect Passes.
Tickets: 5€ per event or 10€ for a day pass, available at the Studio 1 entrance of Kunstquartier Bethanien.