Personal Information
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Given name: Sarah J. M.









Surname: Wenzinger









Email: s.wenzinger@udk-berlin.de









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Your contribution
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Title: Social Prepper: Forking Survival Epistemologies as an Artistic Research Laboratory









Format: Experimental format (4)









Main language: English









Abstract:
Concepts of crisis preparedness, like the prepper are driven by fear. They frame crisis as future rupture, preparedness as isolation or delegation, privatizing survival and shifting responsibility while systemic causes persist. Yet crisis is already ongoing, and survival knowledge and collective skills shaped by political violence, ecological breakdown, and precarity exist. Social Prepper asks instead: how can artistic research mobilize these survival knowledges to generate counter-narratives? 
It is an artistic research project that collects and activates these practices of survival through conversations, field research, and collaborations with artists and activists across uneven crisis contexts. Artistic practice functions as infrastructure for tracing and transmitting embodied knowledge. Borrowing the open-source principle of forking, the project follows how practices—mutual aid protocols, repair techniques, communication strategies, speculative storytelling—circulate and transform. Forking retains origin and consent, allows refusal and differential visibility, and produces recursive publics structured around responsibility. 
Drawing on feminist technoscience, speculative pragmatism, and anthropologies of precarity, the laboratory positions artistic research as a cosmopolitical method that slows crisis narratives and makes fragile survival infrastructures perceptible. Scores, archives, and participatory exercises function as epistemic devices through which survival knowledge is enacted and examined. Crisis becomes legible as an uneven present shaped by cognitive injustice and erasure.
At the conference, the Social Prepper Archive will be activated as a research environment of protocols and testimonies. Participants will fork practices and examine how survival knowledge transforms across contexts, framing artistic research as a non-extractive method for engaging endangered epistemologies and cultivating collective survival beyond imaginaries of isolation. 










Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/465/social%20prepper.png









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Sarah Wenzinger is a Berlin-based conceptual artist, activist researcher, and lecturer working at the intersection of artistic research, spatial practice, and critical pedagogy. She develops long-term research and programme collaborations with European and international cultural institutions, investigating how artistic strategies function as epistemic infrastructures under conditions of urban transformation, climate crisis, and technological change. Her work translates and tests critical theory through collaborative formats, exhibitions, and public programmes, publishing method-based tools for collective inquiry. She studied theatre directing and is completing an MA in Art in Context at UdK Berlin.
  










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
Social Prepper consolidates years of artistic and activist research into crisis imaginaries and survival practices. Earlier investigations addressed dystopian fear narratives; subsequent fieldwork included a documentary on solidarity networks at the Polish–Belarusian border and interviews with artists in Ukraine working under war conditions. Related workshops explored art under unstable contexts. This laboratory marks its first presentation as a coherent research framework.














Requirements
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Additional information:
The laboratory combines a concise exposition of the Social Prepper research trajectory with a multiperspectival research environment. The session begins with a presentation of the project’s conceptual framework, field research, and archive structure, followed by a participatory forking process. Practices are introduced from the archive and collectively examined, translated, and re-situated while retaining origin, contextual specificity, and the right to refuse. Forking requires plurality; participants test how selected survival protocols transform across contexts. The format foregrounds epistemic accountability, consent layers, and differential visibility. Knowledge remains co-produced and provisional. The laboratory sustains tension and situated responsibility as necessary conditions for collective artistic research.










Spatial and technical requirements :
- Projector (HDMI connection) for short presentation and image display
- one large table or several movable tables for archival materials, collective work,  temporary mapping
- document camera (if available) for close-up display of scores and protocols
- I will bring self-developed materials, printed protocols, and archival objects
- Standard seating arrangement that can be reconfigured for small-group work preferred.










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
The laboratory engages lived experiences of crisis, which are subjective and may evoke difficult emotions. Participation is voluntary and non-disclosive; no personal testimony is required. The project follows non-extractive artistic research ethics grounded in epistemic accountability: contextual integrity, layered consent, right to refuse, and differential visibility. No participant is exposed, fixed, or documented without explicit agreement.










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