Social Prepper: Forking Survival Epistemologies as an Artistic Research Laboratory

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.