On Parasiting: Tactical Artistic Research as Resilience under Cultural Capture
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 10:10am
- 11:10am
(60 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
This presentation proposes Parasite Art as an artistic research methodology that explores parasitic tactics not only as forms of resistance, but as potential alternative modes of knowledge production. Situated within an artistic PhD research project, the workshop treats parasitism as a minoritised epistemic practice that operates through proximity, dependency, adaptation, and tactical ambiguity rather than opposition, morality or autonomy.
Instead of positioning endangered languages and knowledges as objects of rescue, I approach them as tactical agents capable of irritation. Drawing on Michel Serres’ figure of the parasite, parasiting becomes a method: entering dominant structures, living off their infrastructures, and introducing dissonance into processes of standardisation and optimisation.
The ongoing artistic research project On Parasiting functions as a real-time laboratory. Invited artists temporarily embed themselves in host systems - cultural institutions, corporate environments, bureaucratic settings - testing how minoritised languages, gestures, and epistemologies can survive and act within extractivist frameworks to produce irritations. The project combines artistic interventions, collective reflection, independent publishing, and discursive formats such as a Parasite School.
In the context of platform capitalism and synthetic realities that flatten heterogeneity, parasitic artistic research does not claim purity or externality. It acknowledges complicity and proximity to power as conditions of action. Minoritised languages are not romanticised as untouched reservoirs; they are understood as resilient yet fragile modes of sense-making that must negotiate hostile environments.
The workshop reflects on practice-based knowledge production: How can infiltration function as method? How can irritation produce epistemic value? And how can artistic-curatorial experiments be articulated as research without neutralising their subversive force?
Instead of positioning endangered languages and knowledges as objects of rescue, I approach them as tactical agents capable of irritation. Drawing on Michel Serres’ figure of the parasite, parasiting becomes a method: entering dominant structures, living off their infrastructures, and introducing dissonance into processes of standardisation and optimisation.
The ongoing artistic research project On Parasiting functions as a real-time laboratory. Invited artists temporarily embed themselves in host systems - cultural institutions, corporate environments, bureaucratic settings - testing how minoritised languages, gestures, and epistemologies can survive and act within extractivist frameworks to produce irritations. The project combines artistic interventions, collective reflection, independent publishing, and discursive formats such as a Parasite School.
In the context of platform capitalism and synthetic realities that flatten heterogeneity, parasitic artistic research does not claim purity or externality. It acknowledges complicity and proximity to power as conditions of action. Minoritised languages are not romanticised as untouched reservoirs; they are understood as resilient yet fragile modes of sense-making that must negotiate hostile environments.
The workshop reflects on practice-based knowledge production: How can infiltration function as method? How can irritation produce epistemic value? And how can artistic-curatorial experiments be articulated as research without neutralising their subversive force?
Biography
Jakob Margit Wirth is an artist and PhD candidate in Artistic Research at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Their practice focuses on parasitic, infiltrative, and collective strategies in public space. They are editor of Kunstforum International: Parasite Paradoxa (2024, Issue 293) and work internationally on projects addressing institutional power, right-to-the-city politics, and minoritised artistic practices.
