On Parasiting is an international artistic project that tests parasitic tactics as a contemporary methodology of resistant artistic practices. It responds by deliberately operating within existing systems and experimenting from inside them: through performative adaptation and precise acts of irritation, relations of power, processes of appropriation, and economic dependencies are rendered visible, their fragility exposed, and concrete spaces of action for a resistant artistic practice developed.
At its center lies a structural question: how can artistic practice remain resistant and effective when critique is absorbed into innovation rhetoric, censored, or threatened by political simplicity?
On Parasiting refuses the comfort of exteriority. Instead of positioning art as moral commentator or symbolic opposition, the project insists on embeddedness. Artists enter companies, organisations or institutions through paid employment. They learn the grammar of the host, perform its routines, and introduce minimal but precise irritations, testing the limits of resistant practices without threatening its own survival.
Parasitism is compelling because it destabilizes the binary of autonomy vs. complicity. It accepts dependency as a condition for action. It works with proximity rather than essentialism. It understands that systems are not only oppressive architectures but also infrastructures allowing sustenance - and therefore sites of intervention. Resistance here is not a spectacle. It is duration, adaptation, and friction from within and evolves out of the urge of our time to think of other forms of dissidence.
Genealogy of the Parasite as a relational figure
The parasite, from the Greek para sitos (meaning “eating beside”), originally named a social figure who shared resources and mediated between the domain of the temple as spiritual and political center and its outside, society. In Roman comedy, the parasite functioned as a destabilizing character, triggering shifts in power and narrative.
Over centuries, the term hardened into an accusation. During the French Revolution it targeted exploitative elites; under National Socialism it became a dehumanizing weapon. The parasite was transformed into a moral and biological insult. It was through the work of Michel Serres and Jacques Derrida that the figure regained conceptual force. For Serres, the parasite is the “third” figure, neither fully inside nor outside a system. It interrupts communication, produces noise, and prevents closure. Without disturbance, systems congeal. Excessive order leads to death. The parasite inhabits thresholds. It does not destroy its host; it lives from it. It shifts boundaries, redirects flows, and exposes fragility through presence. Its force lies in negotiation, proximity without total assimilation.
Parasite as Methodology
On Parasiting adopts this figure not as metaphor but as methodology. The parasite becomes an operational position: embedded, ambivalent, mobile. A parasite cannot sustain from its own system, it must cross over into another’s system and claim it as its host. Therefore, parasitic art leaves the safe enclosure of the Art Field and attaches itself elsewhere, to bureaucracies, corporations, and institutional infrastructures. Parasitic Art sustains itself through the host’s resources while subtly reconfiguring the relations it inhabits. It identifies niches — legal grey zones, administrative blind spots, economic contradictions — and settles there temporarily. It survives by adapting, and by moving before capture.
Curatorial Approach — Process as Infiltration
On Parasiting is structured as a durational, process-oriented framework. The exhibition is not the starting point but the result of an embedded research process.
Parasite School
14–21 June 2026
The public entry point of the project. A hybrid of public symposium and internal bootcamp for the parasiting artists hosted at ZK/U, diffrakt and Make-up. Invited artists, theorists, and practitioners collectively sharpen tactics of infiltration, camouflage, and irritation. The School functions as tactical preparation and collective formation of the group of artists, producing a mutual understanding and care.
Parasiting the Host
July–October 2026
Six artists infiltrate real host systems through paid employment. Their method follows three movements: They analyze internal logics, secure their position through adaptation, and introduce micro-interventions that generate friction without revealing their artistic agenda. Economic dependency is not an obstacle but part of the experiment. The host finances the presence that subtly disturbs it.
A Parasite Job Center accompanies this phase, providing legal advice, strategic reflection, and a Rescue Fund in case of termination. Infiltration is productive but vulnerable; collective infrastructure of care is essential.
Residency and Processing
November 2026
After four months inside host systems, the artists reconvene at ZK/U. Experiences are translated into new works. Embedded knowledge takes form and generates new meanings.
Exhibition
26. November 2026
An exhibition at ZK/U will showcase the process of the Parasiting the Host period and reflect on the methodology of the parasite.
A second exhibition is planned in Spring 2027 at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (tbc), to situates the works within a broader theoretical and genealogical framework of Parasitic Art. It will present both the conceptual backbone and the artistic consequences of infiltration.
The curatorial logic mirrors the parasite itself: relational, adaptive, and contingent. Knowledge is produced through attachment. The project places its own hypothesis at risk by testing whether parasitic tactics can generate durable counter-hegemonic agency.
Parasite Job Center
The Parasite Job Center is the infrastructural core of On Parasiting. It acknowledges that infiltration is not only a conceptual strategy but a material and psychological condition. As artists embed themselves within host systems, their position becomes inherently ambivalent: productive and exposed, adaptive yet unstable. The Job Center responds to this tension by providing a protected space for collective reflection, strategic calibration, and concrete support from legal advice, psychological sessions, to coaching and financial backup through a Rescue Fund. It operates as a counter-structure within the project: a place where experiences from inside the host can be processed, shared, and reoriented. In this sense, the Parasite Job Center does not stand outside the logic of parasiting, it stabilizes it, making sustained infiltration possible without collapsing into either precarity or assimilation.
Parasitic Tactics
On Parasiting identifies and experiments with a set of core tactics. These are not moral positions but strategic hands-on maneuvers.
Camouflage
Adopting the codes, aesthetics, and language of the host. Competence as concealment. Passing as structural survival.
Eating at Somebody’s Place
Living from the host’s resources — salary, infrastructure, institutional legitimacy. Redistribution without declaration.
Amoral Acting
Suspending immediate moral signaling. The parasite does not announce its critique. It persists. Irritation emerges from its mode of being rather than from proclamation.
Leaving Your Habitat
Exiting the art system in order to intervene elsewhere. If the parasite remains within its own field, it becomes decorative.
Finding a Niche
Identifying cracks, thresholds, and ambiguities where maneuvering becomes possible. The niche is not given; it is constructed through attention and adaptation.
On Parasiting is an international artistic project that tests parasitic tactics as a contemporary methodology of resistant artistic practices. It responds by deliberately operating within existing systems and experimenting from inside them: through performative adaptation and precise acts of irritation, relations of power, processes of appropriation, and economic dependencies are rendered visible, their fragility exposed, and concrete spaces of action for a resistant artistic practice developed.
At its center lies a structural question: how can artistic practice remain resistant and effective when critique is absorbed into innovation rhetoric, censored, or threatened by political simplicity?
On Parasiting refuses the comfort of exteriority. Instead of positioning art as moral commentator or symbolic opposition, the project insists on embeddedness. Artists enter companies, organisations or institutions through paid employment. They learn the grammar of the host, perform its routines, and introduce minimal but precise irritations, testing the limits of resistant practices without threatening its own survival.
Parasitism is compelling because it destabilizes the binary of autonomy vs. complicity. It accepts dependency as a condition for action. It works with proximity rather than essentialism. It understands that systems are not only oppressive architectures but also infrastructures allowing sustenance - and therefore sites of intervention. Resistance here is not a spectacle. It is duration, adaptation, and friction from within and evolves out of the urge of our time to think of other forms of dissidence.
Genealogy of the Parasite as a relational figure
The parasite, from the Greek para sitos (meaning “eating beside”), originally named a social figure who shared resources and mediated between the domain of the temple as spiritual and political center and its outside, society. In Roman comedy, the parasite functioned as a destabilizing character, triggering shifts in power and narrative.
Over centuries, the term hardened into an accusation. During the French Revolution it targeted exploitative elites; under National Socialism it became a dehumanizing weapon. The parasite was transformed into a moral and biological insult. It was through the work of Michel Serres and Jacques Derrida that the figure regained conceptual force. For Serres, the parasite is the “third” figure, neither fully inside nor outside a system. It interrupts communication, produces noise, and prevents closure. Without disturbance, systems congeal. Excessive order leads to death. The parasite inhabits thresholds. It does not destroy its host; it lives from it. It shifts boundaries, redirects flows, and exposes fragility through presence. Its force lies in negotiation, proximity without total assimilation.
Parasite as Methodology
On Parasiting adopts this figure not as metaphor but as methodology. The parasite becomes an operational position: embedded, ambivalent, mobile. A parasite cannot sustain from its own system, it must cross over into another’s system and claim it as its host. Therefore, parasitic art leaves the safe enclosure of the Art Field and attaches itself elsewhere, to bureaucracies, corporations, and institutional infrastructures. Parasitic Art sustains itself through the host’s resources while subtly reconfiguring the relations it inhabits. It identifies niches — legal grey zones, administrative blind spots, economic contradictions — and settles there temporarily. It survives by adapting, and by moving before capture.
Curatorial Approach — Process as Infiltration
On Parasiting is structured as a durational, process-oriented framework. The exhibition is not the starting point but the result of an embedded research process.
Parasite School
14–21 June 2026
The public entry point of the project. A hybrid of public symposium and internal bootcamp for the parasiting artists hosted at ZK/U, diffrakt and Make-up. Invited artists, theorists, and practitioners collectively sharpen tactics of infiltration, camouflage, and irritation. The School functions as tactical preparation and collective formation of the group of artists, producing a mutual understanding and care.
Parasiting the Host
July–October 2026
Six artists infiltrate real host systems through paid employment. Their method follows three movements: They analyze internal logics, secure their position through adaptation, and introduce micro-interventions that generate friction without revealing their artistic agenda. Economic dependency is not an obstacle but part of the experiment. The host finances the presence that subtly disturbs it.
A Parasite Job Center accompanies this phase, providing legal advice, strategic reflection, and a Rescue Fund in case of termination. Infiltration is productive but vulnerable; collective infrastructure of care is essential.
Residency and Processing
November 2026
After four months inside host systems, the artists reconvene at ZK/U. Experiences are translated into new works. Embedded knowledge takes form and generates new meanings.
Exhibition
26. November 2026
An exhibition at ZK/U will showcase the process of the Parasiting the Host period and reflect on the methodology of the parasite.
A second exhibition is planned in Spring 2027 at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (tbc), to situates the works within a broader theoretical and genealogical framework of Parasitic Art. It will present both the conceptual backbone and the artistic consequences of infiltration.
The curatorial logic mirrors the parasite itself: relational, adaptive, and contingent. Knowledge is produced through attachment. The project places its own hypothesis at risk by testing whether parasitic tactics can generate durable counter-hegemonic agency.
Parasitic Tactics
On Parasiting identifies and experiments with a set of core tactics. These are not moral positions but strategic hands-on maneuvers.
Camouflage
Adopting the codes, aesthetics, and language of the host. Competence as concealment. Passing as structural survival.
Eating at Somebody’s Place
Living from the host’s resources — salary, infrastructure, institutional legitimacy. Redistribution without declaration.
Amoral Acting
Suspending immediate moral signaling. The parasite does not announce its critique. It persists. Irritation emerges from its mode of being rather than from proclamation.
Leaving Your Habitat
Exiting the art system in order to intervene elsewhere. If the parasite remains within its own field, it becomes decorative.
Finding a Niche
Identifying cracks, thresholds, and ambiguities where maneuvering becomes possible. The niche is not given; it is constructed through attention and adaptation.
curation@parasiting.net
Instagram
On Parasiting GbR
Papierstraße 11
13409 Berlin
Through our newsletter, we send irregular transmissions: announcements, open calls, invitations to public programs, and updates from ongoing phases of attachment.
Through our newsletter, we send irregular transmissions: announcements, open calls, invitations to public programs, and updates from ongoing phases of attachment.
curation@parasiting.net
Instagram
On Parasiting GbR
Papierstraße 11
13409 Berlin