The Parasite School invites the public to the screening of the 1970’s Black Power cult film based on the 1969 novel by Sam Greenlee. The film itself was shot guerrilla-style in secrecy by Dixon, where most of its funding came from Black Americans desiring to see a film like this. The film protagonist, Dan Freeman, enlists in the CIA to retrieve insider knowledge to plan and power through a Black Power revolution. The main character’s positioning and the relational network of power and complicity woven into the plot raise troubling questions and enrich the School’s discussion of parasiting tactics as they emerge in different contexts and are embodied by different subjectivities.

“(...) unfailingly polite and apparently always eager to please, he is the living embodiment of Ellison’s invisible man, ‘yessing whitey to death’ while discreetly learning everything he possibly can about urban guerrilla warfare.” National Film Registry

The introduction gives an overview of On Parasiting and reflects on the first internal phase of the Parasite School. Emerging from the urgency to rethink resistant artistic practice under conditions of appropriation, censorship, and political simplification, the project investigates parasitic methodologies that operate from within existing systems.

Drawing on her ethnographic research in a major German cleaning company, Jana Costas examines how research navigates tensions between critique and cooptation. Focusing on how these dynamics unfold in practice through ethnographic fieldwork, the talk explores how researchers encounter, generate, and reveal “cracks” within workplaces while also reflecting on the risk that research itself becomes absorbed into dominant agendas. It asks what role research can play in creating openings for reflexivity and alternativity.

Participating parasite artists will introduce themselves as well as the hosts they will enter. Each artist will briefly reflect on their host structure, as well as on the conditions, negotiations, and frictions of entering it and becoming part. Because the work operates undercover and depends on sustained embeddedness, identities and institutional names will not appear at the program and we ask all present to keep that disclosed, to not post or share these online. What emerges is a situated map of proximity and interference, where artistic practice becomes a mode of reading, inhabiting, and destabilising the logic of the host.

This talk will consider the artist parasite's nomadic aesthetics, how, in order to intervene and feed on their chosen context, artists draw from their environment and must position themselves and their visibility in peculiar ways. Comparing techniques of mimicry and over-identification with the figure of the intruder and outsider, the talk will explore the absorption of the system's codes, routines, and aesthetics into an artist's working methods, and what these positions tell us about the differential and contingent relationships we have to the systems in our world. As Michel Serres writes, the parasite is an ideal participant.

Parasite Art is situated within political art and artivism, not as a fixed category but as a distinct aesthetic operation that both intersects with and departs from existing artistic practices. Central is the question of how artistic work can be understood through the figure of the parasite as a relational, embedded, and shifting mode of practice within dominant social, political, and institutional systems. This will be evaluated in reference to an artistic example.

The talk tackles three questions by relating them to one minute of public dancing: (1) How to imagine political action in the public sphere, if we think of politics not on a grand scale, but in the most minimal, „parasitic“ sense conceivable. (1) How to rethink aesthetic theory as a theory of embodied, affective and choreographed politics. (3) What does it take for public action to be democratic and what are the conditions for imagining democratic futures.

Where to look for Parasite Aesthetics? When does a relational proximity to and complicity with the host system become parasitism– and when is it conformity? The parasite’s presence produces a more or less permanent political re-arrangement within the system: what does this shift imply both for the parasite and the host? The discussion will address how parasitism and whether parasitism configures one of art’s political affordances. Taking in the positions from the preceding lectures, the participants will discuss limits and possibilities of Parasite Aesthetics as artistic form and as political action.

Anna Watkins Fisher is Senior Lecturer of Digital Media and Culture at King’s College London. She is the author The Play in the System (Duke University Press, 2020) and Safety Orange (University of Minnesota Press, 2021); co-author with Precarity Lab of Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020); and co-editor with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2nd edition, 2015). She is currently completing a new book called Yes Machine, which explores how the ability to say "no" (refuse, opt out, or turn off) is being designed out of our everyday devices and infrastructures, as ceaseless engagement and energy use become the unquestioned default.

arek parasite (pasożyt) – a Polish non-/post- artworker. He works at the intersection of socially engaged visual art, post-art, artivism, collectivism, and cultural animation. Arek Parasite’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in his personal background, including his origins in a farmer-worker class, an impoverished village, and a medium-sized Polish city. He combines these experiences with current socio-political themes to bring out alternative or repressed perspectives. He offers counter-narratives to the existing reality through a wide range of artistic media and means of expression. In 2010, he formulated the ‘Manifesto of Parasitism’, which presents the idea of his activities as a parasite artist, thus referring critically to the artist’s status in society. In line with the ideas contained in the Manifesto, Arek Parasite lived and created by parasitising for four years in several cities in galleries, institutions and cultural venues. Over time, his activities evolved into so-called ‘host projects’. At the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, amid the rise of street protests, he began participating in them with ‘Striking Paintings’. 2026 is his year of ‘Refusal of Work’

Art of the Working Class is a multilingual publishing program at the intersection of art, society, poverty, and wealth. Sold on the streets, vendors keep 100% of the revenues. This model is the collaboration between private and public institutions, organizations, artists, and allies. 

María Inés Plaza Lazo is founder and editor at large of Arts of the Working Class.

Chiara Garbellotto is a social anthropologist and cultural worker. In her academic research, she has explored the (re)mediation of science and technology in exhibition contexts, the different practices and logics of public engagement in museums and the politics and aesthetics of participation. She has worked with, among others, the Furtherfield Gallery and Commons in London, the Museum of Natural History and Art Laboratory in Berlin, as well as Berlin neighbourhood youth centres. She holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Bologna and an MA in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture from the University of Westminster. From 2017 to 2020, she was based at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she contributed to the collaborative research project Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century.

Jakob Margit Wirth is an artist, activist, and PhD candidate in Artistic Research at Bauhaus University Weimar. Their research and artistic practice focus on Parasite Art as a subversive methodology operating within contemporary socio-political and economic systems. Working across performance, intervention, installation, video, and social practice, Wirth investigates how artistic resistance can emerge from positions of complicity rather than external opposition. Through tactics such as infiltration, camouflage, mimicry, and resource redistribution, their projects embed themselves within existing structures to expose hidden power relations, economic dependencies, and the fragility of hegemonic norms.

Alongside their artistic work, Wirth has taught at institutions including Bauhaus University Weimar, Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Kunsthøjskolen Holbæk (DK), and Agogis Zürich, developing pedagogical formats that connect artistic research with social and political practice. They work extensively in collective constellations and are co-founders of projects such as Operation Himmelblick and the collectively-run project space Make-up in Berlin. Their work has been presented internationally in both institutional and non-institutional contexts and featured in media such as ARTE, Monopol, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Jana Costas is Chair of Business Administration, with a focus on People, Work & Management, at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include new forms of work and organizing, identity, control, leadership, violence, secrecy, and space. She is co-author of the monograph Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organisational Life (Stanford University Press). Her ethnographic book Dramas of Dignity: Cleaners in the Corporate Underworld of Berlin (Cambridge University Press) received the European Group for Organization Studies Book Award 2023 and was named Distinguished Winner of the 2024 Award for Responsible Research in Management.

Jennifer (Jen) Clarke is an artist-anthropologist and Associate Professor at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, UK. Her work operates across visual culture, anthropology, and artistic research, developing multimodal and practice-based methods through moving image, exhibition-making, artist publications, and collaborative research. Working across long-term projects in Japan and the UK, her research explores how images, materials, and embodied practices shape ecological and social knowledge. Her recent work focuses on parasitic methodologies, and, what she terms visceral ecologies: how environmental knowledge is internalised, transformed, and lived through everyday material practices such as making, storing, handling, and sensing. She is Lead Artistic Researcher on the UKRI-funded Agroforestry Futures (Treescapes) project and author of recent work on parasitic methodologies, feminist hospitalities, and artistic research.

Grace H. Zhou is a poet and anthropologist. Her ethnographic manuscript, Parasitic Intimacies: Life, Love, and Labor in the Asian Borderlands, weaves together the lifeworlds of diverse groups in Kyrgyzstan that were once criminalized as unproductive “social parasites”—migrant sex workers, drug addicts, and entrepreneurial traders with transnational networks that reach into China, Turkey, and beyond. Her debut poetry collection, diasporous, is winner of the 2025 St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook, Soil Called a Country, selected for Newfound’s 2023 Emerging Poets Series. She received her PhD from Stanford University and is currently Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Harriet Rabe is a systemic counselor with a focus on EFT (emotion-focused therapy) and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy). She is also a multimedia artist and writer and has recently submitted her PhD in artistic research. Her work explores the intersections of emotional landscapes, systemic perspectives, narrative textures, and subjective experience, engaging a range of expressive media (objects, drawings, performance). As a counselor, she works with individuals and couples, supporting them, for instance, in navigating psychosocial stressors, life transitions, and neurodiversity.

Marina Resende Santos is an artist and researcher living in Berlin. She works with investigation, role-playing, community engagement and conceptual gestures on 'eloquent sites' that allow the interrogation of private property and spatialized and racialized inequality. She completed a BA in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and an MA in Raumstrategien at Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin. Her work has been featured internationally at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Kunstenfestival Watou, Chicago Architecture Biennial among others. She won the Mart Stam Prize and the prize in the category Environment at the Festival ImageSante for her film "628 Years of Potatoes", directed with Vincent Jondeau. She has taught at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Berlin University Alliance and TU Berlin on post- and anticolonial artistic practices, land movements and cooperative principles.

Matilde Outeiro is a curator, researcher and project manager who focuses on the construction of counter-hegemonic narratives. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and Comparative Literature from the University of Lisbon (2018). Matilde Outeiro has dedicated herself to managing and conceptualizing both institutional and independent artistic projects. In 2022, she was the curatorial assistant of the 35th Biennial of São Paulo, titled Choreographies of the Impossible. In her practice, Outeiro continually reflects on the political and ethical responsibilities of artistic agents to rethink conventional methodologies, while proposing experimental formats designed to redistribute resources and power. Profoundly influenced by intersectional radical feminism and decolonial theory, her curatorial research examines myth-making as a strategy of resistance, fostering alternative epistemologies for reclaiming agency over personal and communal narratives.

Michael Degani is Associate Professor of Environmental Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, researching energy, infrastructure, and design in Africa and beyond. He is the author of The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania (Duke University Press, 2022), an ethnography of a national grid.

Oliver Marchart, Mag.Dr.phil. (University of Vienna, philosophy), PhD (University of Essex, Government), ‘habilitation’ in philosophy and sociology (University of Lucerne). 2001-2006, scientific assistant at the Department of Media Studies, University of Basel. 2006-2012 SNF-research professor at the Sociological Seminar of the University of Lucerne. 2012-2016 professor of sociology at the Art Academy Düsseldorf. Since March 2016, professor of political theory at the University of Vienna. Fellowships: 1995 Research Fellow at the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Essex. 1997/98 Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK), Vienna. 2005 Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) Paris. 2013 Senior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK), Vienna. 2016 Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Konstanz.

Pascal Nonnen guides people and organisations through change. As a hobby musician, he plays with the tension between upholding patterns and disrupting them — a practice that feeds directly into his professional facilitation work. He uses irritation and interference as core moves: precise acts that crack structures and provoke change. His vision is to co-build a world in which work contributes to the wellbeing of people and planet.

As a Manager for Organization & Culture at a boutique consultancy, he designs development programmes and coaches leadership teams through cultural and structural change. Rooted in systems theory and a passion for creative intervention, he believes change rarely comes from the outside. His thinking is shaped by an interdisciplinary formation across cultural, communication, and economic sciences and digital sociology, studied at Zeppelin University, HU Berlin, Edinburgh, and HSG St. Gallen.

Pilvi Takala is an artist who lives and works in Berlin and Helsinki. Her video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities to question social structures. In her practice she shows that implicit normative rules for behaviour are often only revealed through disruption. Takala represented Finland at the 59th Venice Biennial 2022. Her work has also been shown at Kunsthall Trondheim (2026); FACT Liverpool (2024); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2023); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2023); Pavilion of MUNCH Triennale, Oslo (2022); Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2021); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2018); CCA Glasgow (2016); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013): New Museum, New York (2012); Kunsthalle Basel (2011); Kunstinstituut Melly (FKA Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2010) and 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005). Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013.

Post Brothers is a critical enterprise that includes Matthew Post, an enthusiast, word processor, educator, and (co)dependent curator engaged in artist-oriented projects and critical fabulations. From 2016-2019, Post Brothers was the curator at Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany, and from 2021-2023, they were an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. They have curated numerous exhibitions and projects across the world and regularly publish essays in artist publications, exhibition catalogues, and art and cultural journals. Some recent curated exhibitions of note include: Breaking the Joints, a group exhibition concerning the relationship between animation and the body at Sapieha Palace, Vilnius (2025); Drain the Öresund, a regional group exhibition at Malmö Konsthall (2025); In the beginning was the deed!, an exhibition inspired by local histories of insurrectionary anarchism at the Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, Poland (2021); and Mercury, a visual essay curated in collaboration with the artist Simon Dybbroe Møller for the Tallinn Photomonth 2019 Biennial. They also participate in exhibitions with text-based and performative contributions, and lecture in art and educational contexts across Europe. They live in Kolonia Koplany, a small village near Białystok, Poland.

Suelen Calonga is an artist, researcher, and educator working at the crossroads of African-diasporic memory, ancestral poetics, and counter-colonial thought across her academic, artistic, and spiritual paths. Born in Contagem, Brazil, and based in Berlin, she is currently a PhD candidate in Art History investigating the presences and absences of African-Brazilian heritage in German collections. Her work brings together art, education, and institutional critique to examine silence, invisibility, and the colonial structures that shape what can be known and recognized. She holds a master’s degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, founded Calonga Arte e Cultura, and coordinates KOPF – Knowledge Out of Place Forum, an international network dedicated to African-diasporic heritage displaced into global collections.

Tobias Ginsburg is an author and director. He studied dramaturgy, literary studies, and philosophy. In 2016, he was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, and in 2020, he received the “Grenzgänger” scholarship from the Robert Bosch Foundation. Tobias is also an impostor. For his books, he goes undercover in places most people would never dare to enter: he has lived among Reichsbürger groups and within a sect, infiltrated far-right student fraternities, a gang of militant neo-Nazi rappers, and an international network of homophobic clerical fascists.

Tonia Andresen works as postdoc researcher at the University of Art Braunschweig. Her PhD with the title Globalization as Feminization. Work Relations in Contemporary Art analysis how artists have dealt with different forms of labor such as (waged) care work, manual labor as well as artistic production. Her research topics include gender and queer studies in the arts, labor relations, global inequalities as well as artistic strategies and practices from Abya Yala.

Vincent Rumahloine is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and socially engaged practitioner based in Bandung, Indonesia. His work operates at the intersection of contemporary art and community activism, focusing on themes of displacement, uprooted identities, and the recovery of erased histories. Having transitioned from the NGO sector, he brings a professional background in grassroots advocacy and health-focused engagement to a rigorous artistic practice.His methodology is defined by an approach of "hacking society", seeking out loopholes within existing systems to create space for marginalised narratives. Since 2018, he has served as the Founder and Director of Rakarsa Foundation, a platform that exemplifies this approach by facilitating collaborative creative projects and social initiatives. By navigating institutional gaps, he utilises a research-heavy process to challenge historical erasures and surface the "intelligence of displacement.” This practice manifests through a diverse range of mediums, including large-scale installations, audio-reactive glitch art, public performances, and participatory workshops. As the founder and lead organiser of  Bubuara Foundation, he also acts as a vital bridge between local knowledge systems and global contemporary art. Through this foundation, he works to empower the Jelekong community, preserving its unique painting traditions, called “Jelekongism,” while strategically navigating cultural systems to ensure their longevity. Whether orchestrating participatory sonic walks or developing experimental documentary projects, his work remains committed to the power of collective memory and systemic resilience.