Of The ancient art of navigation is a contemporary condition. Maybe it is our contemporary popular culture. What, ultimately, are today’s conditions and consequences of navigation? The talk will propose to enter that question through the notion of the planetary as an attempt to enounce the navigation principle. The term planetary provides some sort of a working tool and curatorial methodology to learn to understand more precisely the art of navigation as an inescapable condition to think with: It takes place while driving with the car's GPS. Or while operating the endless image of a computer-game. We navigate while surfing across digital platforms using earth-energy. It takes place on 'left-to-die-boats' across the Central Mediterranean Sea in life-danger. As well as on the Lac Léman in class privilege. These navigations operate through lived experiences in non-linear time, as a network of practices crossing borders, as forms of embodiment or the inscription of the feminine, on unstable grounds and liquidity towards spatial disorientation, or through the entanglement of knowledge and non-knowledge. The talk takes place in conversation with the CCC Curatorial Seminar asking 'what is navigation?'. In that seminar, we develop a vocabulary through text-activation, thought-movements, listening, image-processing and thinking in different languages. Its objective is to process and share a political/social/queer/sonic consciousness of 'navigation' as a possibility for learning to live the layered complexity of the contemporary world.

Doreen Mende is a curator and theorist. In 2015, she co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Recent research projects include KP Brehmer Real Capital – Production (2014, Raven Row, London); Travelling Communiqué (2014/13, Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin), Double Bound Economies (2013/12, Halle 14 in Leipzig, centre de la photographie in Geneva, ETH in Zurich, Thomas Fischer Galerie in Berlin), KP Brehmer: A Test Extending Beyond the Action (2011, CAAC, Sevilla), Candida Höfer: Projects    Done (2009/10, CAAC in Sevilla, MARCO in Vigo), Not Right But Wrong (2007, JET, Berlin), Ear Appeal (2006, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna). Project-based collaborations in Ramallah, Beirut, Addis Ababa and Tehran. Mende is co-editor of e-flux journal 59 Harun Farocki (2014),    resident of the blog for Manifesta Journal (2013/14) and editor-in-chief of the publication series Displayer at University of Arts and Design/     ZKM Karlsruhe (2006–09). PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge, Goldsmiths, University of London. Associate faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute. Mende is Head and Professor of the CCC Research Master Programme and the CCC PhD-Forum at HEAD–Genève. Mende lives in Berlin and Geneva. 

Navigating Turbulences names the Public Seminar 2016/17 that is organised by the Research-Based CCC Master Program, one of three Masters of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève. More a frame than a theme, Navigating Turbulences proposes to continue to think together about the need for new vocabularies for living in global turbulences by means of contemporary research processes. All sessions emerge from the CCC-Curriculum with its faculty members The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. Such an approach does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.