IMPACT25 – Countercrafts

When artistic practice engages with social realities, it reveals its particular strength: it is always both a part of the present day and a utopian force that reaches into the sphere of the imaginable.

In times of deepening inequality, narrow discourses and authoritarian attacks on democratic achievements, there is a need for spaces in which counterstrategies can be developed and tested, affects negotiated, and complex perspectives made visible. Art creates spaces of resonance for practices of resistance, repair, and reworlding, in order to challenge dominant narratives and foreground personal ideas of belonging and the future.

How can art be used as a tool that we can literally take into our own hands? Which models for resistant practices exist and can be shared with others? Is it possible to build bridges between places, resources, and existing infrastructures in order to form connections in novel ways?

IMPACT25 sees itself as a transdisciplinary symposium for strategies for dealing with the future. This is where practices and blueprints from the arts, sciences, urban space, architecture and other fields of research come together.

This edition unfolded in two phases: the first two days were open to the public, inter alia with brief presentations of the selected invited projects, followed by two days of closed sessions devoted to the exchange of ideas.