„The parasite intervenes, enters the system as an element of fluctuation. It excites [the system] or incites it; it puts into motion, or it paralyzes it. It changes its state, changes its energetic stance, its displacements and condensations.“ (Michel Serres, Parasite, 1982, p191)

Parasites are the bad kids on the block, inevitably portrayed as seductive but always causing harm. But in many parasite-host relationships, the parasite rarely causes significant damage to the health of the host, because when the host dies, so does the parasite. In the chaotic, unpredictable world of changing environmental conditions, parasites can help hosts adapt. Parasites can stimulate the host's immune system to fight off new microbes, and they can help the host metabolise new forms of food.

How can we learn from other forms of existence and cohabitation and explore parasitic ways of creation? We usually understand parasitic relationships as a binary distinction between two separate entities: host and parasite. How can we expand our notions and create artworks inspired by broader, beyond binary, ecological and communal contexts in which host-parasite relationships survive and thrive?

The figure of the parasite offers artists a means of surveying, articulating, questioning and contaminating relationships, a tool for identifying gaps, interdependencies, differences and positions within affective relationships. Through this observation and redistribution of component logics and positions within systems, the parasite becomes an expert in the patterns of its host and can then subvert and redirect them.

Our interest in parasites is in how they negotiate their surroundings and how their presence provokes responses - how certain implicated bases can become productive for change; how certain infiltrations by those routinely excluded can disrupt the status quo.

Parasitism allows us also to talk about hosting and hospitality, about symbiosis and mutualism, about queer entanglements and adaptivity, about collective perspectives and envisioning spatial strategies through the eyes of the others.

The aim is to explore the concept of parasitism and hosting through various learning sessions and the creation of spatial and ephemeral interventions on the site of the Floating University in the summer semester of 2024, working site-specifically and in response to the existing programme of the Floating University.

Through learning sessions, both practical and theoretical, about expanded notions of more than human, parasitic ways of being, this seminar will allow for the creation and presentation of works during a 1 or 2 day presentation (end of June) and will have access to and collaboration with the Floating University site to gather ideas for the interventions.

This will be through regular access on Tuesday mornings in May and June 2024. (at the Floating Uni: Tues. 07.05, 14.05, 21.05, 11.06, 18.06, + 1 presentation day TBC, the other dates will take place in the seminar room in the Concordia building)