Spike is pleased to host a lecture by

Helen Hester

"Protocol Xenofeminism: Technology, Collectivity, and Mesopolitics"

In this lecture, Helen Hester will use technofeminist debates and practices to explore the politics of scale. Using the example of a single reproductive ‘handcraft tool’ (and the social relations within which it is constituted), she will elaborate a xenofeminist politics of re-purposing, scalability, intersectionality, and collective autonomy, ultimately gesturing towards a theory of xeno-reproductive justice.

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Helen Hester is associate professor of Media and Communication at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. Hester is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (Ashgate, 2015) and Dea ex Machina (Merve Verlag, 2015) in which Laboria Cuboniks published the manifesto on Xenofeminism.

The lecture is part of the evening public program of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, founded and directed by Warren Neidich and co-directed by Barry Schwabsky. In 2017 it takes place at Spike Berlin during the month of July.