With zest, mischief, and a smile, Unnatural Affairs cut through the natural order and infect common sense. They subvert the dominant regime of representation and identity which is based upon reactionary constructions of hierarchical oppositions: of unity and multiplicity, the universal and the particular, the male and the female, the ideal and the material, the self and the other.
Unnatural Affairs are neither, and/or: both. They are of a hybrid monstrosity—in the middle, where the problems grow, where things are undecided, on the verge of something not yet determined. They operate beyond the false, moralistic choice between transgression and care, freedom and love, joy and ethics, between what’s good for me and what’s good for you.
Unnatural Affairs derive great pleasure from infiltrating and subverting discourses both academic and non-scholarly to meddle with them, to shake them up, to denaturalize the ways we habitually think of how and what things are and are supposed to be. They alienate the seemingly familiar, reveal the supposedly natural as a construct, the given as contingent, the habitual as strange. Often, that means exposing the seemingly good as violent—and sometimes, vice versa, making room for transgression’s liberating power.
Unnatural Affairs is also the name of a theory-focused, funded residency program open to anyone with a willingness for radical thinking, taking place in Berlin-Kreuzberg from March 1 to May 31, 2025.
