Julia Wilhelm is a cultural worker based in Rotterdam. She is interested in building otherwise infrastructures for coming together, critical pedagogy, and experimental forms of writing and making public. In her ongoing research project Autoarachnology, she draws from ecofeminist frameworks to investigate how to navigate neoliberal art world infrastructures in search for strategies of resistance.
Her affiliations and stewardships include climate justice collective SPIN; embodied research group Cooking Something Up; Nightly Manifesto, a show on WORM Radio; and Reading Rhythms Club, an alternative reading group. She co-edited the publication Art for (and within) a Citizen Scene (Onomatopee, 2022) and the magazine MagaSPIN No.1: Water.
Autoarachnology (2022-ongoing) - Autoarachnology is an attempt at finding ways to navigate neoliberal infrastructures while searching for strategies of resistance and recipes for weaving, knitting, stitching, and knotting otherwise webs based on solidarity, sustainability, and embeddedness in context. Playing with the metaphor of the spider/web, it aims to break open the idea of the individual artist producing art objects for consumption and offers to think artistic practices as open-ended web-building processes.
Autoarachnolgy exists in the form of a website that traces the threads of my practice and is sometimes formulated into workshops. Beyond, it describes an artistic practice that is not necessarily concerned with producing artworks, but with engaging in collaborative processes.
Autoarachnology (2022-ongoing)
Nightly Manifesto (2022-ongoing) - Nightly Manifesto is an ongoing research podcast on Worm Radio currently led by Senka Milutinović and Julia Wilhelm. Sometimes fictious, most often factual, the show tries to dissect and understand the complexities of critical matters through talking and sharing related sounds. Nightly Manifesto bears an emphasis on developing a platform of shared knowledge with frequent guests. Posters designed by Senka Milutinović and Julia Wilhelm.
Somewhere Else is Closer than You Think (2023-ongoing) - Somewhere Else is Closer than You Think is a collaboration with artist and photographer Lea Novi. It emerges as a non-linear, photographic and sonic narrative that explores the mountain Zugspitze as an ecosystem through the lens of five different characters, who each have a specific relationship to the mountain. The project was composed through several investigative hiking trips and ongoing research on the ecosystem and the beings entangled in it. It touches upon ecological degradation, shifting species communities, hiking culture, Alpine tourism, and fluid notions of time, ultimately raising the question of how we want to relate to the world surrounding us. In its current forms, it combines photography, archival material, film, music, and an audio installation that features the voices of the different characters. Concept, Research and Photography by Lea Novi Research & Writing by Julia Wilhelm Texts spoken by Jana Herrmann
Reading Rhythms Club (2020-ongoing) - The Reading Rhythms Club (RRC) is an experimental reading group founded in October 2020. RRC aims to open up texts as a space for encounter and collaborative experimentation by playing with different reading methods. Since September 2022, each session has been organized with an invited conspirator in a different location that sets the scene and enriches the respective text. RRC is organized by Senka Milutinović and Julia Wilhelm. Posters designed by Senka Milutinović.
Reading Rhythms Club (2020-ongoing) - Documentation of the RRC held on 17 December 2022 at Michelle Teran’s garden house, organized in collaboration with SPIN. The session involved preparing garden beds for spring, reading an excerpt of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity, and the making of a collective quilt.
Cooking Something Up (2021-2023) - Cooking Something Up is a cooking and research collective composed of Freeke van der Sterren, Thao Tong, Yusser Salih, Carla Arcos, and Julia Wilhelm. With a specific focus on the private, the home and the kitchen, we are exploring how to situate and practice study in ecosystems of care. How to reclaim the house as the center of collective life? How to politicize the sphere of the kitchen not only through theory, but in a practical, embodied way?
For one of our workshops at ook_visitorZentrum, Kassel, we invited participants to explore their relationship to the words sustenance and nourishment through zine-making and the preparation a collective alphabet soup.
Cooking Something Up (2021-2023) - Alphabet soup workshop on 3 August 2022 at ook_visitorZentrum at documenta 15, Kassel.
Art for (and within) a Citizen Scene (2021-2022) - The publication Art for (and within) a Citizen Scene: A Look at Art Primarily Active in the Context of Daily Practices sheds light on practices in specific communities where collaboration is common in daily life; where art is seen not only as a self-contained profession, but also as ways of living and being. The project was initiated by reinaart vanhoe and Emily Shin-Jie Lee. Through a series of online workshops, we wanted to include the audience in the publishing process. These workshops took place in spring 2021 in a specifically designed environment on the digital platform gather.town.
During the workshops we engaged with excerpts from the publication, dreamt of an alternative art world based on collectivity and mutual support, made notes and doodles, and listened to the contributors talk about their work.
Art for (and within) a Citizen Scene (2021-2022) - A screenshot of the virtual platform gather.town that served as a context for the online workshops. The multiple islands in the archipelago contain excerpts of the publication, whiteboards, and external links. During the pandemic, it also served as a meeting place for student and activist groups from different countries. The platform was designed by Julia Wilhelm. The workshops which took place in March and April 2021 were developed by Emily Shin-Jie Lee, Sig Pecho, Julia Wilhelm, and reinaart vanhoe.
