Event overview
Klara Kofen delivers our fifth talk 'Fake and Extinct, or Infrastructural Hauntings'. Monday 19th January. 5.30 - 7 pm, LG.02 PSH
How do we negotiate with all the excluded narratives and voices - emancipatory, liberatory, malignant, regressive - when they come to haunt the present? And how do we extract cause-and-consequence from the great junkyard of what-ifs?
Klara Kofen’s recent piece fake & extinct combines digital puppetry, opera and simulated worlds to explore infrastructural hauntings and spectral governance. Moving through ghostly sites of infrastructural sovereignty—some nourishing, some extractive—from this multimedia performance, Kofen examines what legal historian Natasha Wheatley calls 'chronocenosis': the coexistence of competing timescales within single moments.
Which timescales matter - human and non-human, cultural specificities and technological rhythms, economic cycles and planetary processes? Which synchronise, which are subordinated, and who decides? How does power operate when temporalities conflict? And how does technology aid or prevent us to speculate and act on the many counterfactuals that haunt the present moment?
BIO
Klara Kofen is an artist, dramaturg, writer, and researcher. Her work is concerned with histories, speculative, counterfactual, real and imagined and the way technological interfaces shape our relation to time and affect.
Since 2015, Kofen has been the artistic director of Waste Paper Opera, a live performance collective and volunteer chorus. Recent works include fake & extinct (2025, Centrale Fies’ Live Works Fellowship; programmed by TBA21 for Terrafilia, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid); Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments (2023-2025, created in collaboration with Bahar Noorizadeh, commissioned by The Guggenheim Museum New York, first commissioned by BEK Bergen/Reimagine Europe); and Dead Cat Bounce—An Oratorio About Finance and Catastrophe (2022-2024, Waste Paper Opera/ Gary Zhexi Zhang, Somerset House, Nottingham Contemporary, Arts Catalyst, Eastside Projects). Her writing has been published in Catastrophe Time! (ed. G. Zhexi Zhang, Strange Attractor/MIT Press), Cabinet Magazine and by Onomatopee.
Klara studied history at Glasgow and Oxford. She occasionally investigates international trade shows and works at the Bookartbookshop.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Jan 2026 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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