Damaged Deliberations is a two year project that invites multidisciplinary conversations, screenings and workshops to debate, create in, and relate to the contemporary crisis of climate, which increasingly also seems to be a crisis of democracy. As the summer wanes, Damaged Deliberations turns to questions of discarding, and how what is thrown away is rarely a question of objects, but rather a relinquishing of responsibility and care, a calibration of the known. How does chemical testing make our surroundings knowable? In testing for some things and not others, which social relations go undetected? How do chemical molecules translate into a safe or unsafe landscape?

Join us in working through these questions and complicating terms like samples, thresholds, contamination, remediation and recovery. We will start the workshop with a collective reading and research session with writing by anti-colonial feminist writers like Max Liboiron, Michelle Murphy, Angeliki Balyannis and Gabrielle Hecht. Based on this we propose a creative exercise in ‘testing’ our surroundings for more-than-chemical traces and forms of collective life that cannot be easily protocolled. For example, how do we test a space for anti-racism? What factors signal the political ideology of a city administration? Going into the relationship between waste, toxicity, and social space, the workshop seeks to gather collective responses to problems that reveal themselves as increasingly structural, but also increasingly close to home.

Since spots are limited, please register for this workshop by 07. September 2026. To register, please send an email to mail@diffrakt.space with “Political Samples” in the subject line.