On the opening day of the Free School—which this year focuses on clay, softness and desire—Australian-born writer and theorist McKenzie Wark will present her commissioned text On Being Plastic (which can be found in the brochure). In this text she explores how art and language are shaped and moulded by materials, context and time, in an interplay “[…] where we push our sticky fingers into the squishy clay of the world, and it pushes its sticky fingers into the squishy matter of us.” Afterwards, she will engage in a conversation with philosopher and performer Luce deLire.

Wark is a professor of Media and Culture at The New School in New York City. She has published numerous groundbreaking theoretical works, including A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard), Gamer Theory (Harvard), and Capital Is Dead (Verso). Her works of autofiction—which include Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte), Raving (Duke) and Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso)—use sexual aesthetics, dissociation, and her own experience as a trans woman as starting points for theorising new models of contemporary living. In Wark’s writing, intellectualism is not an abstract pursuit, but a form of everyday life.