Radical Sociability

What started out as a vigilante strategy for bringing accountability to powerful people who had previously been immune to any consequences for their actions, is increasingly becoming an unreflective method for bullying within communities. Whether to call it call-out culture, cancel-culture or shaming-culture is hotly debated, but regardless of its name, by now its toxicity is undeniable.

Lou Drago has been investigating identity politic’s role in perpetuating what socio-political observers have called the “fracturing of the Left,” and cancel-culture’s role in deepening divides along identity-based lines. In this sound piece, Drago introduces their ideas around enacting intersectional affinity through a process called Radical Sociability, and through a series of exercises, speculate with participants on how to be receptive and humble in order to really enact solidarity.

Lou Drago is a Berlin-based artist, curator, writer and radio producer/ DJ. Drago is a founding member of XenoEntities Network, Berlin, a collective who focuses their research on queer, gender and feminist studies and their interactions with digital technologies.

They curate and produce, Transience, a monthly show on Cashmere Radio, Berlin that focuses on experimental, ambient and experient music that aims to offer anxiety relief to its listeners. Drago’s recent research is concerned with finding ways to coalesce all of those who fail to fit a neoliberal, capitalist mould in an attempt to reunite what we have witnessed to be an increasingly fractured Left.

They have shown work, curated shows and spoken on panels across Europe and internationally.