Ours is a time of non. Since 2008 “non-movements” have been witnessed as persistent forms of “collective and connective actions of non-collective actors who pursue not a politics of protest but of redress, through direct actions” (Bayat 2013). This non is “the trend of our era”, “a confusion in which no new political order has been found that can restabilize capitalist politics” (Endnotes, 2020/2024). Decoherence is everywhere. Non arises from a recent explosion of diversified identities, subcultures and generalized distrust in the modern contracts of social mediation. Whether non opens up for an inversion or substantial reorientation of these fragmented beings is an open question that at least offers space to fill. Non-movements result from, and appropriate, a form of delinking. The poor building on public land, youth playing forbidden music, or this year’s “‘massive’ rise in pensioner shoplifting” in the UK: these are movements of delinking from the state's legal and social norms. They resist by making those norms irrelevant, at least for a moment. Non is not primarily following a strategy of opposition, but of off-axis-becoming; becoming para-public or non-public. In contrast to ‘classical’ subcultural practices it is not about producing communities gathering around representation, but sites for scattering around (unaligned) refusal and alternative logistics (of strategic disappearance).
Therefore, contrary to a con-ference, the non-ference is not about coming-, bringing- or holding-together, no collective emergence of coherent identification or common goals, but fugitive alliances without form accepting the fact that we will remain Strange(rs) (Laruelle 1995) to ourselves and one another, “inhabiting the radically solitary and fundamentally vulnerable real of the “Human-in-Human” we all are (the Real each of us in his/her last instance is).” (Kolozova 2011)

This is the third meeting in three years after two nonferences took place at Forum Stadtpark in Graz since 2023. It is also a return to some kind of home, as much of this began here in Frankfurt/Main, with the dispersed connections established through the Frankfurt-based labels Mille Plateaux & Force Inc. and the related NON-Blog, heavily influenced by its founder Achim Szepanski, who died too early last year in September 2024, leaving NON as an open agenda to a vast table seated with experiments in practice and theory. The nonference in Frankfurt comprises audio-visual installations and lectures at Synnika in the Frankfurt/Main station district as well as live acts at the Kapelle in Offenbach, with contributions by Simona Zamboli, Clara Wildberger, Jeronimo Voss, Sukkube, Martin Stiehl, Open Secret, Stylianos Papavasiliou, Koga Miyata, Lain Iwakura, hitekjaz, Jan Heintz, John-Robin Bold, Bienoise, Ivan Beta, Lars Karl Becker, aggression_f_fatale and Ibrahim Alfa Jr.

Funded by Musikfonds e.V. by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as Kulturamt Frankfurt/Main.