In face of current findings on the climate crisis, contemporary theoretical approaches are proposing new ways of relating to our planet. Countering the notion of sovereign, self-dependent subjects, these positions emphasize interdependent relationships between human and non-human actors, as well as solidarity, care, and mutual support. Decolonial and queer-feminist approaches position themselves, in their roles as emerging ecologies, as forms of social resistance against an anthropocentric-individualistic world order.

This development can also be seen in the arts, for example in participatory practices, in the social arts, and in fictional conceptions of history. These art practices conceive and test alternative forms of communal living, working, and relating. Furthermore, they seek to take the life experiences that have been forgotten or written out of history and make them visible, experienceable, and memorable in their spatial, institutional, and geopolitical contexts.

The workshop series focuses on how these types of relationships between humans, spaces, objects, and environments are represented in artistic and creative practices. Special emphasis is placed on questions of space and on practices that give shape to social structures or create them in the first place, such as dance and theater, body, sound, spatial arts, architecture, and curatorial practices. How do relationships constitute spaces of living, dwelling, loving, playing, thinking, and acting? How can the hierarchical structures that inevitably shape the possibilities of public and private spaces be made visible and even be displaced, subverted, or dismantled through artistic processes? What self-perceptions are inscribed within public and private spaces and the relationships that unfold within and between them? And to what extent can historiographical reevaluations of marginalized, peripheral, and resistant phenomena question and constructively transform these self-perceptions?

Artists, academics, and other actors from various fields are invited to engage in a dialogue on these questions, using an artistic work or text as their starting point.

Research projects A06, B02, B05 and B06 are involved in the workshop series.

2022

Asja Lacis’ Manifest „Neue Richtungen in der Theaterkunst“ (1921)
Designed by Konstanze Schmitt and Mimmi Woisnitza (project A06).

2023

„Revolutionärin im Beruf“ oder „Mitarbeiterin“? Asja Lācis in BRD und DDR
Designed by Konstanze Schmitt and Mimmi Woisnitza (project A06). Asja Lācis heute. Künstlerische Interventionen und Positionen
Designed by Konstanze Schmitt and Mimmi Woisnitza (project A06). Vor dem Entwurf – Erfahrungen, Prozesse, Praktiken
Designed by project B06: Susanne Hauser, Hannah Strothmann (UdK Berlin) Eva-Maria Ciesla, Julia Weber (FU Berlin). Klanglandschaft
Conceived by Layla Zami (project B05) and co-organized by Sophie Schultze-Allen (project B02).