The working group investigates the reciprocity of the arts and public spheres. To what extent do the arts constitute or test new, alternative, and oppositional public spheres? What are the material, spatial and temporal registers of artistic infiltrations into the public? In this regard, the group aims at a conceptual and theoretical exploration of the term and to connect the antagonistic “counter” to more fluid relations and terms such as “sub,” “adjacent,” “partial” or “alternative public spheres.” These theoretical investigations develop in close interrelation with the concrete case studies of the respective research projects. Among other questions, we will examine how (counter)public spheres are socially, spatially, praxeologically, discursively, or medially created and what dynamics of hegemony and marginality compose and shape (counter)public spheres.

The contact persons for this working group are Henning Podulski (C01) and Mimmi Woisnitza (A06).

The working group is dedicated to artistic works and practices that deal with hegemonic power relations and demarcations in an intervening way. We ask ourselves how decolonial art spaces are created that question and change social norms and structures through reflection, transgression and transformation. We will reflect on decolonial and emancipatory knowledge practices and related discourses by visiting exhibitions and performances together, discussing theoretical texts and inviting guests to join the working group.

Based on the impulses, methods and objects of the participating working group participants, we work with questions and approaches from various disciplines and move at their interfaces (including art history, gender studies, cultural studies, dance, theater and film studies, performance studies, sound studies, literary studies, ethnography). We counter the Eurocentric understanding of the concept of decolonization with discourse-critical perspectives from the so-called Global South. We understand decolonization as a continuous process that is open to criticism and encounter. The questions that concern us include:

How can art understandings and art practices be reflected from a decolonial research perspective? How can the concept of intervention be used in this context? How do decolonizing and feminist discourses and practices interact? How can historical contexts and analytical procedures of the present be placed in relation to each other?

Contact persons are Layla Zami (B05) and Birgit Eusterschulte (C06).

This working group explores how digital media practices explicitly and implicitly intervene in social and political processes. In addition to formats such as hacktivism and activism through hashtag, video, and image campaigns, the group examines everyday practical and artistic strategies that test alternative and subliminal forms of sociopolitical intervention with and within digital media systems. The focus is on the wealth of material offered by the disciplines involved (cultural studies, philosophy, film studies, theater studies, sociology, and media studies), while critically examining their entanglements with platform capitalism and institutionalization. A concept of activism will be developed that is not solely focused on actors, but includes aesthetic and discursive dimensions as well as resonance phenomena and their underlying media conditions and dynamics. Related to this are questions about the methods and structures of digital addressing, collectivization, and mobilization, whose effects and repercussions are discussed both online and offline, in the ideological battlefield between progressive and hegemonic-regressive movements.

The contact persons for this working group are Naomi Boyce (A01) and Florian Schlittgen (B04).

This working group examines the ways in which forms and formats prefigure, align, and performatively influence the potential of artistic interventions.  Building on shared discussions of theoretical texts that deal with form/formats and rhythm, the working group will elaborate criteria of Areas B: Moving – Disrupting and C: Drafting – Discarding as well as changes in the definition of terms (such as the shift from “form” to “format”). Historical aspects such as the dynamization and dissolution of concepts of form since the avant-garde, as well as media and institutional factors associated with the shift in frameworks of formats and rhythms in intervening practices, are important for the current and future goals of the working group: they raise questions about the relationship of forms/formats to discourses of diversity and migration.
Artistic and political possibilities will be explored through the work of the research projects and in relation to the main CRC questions, with regard to theory and experimental formats and practices. The effects of these explorations are examined in workshops that accompany the thinking process of the working group.

The contact person for this working group is Kirsten Maar (B02).

Drawing on the diversity of perspectives offered by the disciplines involved (architecture, cultural studies, European ethnology, musicology, philosophy, and sociology), the working group will explore the intervention potential of different improvisational practices for aesthetic, social, and political visions of the future. Using a broad spectrum of examples that encompass both explicit and implicit improvisational phenomena from the spheres of aesthetics and everyday practice, the discussion will focus on how the characteristic tension between necessary planning and regulation on the one hand and the uncertainty and openness on the other, manifests in the structures, methods, and impacts of specific improvisational practices.

The contact persons for this working group are Eva Backhaus (B01) and Simon Teune (B03).

The working group sees itself as a platform for the exchange and discussion of all questions concerning the relationship between academia and activism. As many members of the SFB are activists themselves, they are faced with the question of how activist work and academic activity can be reconciled. These concern, for example, the understanding of roles, the different requirements and the tension that arises from the different roles. Discussing and reflecting on these questions is an essential part of the working group's work. This is done, on the one hand, on the basis of specific challenges that the members of the working group are confronted with, and, on the other, as part of a more general examination of issues such as the neutrality of academia.

A second important part of the working group's work is to make problems at the SFB visible through a joint exchange and to make concrete suggestions for improvements based on this mutual reflection, or to take a position on these. So far, this has included the creation of a voluntary self-commitment for air travel. The working group also sees itself as a kind of seismograph in order to promptly address current concerns and problems and introduce them into the SFB's general discussion at an appropriate point.

A third component of the working group's work is the organization of events that deal with questions of activism and academia. These include invitations from activists, such as the discussion with members of the Agape Earth Coalition, or the organization of networking meetings, such as the BarCamp From Facts to Lived Knowledge.

Contact persons are Eva Backhaus (B01) and Matthias Grotkopp (C04).

In collaboration with the research projects A06, B03, and C03, the methods workshop explores how past and present practices can be reconstructed in terms of their materiality and processes, as well as the forms of representation and modes of writing that can vividly portray these practices in their performative nature: How can artistic practices be described and reconstructed in their respective historical contexts? How can their potential to intervene in sociocultural phenomena be understood and specified? The workshop explores historiographic and ethnographic methods from the perspective of art history, literary studies, sociology, and social philosophy.

Practices are in part characterized by their ordering function, serving as patterns and habits of everyday social practices or artistic procedures. They only become recognizable as practices through a stable structure of repetition, yet they also possess a certain openness in their variability and susceptibility to disruption. This inherent openness, often accompanied by critical reflexivity, brings into focus social and artistic practices as forms of disruption and resistance.

Contact person: Anna Kipke (A06).