Past Events

2.15 - 3.45pm
Talk
Guest: Irine Jorjadze (via Zoom)
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
This event will be held in German.

As part of the first European exhibition on modernism and avant-garde in Georgia, paintings, graphics and films were recently exhibited in Brussels. This will be presented and discussed in conversation with the curator and art historian Irine Jorjadze.

In conversation with her, we will talk about the relationship between colonialism and modernity within the avant-garde movements that took place in Georgia, and in particular about current exhibition practices. On the one hand, we will focus on the curator's work, including within the exhibition "Avant-Garde in Georgia (1900-1936)", on the other, the art itself offers space for political discourse, as Tbilisi opens up an interesting space in questions of the nationalisation of art: from the Stalinist terror of 1937 to explicitly left-wing artistic counter-strategies to it.

The discussion will focus in particular on ideas of the primitive, inscribed in artistic objects created in Tbilisi, and on entering into a discourse that negotiates Georgia's exoticisation by outsiders and its own exoticisation of the other. The works of artist Niko Pirosmani in particular offer interesting insights into how social conditions play into artistic productions and thus gain visibility in the objects. Naive art and the so-called masters without a school reflect issues of class relations and material inequality on the one hand, but also confrontations within the language of form. Within these art forms, which pose a claim to difference and are in search of authenticity, ways of thinking from the colonial and thus also figurations of the so-called primitive are also inscribed. They contain an aesthetic idealisation of the experience of a pre-industrial era, which also led to the avant-garde in Georgia reproducing racist stereotypes. This aesthetic, constructed as other without dialogue with the depicted, becomes a method of bringing the constructed other under control and is thus also structurally integrated into the colonialist world view.

The event takes place as part of the seminar "Naive Art, Primitivism and Counter-Primitivism" in cooperation with the ArchipelagoLab.

Irine Jorjadze is an art historian and curator. She was research curator of the europalia exhibition "Avant-Garde in Georgia (1900-1936)" at Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels. She lives and works in Tbilisi.

Katharina Tchelidze is a research assistant at the Chair of Art History at Leuphana University and is writing her dissertation on the artist group H2SO4.

Oktober 26, 6 - 8pm
November 16, 6 - 9pm (online)
Dezember 6/7, 5 - 8pm
Januar 12/13, 4 - 7pm
online/ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
The group will be held mainly in German.

Theories of desire and sexuality are booming - even though they have been the subject of political and theoretical discourse for decades. We would like to cast two thematic spotlights: On the one hand, we are interested in the historical debate about the relationship between identity and desire, which developed in the context of lesbian and feminist theories. On the other hand, we will discuss recent contributions to theories of desire and sexuality that are located in the field of psychoanalytically influenced queer theory as well as affect theory. We will propose texts by Christian Maurel, Diana Fuss, Teresa de Lauretis, Alenka Zupančič, Lee Edelman, Gila Ashtor, and Lauren Berlant, and are happy to open the seminar to other suggestions.  The plan so far is to have the reading circle/event take place partly in blocks, in order to allow for thematic immersion and perhaps also a better compatibility of the additional reading with "regular" studies and other commitments. In general, however, the exact mode can be discussed at the first meeting. We look forward to reading and discussing together!

Joining later is always possible.

Material: The seminar will take place within the framework of the Autonomous Teaching program. We will upload the reading promptly in the folder for the event on MyStudy. For questions please send a short email to Thekla Molnar.

every second tuesday
6 pm
The group will be held mainly in German.

In this reading group we meet to read texts that are currently moving the people who are active in and around the Lab, that we would like to explore together, and that might become part of the Archipelago.

Dates: October 17th and 31st, November 14th and 28th, December 12th, January 16th and 30th, February 13th and 27th

Material:
For text and access information, feel free to send a quick email to archipelagolab@leuphana.de.

7.30 - 9pm
Short Film Screening and Discussion
Scala Programmkino
Apothekenstraße 17, 21335 Lüneburg
Free admission

Wie sich erinnern […] Вспоминать by Katja Lell, 10 min, german/russian with englisch subtitles
Lamarck by Marian Mayland, 28 min, german with english subtitles
Der Fluss ins Vergessen by Zi Li, 18 min, german/mandarin with englisch subtitles

Recounted in the family, felt between generations, hidden and rediscovered in the material. In the essayistic, documentary, and poetic works of filmmakers Katja Lell, Marian Mayland and Zi Li, processes of remembering are being transformed. The three short films open up private worlds to the viewers that simultaneously feel familiar. They tell family (hi)story(ies) that intertwine the intimate, with politics and history. 

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmakers that will shed light on their material and cinematic approaches and illuminate boundaries between the remembered, the recollected, and the imagined.

This event is a collaboration of ArchipelagoLab and the DFG Graduiertenkolleg 'Kulturen der Kritik'. Organised by Leon Follert and Marie Lynn Jessen.

6pm
C5.325
Talk in German by Çiğdem Inan

Based on the denial of racism and the mechanisms of victim-perpetrator reversal that have come to light in right-wing and racist attacks, including the Solingen arson attack, Çiğdem Inan's lecture negotiates the unequal distribution of vulnerability within discourses of security and care in migration policy. She shows how grief and fear form the contested arena in which the vulnerability of people affected by racism is simultaneously denied, re-appropriated and negotiated. To what extent can a political agency emerge from experiences of grief, loss and dispossession in the context of racist violence that is able to abolish divisions into vulnerable and non-vulnerable lives by virtue of a different social relationality?

Çiğdem Inan is a sociologist who lives and works in Berlin. Her teaching and research focuses on affect theory, post-structuralism, critical migration sociology, queer-feminist philosophy, racism studies and postcolonial social theory. She is currently working on the politics of negative affectivity, ontologies of dispossession and fugitive resistance in relation to racist violence, which she discusses in the context of right-wing and racist attacks in Germany, among other things. She is also working on a book on Das Andere des Affektiven, in which she combines classical and non-classical philosophies of the affective with critiques of racism.

This event is a cooperation between the Institute for Sociology and Cultural Organization, the Center for Critical Studies and the ArchipelagoLab.

Every first Tuesday of the month we meet at 8pm in the ArchipelagoLab (C5.225) for our Labmeeting to be together and exchange ideas. Feel free to bring food or drinks. Dates:  May 2, June 6, July 4

Moreover, the Autonome Schreibgruppe: Miteinander schreiben, Feedback üben, organised byLiane Schlumberger and Max Waschka met weekly.

4 - 5.30 pm
Guests: Ibã Huni Kuin & Daniel Dinato (via Zoom)
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
This Event will be held in English and Portuguese (translated).

The Movement of Huni Kuin Artists (MAHKU), founded in 2012 by Ibã Huni Kuin and his son Bane Huni Kuin, has been present in the Brazilian contemporary art scene for over a decade – they are currently at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), with the exhibition Mirações. This presentation of researcher Ibã Huni Kuin and curator Daniel Dinato about MAHKU and their ongoing collaborations takes place in the context of a dialogue with students of the 'Decolonial Thought and Practice' seminar led by Raphael Daibert.

In order to decentralize thought and practice from Europe and focus on subjectivities from other geographies, the main questions of the seminar Decolonial Thought and Practice are: How do contemporary art forms respond to a suppressing (art) history that has historically erased multiple voices? What is the role of art in resisting and creating worlds otherwise? Learning from Global Southern theorists, 'Decolonial Thought and Practice' intends to collectively research the thinking and the doing of theory and art practitioners that in their politics and art forms act as openings to other landscapes of understanding.

Ibã Huni Kuin is an artist, researcher, and txana, a specialist in the chants of ayahuasca. In the 1980s, he began to research with his father, Tuin, and his uncles to register and reclaim the ayahuasca chants, called huni meka, and the Hanxta Kuin language, the language of the Huni Kuin. It was in this context that he and his son Bane founded the Movement of Huni Kuin Artists (MAHKU) in 2012. Ibã is also an activist who fights for the affirmation of Huni Kuin culture and for its economic and political autonomy.

Daniel Dinato is an anthropologist and curator. Since 2016 he has been working and researching with MAHKU. Together, they organized the exhibitions Yube Inu, Yube Shanu, MAHKU: Songs of Images and MAHKU: Sell canvas, buy land. He is currently developing his PhD at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada.

Raphael Daibert is a Brazilian curator, artist and researcher based in Berlin. He is a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy and Art History and PhD candidate at the Cultures of Critique Research Training Group at Leuphana University Lüneburg and is, during this semester, leading the seminar 'Decolonial Thought and Practice'.

Material:
Via archipelagolab@leuphana.de you can request a text by Daniel Dinato to prepare - however, this is not necessary.
Amilton Mattos' film "O sonho do nixi pae (2015)" can be watched here.
 

6 - 9 pm
Film screening and discussion
Guests: Initiative "Undoing Unease"
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

The event will be held in english.

Have you ever experienced unease in academia? What does “unease” mean to you? We, the initiative “Undoing Unease” and the ArchipelagoLab, invite you to join our screening and discussion of the documentary “Picture a Scientist” which focuses on how exclusionary structures, harassment and diffuse power mechanisms discriminate against marginalized people. You are welcome to come by, share experiences or just listen.
 

9am - 6.10pm
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Screening in French with English subtitles.

The Abécédaire is Gilles Deleuze's only appearance on television. In just under mere eight hours, journalist Claire Parnet interviews the French philosopher and navigates Deleuze's philosophical reflections along the alphabet. The interview was recorded in 1989-1990, but at his request was not broadcast until after Deleuze's death in 1995.

We will show the work in 4 blocks, all in one day, with breaks. Join us as it suits you or keep up with us in this marathon. We welcome everyone, even if it's just for your favorite letter!

5 pm - 8 pm
Guest: Lucas Tiemon
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

Whether at university, at work or when your best friend hooks up with a sexy person again - but you yourself remain alone:
Envy is something we encounter again and again in our everyday lives. That's why Lucas Tiemon invites you to watch the video essay by ContraPoints together,
which deals with precisely this topic. It deals with the cultural-historical genesis of the concept of envy, its social function and an examination of this mortal sin despite its taboo status.
After the essay, Lucas Tiemon, who is writing his bachelor's thesis on the topic, would like to discuss and reflect with you.
 

6 - 8pm
Screening
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

In Empire Me, Paul Poet brings together six different Do-It-Yourself states and micronations that view themselves as experimental fields for new forms of life. The presented and partly controversial counterfoundations want to create their own worlds and thus oppose traditional forms of society and state.
With the inhabitants of Sealand, Hutt River, Damanhur, ZeGG, Christiania and the floating cities of Serenissima.

The screening is organized by the project "Alltag im Dissens" by Andrea Kretschmann and takes place in cooperation with the research initiative Kulturen des Konflikts.
 

6 - 8 pm
Guest: Gerko Egert
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
The event will be held in German.

„Den Weg zu bereiten, der vom wissenschaftlichen Forschungsansatz über das Experiment und die Methode bis hin zu dem führt, was wir Kunst nennen, das ist die Aufgabe der Technik – in unserem Fall der pädagogischen Technik…“ C. Freinet

When the French educator Célestin Freinet made the printing press the center of his pedagogy, he was concerned with more than just teaching students how to print. For him, typesetting and duplicating, writing and distributing, editing and designing a magazine by students for students were themselves essential techniques of his pedagogy.

Based on this narrow as well as experimental linking of pedagogy and publishing, learning and printing, thinking and acting, the lecture explores the political potential of current and historical techniques of a radical pedagogy. What spaces, formats, and practices of self-organized, open-source, and peer-to-peer learning have existed and continue to exist? How can artistic, activist, and collective techniques serve to communicate other, marginalized knowledge even today? Most importantly, how can they communicate it in a different way? In other words, how does a technique become a pedagogical technique?

Gerko Egert is a performance and media scholar. He is currently a private lecturer at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen. He has been a substitute professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and the HBK Braunschweig. He researches philosophies and politics of movement, art and radical pedagogy, planetary action, dance and performance since the 20th century, process philosophy as well as (speculative) pragmatism. In addition to his PhD Berührungen. Bewegung, Relation und Affekt im zeitgenössischen Tanz (Transcript 2016, engl.: Routledge 2020), his publications include "Operational Choreography. Dance and Logistical Capitalism" (Performance Philosophy 2022) and the anthology Experimente lernen, Techniken tauschen. Ein spekulatives Handbuch (hrsg. mit Julia Bee, 2020).
Together with Julia Bee he runs the publication platform nocturne.
 

6 - 8 pm
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

They infiltrate nation states, cut up banknotes, leave behind thin traces, a manuscript. We encounter them as ambassadors, dream figures and troublemakers. The ant changes human beings, a formication is unstoppable. Their tunnels are timeless architectures, the undermining takes place in the untunnelled. A hand, found inside an anthill. A tingling, two mandibles pinching the surface layers. The beginning of an intraterrestrial contact. 

In consideration of various artistic contacts with the ants, we venture an approach.

Lisa Behrendt studied philosophy, German language and literature and performing arts in Braunschweig and currently works as a waitress and freelance journalist for a city magazine.

Hanna Zeyen is a student of cultural and sustainability studies in Lüneburg and works in a Kunstverein.

Both are members of the Ameisenschutzwarte Niedersachsen and trained ant carers.
 

6 - 8 pm
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

At the start of this new term in the ArchipelagoLab we want to reflect on Ruth Sonderegger's idea of contagion, and with this in mind about what the Lab represents and offers to us.
Anybody who wants to participate can read „Foucaults Kyniker_innen. Auf dem Weg zu einer kreativen und affirmativen Kritik“ and join us in the Lab.
Being together, reading together.

Text (in German)
 

6 - 8 pm
Workshop
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
This event will be held in english

Guests: Nik Forrest and Alanna Thain (Montreal)

Sleep exists as a critical and opaque threshold—between public and private, individual and collective, body and environment. Some would argue that the roots of the contemporary Western understanding of sleep start with an ecological experiment in biopolitical management: the 1938 descent into Mammoth Cave by Nathanial Kleitman, the so-called father of sleep studies. Kleitmen’s work, as Matthew Wolf Meyer puts it, aimed to turn "individual experiences of sleep into the sleep of the masses". Kleitman and his grad student idealized the cave as an ecology of control, a black box divorced from daylight that would allow them to experimentally reset their circadian rhythms in accordance with a 28 hour cycle. More recently, Jonathan Crary has argued that we are taking part in a mass experiment with the 24/7 lightbox of late capitalism, in an always on and lit-up world. Between black box and light cube, how else might we think sleep as an ecology, one characterised by an experience we call “thresholding”? In part one, we’ll look at the emergence of modern sleep in terms of crisis, control and creativity, across examples from art and activist projects such as the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, New Circadia, Meet to Sleep, Black Power Naps, Sleep79 (Matthew Fuller and Shu Lea Cheang) and more. In the second part, we will experiment with ecological sound techniques that attempt to cultivate collective forms of rest and thresholding.

Selected readings: Excerpts from Matthew Fuller. How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconscousness.
 

6 - 8 pm
Artist Talk
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
This event will be held in english

Guest: Edith Brunette and François Lemieux (Montreal/Berlin)

Artists, authors, and researchers Edith Brunette and François Lemieux will present their recent artwork Going to, Making Do, Passing Just the Same. Installation, videos, performances, as well as a book compose this project which was the result of many collaborations amongst friends old and new with whom they wanted to think further about inhabiting: how to live in this world, a ruin of our own making? An inquiry into the ordinary, Going to, Making Do, Passing Just the Same led them to develop a methodology to explore and magnify the often hidden infrastructures of State capitalism, and some of the ways people circumvent their frontiers and rules.

We will propose elements of reflection to pay better attention to what binds us together in order to thwart our economy’s undesirable practices, temporalities, and ways of being. If these ruins are the signs of a rapidly collapsing world, we must ask ourselves: What do we want to fight for, and with whom?

François Lemieux’s post-disciplinary art activity brings together practice, publishing and research in the form of exhibitions, documents and situations that address language, space and power. Current and upcoming projects include: Organ of Cause and Effect (2022) Künstlehaus Bethanien, Berlin; Désoeuvrer la Valeur / Derivative Value, curated with Erik Bordeleau, Marilou Lemmens & Bernard Schutze, VOX—Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal (2022); Going to, Making do, Passing Just the Same, with Edith Brunette, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montréal (2021) / Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine, Trois-Rivières (2022) / Espace Mach, Université de Sherbrooke (2022); Variations autour d’un Patio, curated by Pavel Pavlov, Le Patio, Aylmer (2021); Primary attempts and related materials, Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio, Sapporo (2019). Recent publications include: Le Merle vol. 6, no. 1, At the Edges of Empire: Measures of Peter Sloterdijk, with Erik Bordeleau and Dalie Giroux [online: lemerle.xyz] (2021); and the book Going to, Making do, Passing Just the Same, edited with Edith Brunette, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University Press, Montréal (2021).

Edith Brunette combines artistic practice and theoretical research. Both aspects of her practice reflect on discourses in relation to artworks in the field of the arts, and to what they reveal of the political forces and games at work. Her projects deal in particular with video surveillance (Caméraroman, 2011), liberty of speech in times of social crisis (Consensus, 2012) and the artists’ political agency (Faut-il se couper la langue ?, 2013; Cuts Make the Country Better, 2015, in collaboration with François Lemieux). Her work has been presented in multiple venues in Canada, including Galerie de l’UQAM, Skol, articule (Montréal), Axenéo7 (Gatineau), and Le Lieu (Québec). She has participated in various art residencies in Québec (Optica, DARE-DARE, Praxis, La Chambre blanche) and France (art3, Valence). As an author and researcher, she regularly publishes texts in journals and art publications. A cofounder of the organization Journée sans culture, she is currently enrolled in a PhD program in political science at the University of Ottawa.
 

6 - 8 pm
Performance
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
This event will be held in english

Guest: Gabriel Francisco Lemos (São Paulo)

Yet We Laugh is a performance in which the artist and researcher Gabriel Lemos explains to a laptop what laughter and humor could mean to a human being. During this 45 minutes performance, the audience will also listen to the sonic learning process of a machine attempting to laugh. Based on text and sound, Yet We Laugh is a speculative lecture performance that articulates some of the reasons why we are sometimes possessed by laughter. The research that motivates this work is concerned with laughter's effect on psychology and how humor and absurdity could break with daily control feedback loops.

Gabriel Francisco Lemos (1988, lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil) is a composer, visual artist, and researcher working at the intersection between performance and composition in interdisciplinary contexts. His work concerns subjects related to sound, language, and technological mediation. From 2019 onwards, Lemos collaborates with GAIA (Art and Artificial Intelligence Group) in partnership with the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI / INOVA-USP). As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), Lemos researches the implementation of neural networks for creative purposes, its aesthetic possibilities, epistemic influences, and socio-political impacts in culture.
 

6.30 - 8 pm
Artist Talk and Discussion
Avenir Rösterei (Ilmenaugarten 137)

Guest: Jana Vanecek (Zürich)
 

Jana Vanecek's works negotiate mental health and neurodivergence in the context of multilayered interwoven socio-political discourses. They operate at the intersections of art, research, science, and literature. Vanecek selects topics based on personal experience, but the focus is not on the "individual person." The writing and/or artistic «self» is decentralised to reveal the cultural, political, economic, and social entanglements that shape this «self» - but also the social realities of many other lives. Vanecek illuminates the chosen topics from different disciplinary perspectives, using the combination of various voices as a structuring principle.

In the lecture Jana Vanecek will present two works that are an excerpt from her artistic research project on neurodiversity, mental health and co-authorship with artificial intelligence. The presentation will be followed by a discussion with Christoph Brunner and Marie Lynn Jessen.

Born in Czechoslovakia and shaped by its manifestation of state socialism, Jana Vanecek (all pronouns/none) currently works as a research associate at Zurich University of Arts, as well as an artist and author. She studied Fine Arts, Theory and Transdisciplinarity. Medical Humanities, neurodiversity, queer-feminist technoscience, and language are her main interests. Vanecek was nominated for the SWISS ART AWARD in 2021 and has received the ProHelvetia Residency Shanghai (CN) and the Art Grant of the City of Zurich (studio residency Genoa) in 2022. In June 2022 Vanecek's book «ID9606/2a-c: Dispositve eines Virus» was published at transversal Verlag.
 

6 - 8 pm
Workshop
Online (Zoom) // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

Guests: Sophia Bembeza (Athen) and Julia Haas (Wupptertal), Christoph Brunner

The Workshop will be held online as well as in the ArchipelagoLab (C5.225), you are welcome in both spaces.
Please register via archipelagolab@leuphana.de. The Zoomlink will be sent to you then.

The Workshop series adresses aesthetics and online practices of the so called “new right”. This third iteration will look at the complex issues of misogyny, anti feminism and right wing feminism. From Incels to invocations of nationalistic womanhood there are many different concepts of femininity as the target of violent fantasies as well as women functioning as strategic figures of political activisms. Together with the participants we want to explore these images of the female and their usage in media, and thus uncover the deep connections of right wing ideologies with queer- and transphobic and anti-women agendas.

Sophia Bembeza, Julia Haas and Christoph Brunner will hold this workshop via Zoom.
 

6 - 8 pm
Studio Talk
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

Guests: Paula Hildebrandt und Kathrin Wildner

What marks the relationship between research, art and activism? And how does one find the appropriate narratives and modes of expression for this relationship? We would like to discuss these "primary questions" of the ArchipelagoLab with the artistic-research activists, authors and publishers Paula Hildebrandt and Kathrin Wildner. In an open studio conversation, we want to take on the question of the conditions under which culture and science come together (or not), what this has to do with storytelling practices, and why the elephant in the seminar room (but also in social, art, or urban space) is absolutely real (albeit very multifaceted). We will talk about poetic, aberrant, radical and existential forms of research, which open up a fresh view or a good feeling only through their minoritarian or subaltern status. To this end, Paula and Kathrin will share from their practical experiences, we will hear an excerpt from Paula's recently published book Welcome City, and learn about possibilities of bookmaking as a cultural-political intervention. The stakes are no more and no less than the essential question for KuWis (but also others): why are we actually doing this? And how could it be done differently, more joyfully, or even with more punch?

Paula Hildebrandt is a writer and filmmaker whose work combines performative action, experimental writing, photography, video, and artistic teaching. Her most recent book, Welcome City (adocs 2022), designs Hamburg as a welcoming city. Educated in Berlin, Sussex and Cambridge, she has worked in international development cooperation and co-curated ÜBER LEBENSKUNST at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She has taught at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and the Universidade Federal in Rio de Janeiro, and her doctoral dissertation at the Bauhaus University Weimar explored artistic interventions and contemporary forms of political participation. Her narratives, essays and academic texts (Urbane Kunst, The Reseacher is Present) have appeared in various magazines (PERIPHERIE, polar) and anthologies, for the Goethe Institute, art associations and dramatic societies. The installation and video work "Logistics of Paradise" was shown in the context of GRET REPORT 2020 at Kampnagel. From 2015 to 2018 she coordinated the graduate program "Performing Citizenship".

Kathrin Wildner is an urban anthropologist conducting ethnographic fieldwork in New York City, Mexico City, Istanbul, Bogotá and other urban agglomerations.
She conducts research on issues of public space and urban citizenship using (artistic) methods of sound, mapping, and walking. She is a founding member of metroZones - Center for Urban Affairs and involved in a variety of transdisciplinary projects, publications, exhibitions, workshops and other performative mediation formats (www.metrozones.info). She teaches at international universities, such as the University of Hamburg, the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, the European University Viadrina or the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. From 2005 to 2007 she directed the research project "Theories of Public Space" at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung HFG, Karlsruhe. She was professor of Urban Anthropology at HCU, Hamburg (2012-2021) and visiting professor in the master's program "Spatial Strategies" at Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Berlin (2013-2015).
 

6 - 8 pm
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

To conclude the term, we want to invite you to a screening of the somewhat disturbing documentary about Pepe the Frog’s origins, Feels Good Man (Arthur Jones, 2020) on January 25^th. On this occasion we will let the term fade out with you and possibly take inventory. And who knows – maybe there will already be some new ideas for the summer term in our heads! There will be snacks and drinks.
 

6 - 8 pm
ArchipelagoLab
The event will be accompanied by a translator.

Guest: Dejla Haidar (Kobanê University, Rojava University Qamislo)

On her trip through Germany, Dejla Haidar, who is a lecturer for Jineolojî at Kobanê University and Rojava University in Qamislo, will also visit the ArchipelagoLab. This will be a premiere, as it will be the first time that an educational delegation from the self-governing region of Northern and Eastern Syria, known as Rojava, will come to Germany. There is an interest on the part of the delegation to introduce the departure in educational work and the new universities with a liberal democratic approach to education in Rojava and Jineolojî in particular, to learn about critical approaches at German universities and to discuss possibilities of possible future cooperation.

Jineolojî looks at the history of patriarchy, state, capitalism and society from the perspective of women as well as life. In doing so, it works with society to find solutions to pressing social problems and for gender liberation, democracy and ecology.

The semester events at ArchipelagoLab are over and we want to wish you a great summer! A big thank you for the inspiring exchange, see you next semester!

July 7 2022  - 6-8pm in C5.225
Plants_Intelligence. Learning like a Plant (in English)
with Yvonne Volkart, Dr. Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, Rasa Smite
lecture and discussion

Presentation and discussion with Yvonne Volkart, Rasa Smite, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch about their ongoing Swiss National Foundation research project.

In this presentation we explore an angle of neo-extractivism by attending to the non-human beings that bear the heavy toll of the very promises of development. Across the Global South, plants remain instrumental for economic agendas that seek to level up the output of the region in the global economy, via agroindustry, ‘green’ revolutions or land-use policies that run on novel modes of resource extraction. However, plants’ unique capacity for survival is also the creation and sustenance of the living. Plants solve problems, adapt to and form their environments, or endure hard times and reappear where devastation and ecocide precede. In doing so, they form alliances with farming and Indigenous medicine collectives, with plant breeding scientists, agroecologists, and artists to device modes of resistance and survival. Therefore, this presentation unpacks key questions concerning plant intelligence and presents ongoing research by artists and theorists working with project partners across Argentina, Colombia’s Andean-Amazon region, and Northern Switzerland.

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June 29 2022  - 6-8pm
Aesthetics of the (New) Right Part 2 - Humor, Irony, Cynicism (in German)
With Sofia Bempeza, Christoph Brunner and Fabian Schäfer
Interactive Zoom Workshop

The workshop deals with online practices of the (new) right and their specific visual encodings. Humor, irony, and cynicism are recurring motifs that are supposed to trivialize racist content and attitudes. At the same time, humor is a central vehicle to enable a low-threshold approach of potential interested parties. The workshop offers short orienting inputs, among others with image-analytical, culture-specific (esp. Japan) and media cultural studies perspectives and cordially invites all participants to bring materials for discussion and joint analysis.

We ask for registration until 29.6.2022 15pm: archipelagolab@leuphana.de

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June 22nd 2022 from 6pm in C5.225
ArchipelagoLab - Plenum & Lab Dinner

After a long break, we will meet again for the first time for a plenary in ArchipelagoLab (C 5.225) on June 22 from 6pm. If you feel like thinking together about the Lab and what it can be, and maybe even imagine contributing your own ideas and projects, come by!
 
More info about the Lab can be found on our website: www.leuphana.de/institute/ipk/archipelago-lab.html

There will be a hearty buffet with homemade treats, cold drinks and lots of music to start and end the day. Registrations until 21.06. (10 a.m.) please

to: archipelagolab@leuphana.de

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May 4 2022 – 6-8 pm
Decolonial Anesthesia and the Question of Solidarity
A workshop with Flavia Meireles, Tiara Roxanne, and Christoph Brunner

ArchipelagoLab for Transversal Practices
Leuphana University Lüneburg

Registrations by mail to archipelagolab@leuphana.de

The workshop will deal with the double bind of coloniality and modernity in their anesthetizing perturbations. Colonial Anesthesia is a term we borrow from the Brazilian indigenous artist Lian Gaia. In this context, anesthesia pertains to both, a set of strategies immanent to colonial violence covering up the atrocities of its continued acting and to the anesthetizing capture of the possibilities of decolonization. Caught between the colonial and the decolonial anesthetic, we ask about practices, techniques and gestures of solidarity with decolonial struggles of the South speaking from our institutional, artistic, and activist practices as well as geopolitical situatedness. We do so by acknowledging our own defeat while not giving up on a sensibility for shared urgency. Through explorations of collaborations with indigenous artists and activist, engagements with digital embodiments and data sovereignty, and ways of re-inventing a fugitive transversal vocabulary the workshop opens a space for sharing the untranslatable sensations and concerns that permeate an all too colonial present. We invite people to bring questions, invent possible futures, and fabricate counterpoisons against the numbing power of colonial anesthesia.

There will be food, drinks, and sofas.

Short Bios:

Flavia Meireles is a (dance) professor at the Graduate Program of Ethnical-racial Relationships (PPRER) at CEFET-RJ (Brazil). She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Amongst others she is a visiting researcher at the Center for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG) at the University of Brighton (UK). Her main interests are grassroots social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially indigenous movements and the plurality of feminists LGBTQIA struggles and discourses; politics of body; decolonial feminism from Global South perspectives; conditions and work of the artist; dance, cinema, visual arts and intersected politics of race, gender and sexuality.

Tiara Roxanne is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Data & Society in NYC. They are a Tarascan Indigenous Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. Roxanne's research and artistic practice investigates the encounter between Indigeneity and AI by interrogating colonial structures embedded within machine learning systems.  Their work explores the notion that decolonization is not possible, therefore, we must establish decolonial gestures. Tiara has presented at Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto),  European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), University of Applied Arts (Vienna),  SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), among others.

Christoph Brunner is Assistant Professor for Cultural Theory at Leuphana University Luneburg. His research focuses on the media aesthetics of social movements and processes of sense/making with a particular sensibility toward post- and decolonial perspectives. He is PI of the DFG-Research Network "Other Knowledges in Artistic Research and Aesthetic Theory“ and the DFG project "Participatory Critique as Tansformative and Transversal With“. Recent publication with Amélie Brisson-Darveau: Texturing Space - Towards an Exponential Cartography.

25.01.2022, 18-21 h, ArchipelgoLab for transversal practices.

Aesthetics of the (new) right.
recognize, analyze, refute
A workshop with Sofia Bempeza and Christoph Brunner

The workshop deals with the aesthetics of (new) right-wing movements and their media environments. Besides the relevant and clearly recognizable visual languages of classic right-wing aesthetics, the expressions of newer right-wing movements are determined by an intended ambivalence as well as by tactical appropriation of different cultural codes that disguise racist, discriminatory, and anti-Semitic content behind a supposedly trivialized (e.g. meme) surface. Likewise, digital platforms and media tactics contribute to new forms of dissemination and circulation of this content that both create "owned" publics and reach mainstream discourses in terms of affect politics.

After brief inputs from the workshop leaders, we would like to look together at materials, analyze them, and exchange ideas about forms of refutation. For this we will do a preparatory reading from Simon Strick's Rights Feelings. You are welcome to bring examples for discussion.

Simon Strick: Right Feelings - Affects and Strategies of Digital Fascism, reading: pp. 105-127. 

The workshop will take place online and is limited to 25 participants.

To register and receive the reading, please write to archipelagolab@leuphana.de by January 15, 2022.

Sofia Bempeza is an artist, art and cultural theorist (Athens/Zurich) and author of the book History(s) of the Art Strike. Main areas of work: Dissent and polyphony, aesthetics of the new right, queer-feminist art and knowledge production, and forms of the collective. sofiabempeza.org 

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LAB PLENUM - NEXT MEETING: WEDNESDAY, 27.10.2021 AT 17:00 IN C5.225

With the return to face-to-face teaching, our open space for change to break binary theory-and-practice structures and discover new paths of thinking will no longer exist only online, but finally back in reallife! An important step for the Lab, which sees itself as a hub of transversal movements and as a place of relations, where encounters and exchange, coming together and a togetherness in the end are indispensable.

For this reason, we would like to invite you to our first Lab plenary in presence, which will take place on 27.10. at 17:00 in ArchipelagoLab in C5.225. We will have the opportunity to spend time together, talk about important and moving topics, and develop ideas for the new semester. In order to use the upcoming time productively, we would also like to encourage you to already formulate more or less concrete ideas for possible event formats or content that you could imagine in the context of the Lab.

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LAB-READING GROUP // Stefano Harney & Fred Moten: All Incomplete
NEXT MEETING: Wedneyday, 03.11.2021 at 19:00 in C5.225

Organized by Christoph Brunner

Five years ago the Lab began with the desire to make space for shared experiences of study, that is, a ways of inhabiting the time and space of reading, thinking and being together, without constraints of seminars, credit points, or the accumulation of academic surplus value. We started by reading The Undercommons, a book by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten that asks about the fugitive sociality in the gaps and cracks of institutions such as the university. They do so from the perspective of Black Studies and the experience of refused, rejected, and subjected lives in the wake of the ongoing repercussions of the transatlantic slave trade. In their new book All Incomplete, they extend the critiques on logistics, individuation, and sovereignty, while developing tools of conviviality in the „ground and underground of social existence.“ The reading group invites for a collective and collaborative engagements that help us to activate and strengthen the sociality that prevents us from isolation and late liberal individualism.

Since some have attended from a distance in the past, we would like to offer this for the reading circle on All Incomplete and will make the event hybrid.

Here is the zoom link:

leuphana.zoom.us/j/94480312191

Meeting ID: 944 8031 2191
ID code: 979804

3.11. // 19:00 // ArchipelagoLab

Chapter (13-36):
The Theft of Assembly
We Want a Precedent
Usufruct and Use

17.11. // 18:00 // ArchipelagoLab
Chapter (37-60)
Leave Our Mikes Alone
Unwatchable, Unwatchable
Al-Khwāriddim

01.12. // 18:00 // ArchipelagoLab
Chapter (61-88)
A Partial Education
Indent
Against Management

12.01. // 18:00 // ArchipelagoLab
Chapter (113-136)
Base Faith
Plantocracy and Communism
Who Determines if Something is Habitable?

19.01. // 18:00 // ArchipelagoLab
Chapter (137-154)
Black (Ante)Heroism
Suicide as a Class

26.1. // 18:00 // ArchipelagoLab
Chapter (155-172)
The Gift of Corruption
Home is Where We Displace our Selves

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LAB-READING GROUP // Jane Bennett: Vibrant Matter (readings in german)
weekly on Thursdays, next meeting: 04.11.2021 at 18:30 in C5.225

Organized by Liane Schlumberger, Max Waschka, Sophia Wagener, Thekla Molnar

The work of political theorist Jane Bennett belongs to the strand of theory known as "new materialism." She develops an ontology of matter without focusing on human experience. By negotiating assumptions about the agency of non-human actors, she challenges key assumptions of a humanist stance and changes the way we look at our relationship to things and the world. In order to approach this version of New Materialism, we will read together Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter, first published in 2010. We would like to open up this space for further thinking and discussion together, without the pressure of productivity, but with the possibility of criticizing and questioning what we have read.

04.11. // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
Getting to know each other
Vorwort, S. 7–26

11.11. // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
I Die Kraft der Dinge, S. 27–53

18.11. // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
II Die Handlungsmacht der Gefüge, S. 54–81

25.11.  // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
III Essbare Materie, S. 82–100
IV Ein Leben des Metalls, S. 101–114

02.12.  // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
V Weder Vitalismus noch Mechanismus, S. 115–142

09.12.  // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
VI Stammzellen und die Kultur des Lebens, S. 143–159

16.12.  // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
VII Politische Ökologien, S. 160–182

13.01.  // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
VIII Vitalität und Eigeninteresse, S. 183–201

20.01.  // 18.30 - 20.00 //ArchipelagoLab
closing session: résumé & critique

est. 27.01. // time tba // Zoom
Reading with Jane Bennett (requested)

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03.12.2021 // 19:00
Delphi Showpalast (Eimsbüttler Chaussee 5, Hamburg)

Book Presentation // Texturing Space - Towards an Exponential Cartography
Christoph Brunner, Nuria Krämer, Patrick Müller, Jana Vanecek

Together with authors from Zurich we present the recently published anthology Texturing Space - Towards an Exponential Cartography by Amélie Brisson-Darveau and Christoph Brunner (eds.) at Booky McBookface (temporary bookstore with event program) in Hamburg. The book, published by adocs Publishing, deals with artistic-research and cultural-theoretical approaches to texture - a term whose theoretical and pragmatic interpretation allows a high potential for strategies and techniques of exploration of urban, social and political spaces.
https://adocs.de/de/buecher/monografie/texturing-space-towards-exponential-cartography

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25.01.2022 // 18:15
ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

Workshop on: (New) Right Aesthetics
Sofia Bempeza, Christoph Brunner, Ines Kleesattel

The workshop deals with the aesthetics of the (new) right and its media and communication strategies. Together with the participants we will look at and analyze concrete materials. We also want to look at counter-strategies and make them productive for cultural studies contexts.

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FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS (all events in German)

"Ungefüge"
Presentations of the new transversal volume
with Gerald Raunig

November 15, HAMBURG, 19.30: Buttclub
November 16, BOCHUM, 18.00: Institute for Theater Studies, Ruhr-University
November 17, COLOGNE, 19.00: Academy of Media Arts Cologne, with Phil Collins and Stefano Harney
November 19, BERLIN, 19.30: Bookstore Pro qm, with Isabell Lorey
December 06, ZURICH, 18.00: Zurich University of the Arts, as part of the senseABILITIES series.

After DIVIDUUM (2015), Gerald Raunig presents the second volume of "Maschinischer Kapitalismus und molekulare Revolution." Ungefüge unfolds a wild abundance of material of ungefügigkeit, from the multilingual translation machines in al-Andalus to the queer mysticism of the High Middle Ages and the small voices of the falsetto in 20th-century jazz and soul to today's unfugen and umfugen against the smooth city of the digit in machinic capitalism.
Ungefüge not only develops a conceptual ecology of notions of fuguing and joining, availability and inflexibility, but also undertakes an experiment in theoretical form. Semi-fictional interweaves with meticulously researched historical sources, mystical writings with letters from friends, philosophical fragments with poetic ritornellos. More than a narrative of disjunctions of social environments, thing-worlds, and spirit-worlds, the book itself is a divisive manifold in form and content, out of the joints, in the joints, disjunctions.

Unstructures
Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, Volume 2
Gerald Raunig
transversal texts 2021
ISBN: 978-3-903046-27-6
340 pages, paperback, € 15,00

https://transversal.at/books/ungefuege

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SERIES OF TALKS "PUBLICS BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION
 
We cordially invite you to the series of talks "Public Spheres between Fact and Fiction", organized by the Institute for Historical Studies and Literary Cultures in cooperation with Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V. and Literaturbüro Lüneburg e.V.. Theorists and authors will talk about their respective forms of knowledge production in the tension between factuality and fiction. Under which conditions and with which procedures is knowledge produced in literature and art?
 
Dates:
 
Architectural Fathers by Canary Wharf: Project Birdcage
with Oliver Corino (London), author
November 16, 2021, 6 p.m.
Hall for Art, Reichenbachstraße 2, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany
Registration at info@halle-fuer-kunst.de
 
"Lost in Berlin"
with David Wagner (Berlin), author
December 1, 2021, 7:30 p.m.
Heinrich Heine House, Am Ochsenmarkt 1a, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany
Registration at: literaturbuero@stadt.lueneburg.de
 
Curatorial Public Sphere - How can we act together in a world that increasingly isolates us?
with Nora Sternfeld, HFBK Hamburg
January 27, 2022, 6 p.m.
Hall for Art, Reichenbachstraße 2, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany.
Registration at info@halle-fuer-kunst.de

LAB PLENUM - next meeting 16.06., 17:00, online
Wednesdays: 24.3, 21.4., 19.5., 16.6. at 17:00 (online)

At the end of last semester, we had the pleasure of experiencing a quite joyful lab plenum and decided to meet on a more regular basis in the future. The aim is to engage in a collective process of planning and to weave the resonances and themes that move us. We also want to have the chance to see each other and hang out, obviously. Everyone is warmly invited to join at any point, whether to engage concretely, or just to tune in and listen or to get to know each other.

Zoom - Link
https://leuphana.zoom.us/j/97846521404?pwd=c0JPRUwvRjI4aXRvODdWMVVVdlJ6QT09

Meeting-ID: 978 4652 1404
Code: 954995

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TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE - next meeting 10.06., 18:15, online
organized by Mari Meyer-Sahling

"Punishment is a quick-fix, healing is a long process" is what Adrienne Maree Brown sums up in her book We Will Not Cancel Us.

What does it mean when institutions like the police, the judiciary, and the state do not establish security but rather pose a threat, especially to People of Color and other marginalized groups? To what extent have we internalized the oppressive mechanisms of punishment as a method of establishing "justice"? Who is actually innocent here? Transformative justice is not a future utopia; it is practiced in many places, changing, failing, and helping in faultfinding processes of engagement. It does not focus only on the perpetrator of violence as the perpetrator:in, but on a context of hurtful institutional structures that produce violence. 

Transformative Justice methods are a daily deep practice of what it means to sustain interpersonal relationships, as well as collective utopias and realities. This semester, in particular, we delve into questions about the notion of security. 

For Zoom access, please email marie.meyer-sahling@live.de

Program:

- 15.04.2021 Security from a feminist perspective with two Hamburg door women from the field.
- 17.05.2021 Social control between Fordism and Postfordism - Perception of danger in change with Andrea Kretschmann
- 10.06.2021 What does security mean in Germany from a migrant perspective? with representatives of Women In Exile

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I HAVE A BODY - next meeting 20.04., 18:15, online
weekly tuesdays, 18:15, online
organized by Mari Meyer-Sahling and Vilma Braun

1. I have a body. Who am I?
2. I would not have a body, if there was no food.
3. I would not have food, if there was not a working society.
4. I have a body. I am part of the working society.
5. Society could not produce food, if there was no raw material.
6. There would be no raw material, if there was no planet earth.
7. I have a body. I am part of planet earth.
8. Planet earth presupposes the solar system.
9. I have a body. I am part of the solar system.
10. Who am I?

If I want to get close to the body with words, I must not talk about it, but WITH it.

...an instruction, as company. At the end of which there is no finished (shelf), rather you have trudged through your own decay into nothingness. I am not interested in more layers of abstraction. I long for the contact YOU:HERE. In the corner of my eye, cascade in orange. I collect occupations for which I don't feel bad when doing. I see them. Desirious and suppressed glances. And then the pizza in the middle and those with differently abled bodies.

for online access please mail to marie.meyer-sahling@live.de

- always weekly on Tuesdays; organized by Mari Meyer-Sahling and Vilma Braun

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LAB – READING GROUP on bell hooks - next meeting 26.05., 17:00
Every last wednesday in every month: 28.4., 26.5., 30.6. – at 17:00 (online)
organized by Sophie Peterson and Christoph Brunner

For the coming semester a small group of interested folks wants to engage with the work of bell hooks from different angles. bell hooks is an American writer, feminist, activist and academic. Her work spans a large spectrum of key concerns for cultural studies, consequently focusing on the intersection on race, class, and gender. Her work draws on a decidedly feminist critique of capitalism and includes analyses of popular culture as much as art, addresses the practice of writing and deals with counter-hegemonic pedagogies. Over three extensive sessions, we want to read different texts selected from her entire body of work. We suggest the three following clusters: 1) teaching/learning/pedagogy, 2) the intricacies between class and race, 3) The relation between theory and practice. 

Learning and Pedagogy

In resonance with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s notion of “study” as collective process of (un)learning we will be reading excerpts from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice to Freedom. We consider these writing as a poignant response to an increasingly flawed deployment of the concept of freedom in academic circles in the form of an violent appropriation to guard the privileges of the hegemonic subject rather than nurturing an ethics of difference and diversity.

Class and Race

In her work hooks points out crucial blind spots of white feminism as long as it does not act intersectionally. Part of her critique is the omission of class as analytic category. In Where We Stand: Class hooks tackles the class issue head on and provides a crucial connection to a key concern of British Cultural Studies.

Theory & Practice

Engaging with her until now last book Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice we want to further investigate the relation between theory and practice, a key concern for the Lab. Through the chapters “A Community of Caring”, “Bonding Across Boundaries”, and “Everyday Resistance: Saying No to White Supremacy” we trace hooks weaving of auto-experiential narrative and theoretical elaborations.

Zoom - Link:
https://leuphana.zoom.us/j/94480312191?pwd=Sis1dGVzVkpabGJuNlBYbHlkOGh2QT09

Meeting-ID: 944 8031 2191
Code: 979804

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LAB - READING GROUP on Donna Haraways "Staying with the Trouble" & footnote reading with Karin Harrasser (german translation) - weekly on fridays at 14:30, online
organized by Liane Schlumberger and Max Waschka


Together we will explore the ways in which Donna Haraway's theory has changed since The Cyborg Manifesto, Situated Knowledge, and The Companion Manifesto and is able to respond to the crises of our time. Donna Haraway has been one of the most important feminist scholars of postmodernism since The Cyborg Manifesto. Her influence ranges from feminist epistemology and philosophy of science to media studies and biology.
We have invited Karin Harrasser to give an annotated footnote reading from Donna Haraway's book "Staying with the Trouble" on June 29, 2021. Karin Harrasser is not only the translator of the book, but has also contributed significantly to the genesis and systematization of Donna Haraway's complete work. In preparation for this reading, the ArchipelagoLab and the student council for the Master of Cultural Studies will organize a reading circle in which weekly all 8 chapters in "Staying with the Trouble" - with special attention to the footnotes - will be read and discussed together.

Registration at archipelagolab@leuphana.de (for an overview of all those interested rather than mandatory to participate).

- weekly on Fridays at 14:30 with special event on 29.06.

ZINE PROJECT - 10/27/2020, 17:30-19:00, online
Organized by Adda Orbach.

Everything that does not fit into the limited forms of exams, essays, or term papers often gets short shrift in the content work of everyday university life. Yet there is always a need for other, perhaps more aesthetic, in any case more open approaches. The plan is therefore as follows: Let's develop a zine together as a group. A zine is a kind of amateur magazine with a small circulation that is self-published. What should be in it (e.g. poems, comics, manifestos, prose, short stories, ...), what content it will be about, when, how, and where we meet - we can agree on all that together. It's about becoming collectively creative, about creating a platform that allows an open, considerate discussion of diverse topics. The first meeting, where everything else will be discussed, will take place on Tuesday, 27.10. via Zoom.
For the access data please contact adda.orbach@stud.leuphana.de"
[the offer takes place in cooperation with the Alternative Teaching of the AStA, https://asta-lueneburg.de/projekte/alternative-lehre/]

TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE - 16:00-20:00, online
Organized by Marie Meyer-Sahling

First meeting: Reading on Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis What to do when shit happens? How to deal with violence in our environment? And who does the violence even come from, is it always one-sided? Police as "friends and helpers" - a myth that has been deconstructed not just since the Black Lives Matter movement, but for which there are few counter-narratives. What can security and justice look like with demands like "Abolish the Police"?
In the format "Transformative Justice" there are different events in the form of readings, film evenings, workshops etc. on the topics of racist structures within the police, police violence, prisons, punishment, what does justice mean etc. It is about exploring new imaginary (dis)orders on the topic of security, questioning existing structures and finding alternatives.  No previous knowledge or regular participation is necessary, each meeting will be structured in such a way that everyone who is interested can participate unprepared.
For registration, write the text and zoom link directly to Marie Meyer-Sahling: marie.meyer-sahling@live.de

LAB READING GROUP - Saidiya Hartman: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, online

With Wayward Lives, author and scholar Saidiya Hartman presents a book on the lives of young black women in the early 20th century. In it, she traces lives and survival, the struggle for freedom and self-determination, and the many defeats and resistances, most of them violent. In addition to this central archaeological and genealogical work of resistant practice, Hartman also raises the question of how write in presence of these lives and not simply about them. This also means what other, more affective values, can be mobilized for a changed perspective on scholarly practice than an activist one.


As a foretaste, here is a longer piece from the New Yorker: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/26/how-saidiya-hartman-retells-the-history-of-black-life

Dates:


11/4/2020, 17:00 // Saidiya Hartman (2020) "A Note on Method," pp. xiii-xv, "Cast of Characters, pp. xvii-xxi, "A Minor Figure, pp. 13-35
Dec. 2. 2020, 17:00 // Saidiya Hartman (2020), "An Atlas of the Wayward," pp. 81-121
Jan. 13, 2021, 17:00 // Saidiya Hartman (2020), "Riot and Refrain," pp. 263-287

For reading and zoom links, please email: archipelagolab@leuphana.de

[the first session is in cooperation with the Gender & Diversity Reading Group. For more info, see: www.leuphana.de/services/gleichstellung/netzwerk-geschlechter-und-diversitaetsforschung/aktuelle-veranstaltungen-im-wise-20202021.html]

With the shifting of all university events into the spheres of digital spaces, we have asked ourselves the question of how the ArchipelagoLab, how we, can and want to act in this process.

"As a crossroads of transversal movements, as a place of relations, we would like to keep the lab open for you and anyone who wants to contribute and share their ideas".

In the present situation, this place must seek new forms, create new possibilities of proximity and explore new ways that continue to emphasize the interwoven nature of all our lives and thoughts, feelings and actions.

How we can and would like to to implement these wishes and demands, these ideas and concepts together in the near future has not yet been conclusively - in fact it is never conclusively - determined. We would like to take the formats and topics already conceived for this semester as a starting point for our search, put them together and embodied anew in virtual space.
We would like to read and discuss different texts that deal with questions of care; against isolation and loneliness.
In cooperation with Ben Trott - as a merge, so to speak, with his Gender & Diversity Reading Group - and two students, we have selected three readings and look forward to all those who wish to exchange views!

the dates:

29.04 : The Force of Non-Violence, by Judith Butler
27.05 : Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici
01.07 : Women, Reproduction, and the Commons, by Silvia Federici

Plenum
23.10 / 06.11 / 20.11 / 04.12 / 18.12 // 14:15 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

An open plenary discussion giving time for reflection and development. The lab is shaped through active participation, diverse ideas and projects evolving from collective thinking and acting. Therefore the possibility to get together shall be supported through this biweekly format, to ensure enough time and space in need for exchange and caring. Everybody is welcome!

24.10.2019 / 07.11 / 21.11 / 05.12 / 19.12 // 18:00 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Seminar hold by:  Alternative Lehre (alternative teaching)
Feminist Science Fiction – Cyborgs and Friends

How can we create alternative perspectives for peaceful coexistence? Story-telling as an act of creation is constantly emphasized by the Feminist Donna Haraway. Our stories inherit the power of life as they build the worlds in which we live in. Especially science-fiction literature presents an environment for worlds and creatures standing outside of normative categories such as heteronormativity, a binary conception of gender, sexist role models and (post-)colonial and racist power structures. We would like to follow Haraway’s path and search for new possibilities in feminist science fiction. Book proposals are highly welcome in our first session. How can we rethink coexistence? Which stories do we want to tell? 

05.11.2019 // 18:15 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Study Night: Renderlands: Digital Animation in Science and Art 
Guest: Joel McKim 

This talk is concerned with rendered images that operate outside the visual logic of photo-realism. It will return to the historical origins of digital animation in order to explore the possibility of more experimental scientific and aesthetic modes of representation. In the early computer animation work of Bell Labs researchers and artists, such as Edward E. Zajac, A. Michael Noll, Kenneth C. Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz, we see some of the first attempts to use rendered images to both represent computational information that would otherwise be unavailable to human vision and to push beyond the normal threshold of sense perception. This digital animation work of the late 1960s and early 1970s suggests an experimental potential in the rendered image that would soon be eclipsed by the entertainment industry’s push towards photo-realistic CGI.

06.11.2019 // 14:00 // Hannover 
Hanging out with …
… ruine hq

Evolving from  decentralized and friendly relations of a disaster-community the RUIN finds itself at the core of ruine hq’s practice as it represents an analysis of the present as well as a mode of action. Our present civilization can be no more the form of thinking or doing the world. Life has to go on within those ruins and outlive them. Rather improvised and selfmade, slow and connected, excessive and trippy, lost and yet confident.  
We are going to talk about the effect of structures through and in which we move, talk, think, produce, consume and live and what we would really like them to be for us. 

ruinehq.org

05.12.2019 / 16:00 / Zentralgebäude C40.606 
06.12.2019 / 10:00 / ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Art, Activism, Technopolitics
Workshop and Talks

The talks and workshop deal with the intricacies of sensation, knowledge production and their techno-social milieus in artistic and activist practices. They ask: how do different modes of expression and experience allow for the emergence of forms of “participatory critique”? Such a critique, we suggest, cannot be externalized from its material, social, and geopolitical situatedness with all its complexities and contradictions. We will explicitly turn towards post- and decolonial contexts and approaches as much as material practices with the aim to develop a more distributed, collective and more-than-human account of participatory critique.

The workshop is organized by the Project „Participatory Critique as Transforming and Transversal With“ as part of the DFG research group „Media and Participation.“

PROGRAM

Elke Bippus (ZHdK),
Christoph Brunner (Leuphana),
Short Introduction

Alessandra Renzi (COncordia University, Montreal)
Data-Bodies in Co-Research

Eduardo Molinari (Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires)
Archivo Caminante (Walking Archives). Stones in the water.

Collective Conversation

11.12. 2019 // 18:15 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Hanging Out With…  … One Mother
with Natasha P. und Preach 

Founded as a small collective in 2016 the artists* of One Mother have embedded themselves as a firm part of the german music scene by now. Corresponding to their feelings and serving as outlet for the reality of a world marked by mercilessness, their sound is varying between hiphop, pop and experimental. We would like to investigate the sensual as well as intellectual resonances evolving from those sounds and discuss their potentials to (re)create relations. 
Amongst others, One Mother is curating a Hamburg based event series called GLOBAL FEMINIST BAD(B)ASS. and taking place at Kampnagel. Through formats like that they want to give visibility to a local scene too often underrepresented: feminist, queer and non-white.

16.01.2020 // 18:15 // Archipelagolab (C5.225)
Study Night with Isabell Lorey on Precarity and Presential Democracy

How can we create alliances that allow criticism of fixed structures, of social organization as a whole, and introduce continuous reorganization as new form of social and political becoming? Together with Prof. Dr. Isabell Lorey, we would like to explore the meanings and effects of supposedly immovable circumstances. To what extent do they have a paralyzing effect and shift the focus of individual, social and political activity from change to preservation? We would like to discuss approaches and potentials of activist practices that contest these reactionary movements and connect them to theoretically developed concepts. How can resonances be identified and recreated between theory and practice?

Biography

Isabell Lorey studied political science, philosophy as well as African and European ethnology. She received her doctorate at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in 1996 with her first monograph on the US political philosopher Judith Butler, one of the most important queer theorists*. In 2009, Isabell Lorey habilitated at the University of Vienna with a study on community building and securing power, which was published in 2011 by Diaphanes. Lorey certainly became best known with her book The Government of the Precarious, for which Judith Butler wrote the preface and which has since been translated into five languages. Lorey deals with the precarisation that is spreading throughout society, the social insecurity in neo-liberal conditions, the gender relations associated with this, but also the possibilities for change.

16.04.2019 // 18:15 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Study Night: Collective Listening
Guest: Kathrin Wildner (Hamburg)

Sound is a relay between bodies, the social and space and time. During the Study Night on „Collective Listening“ we will focus on the process of hearing. After a short introduction on sound research in cultural studies, we will explore through little exercises how to use hearing, collective listening, and an awareness for sound as methods of cultural research and what new forms of knowledge it yields.

17.05.2019 // 10:00-13:00 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
How to be an Ally - Solidarity und alliance making in an anti-racist context

In their workshops, Arpana Aischa Berndt and Maja Bogojević address possibilities of action for supporting people who are affected by racism in everyday life. Together with the participants, terms of the racism discourse will be clarified and explained and the handling of situations where discrimination takes place will be discussed. 

Arpana Aischa Berndt is author and anti-racism coach. Maja Bogojević is social scientist*, artist*, activist*, and filmmaker* with a focus on anti racism and intersectional queer-feminism. 

„Not to become an accomplice, but to show solidarity with the victim - that is the core of the whole.“ - Maja Bogojević

22.05.2019 // 18:15 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Study Night: Logistiken des Affekts
Guest: Gerko Egert (Gießen)

Commonly we conceive of logistics as the movement of goods, commodities and resources - those processes of the “Global supply chain capitalism“ (Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing) that often times remain imperceptible. During this study night we want to discuss the way in which micro movements, rhythms and dynamics of logistics seep into our affective modes of existence in everyday life and how they modulate each other.

12.06.2019 // 18:15 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)
Study Night: Artistic Practices of Commoning
Guest: Cornelia Sollfrank, Shusha Niederberger, Felix Stalder (Berlin/Zürich)

Artistic and activist strategies of commoning exceed the maintenance and accessibility of resources. Concerns of autonomous infrastructures alternative forms of knowledge and an expanded conception of aesthetic practice are not just addressed discursively but experimentally put to work.

Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank and Shusha Niederberger will unfold their approaches and strategies with the help of three concrete artistic-activist projects taken from their current research project „Creating Commons.“
Further information at: http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch

21.06.2019 // 19:00 // mosaique (Katzenstraße 1)
Hanging Out With... Diaspora Salon صالونالشتات

"The Diaspora Salon is a place for (post-)migratory voices, voices of color in Hamburg. Let’s make space for art, encounter and exchange. Against racism. For empowerment. The salon was founded as a project of friends* from St. Pauli and its surrounds in cooperation with the GWA St. Pauli" (Self description Diaspora Salon). In June the Salon is coming to Lüneburg to do an event about a specific topic. Stay tuned!

Dokumentieren am Donnerstag: Das ABC des Gilles Deleuze (L’Abecedaire)
16.05. / 23.05. / 06.06. / 20.06. // 18:15 // ArchipelagoLab (C5.225)

After the successful mini-series on documentaries last semester we want to continue our practice of collective viewing. This term, and due to many requests, we will dedicate ourselves over the course of four sessions to the interview between Claire Parnet und Gilles Deleuze in the format of an ABC of concepts - from a like „animal“ to z like „zigzag“ - we can’t think of a more delightful way of frequenting Deleuze’s thought.

Hanging Out With...

... Ecologies of Care
Perspektiven auf Sorge
JANUARY 08 2019 | 18:15 | C5.225

Um die Sorge ist es nicht gut bestellt. Selbst wenn sie es ist, die uns am Leben hält, wird sie ständig unsichtbar gemacht, abgewertet und ausgebeutet. Doch es regt sich Widerstand: transnationale feministische Allianzen weisen diese Zustände zurück, treten in den Streik oder erfinden neue Formen des Miteinanderlebens und des Sorgetragens, jenseits kapitalistischer und staatlicher Verhältnisse.

Sorge-Krise, Sorge-Streik – Ecologies of Care und Carespective. Wir wollen euch einladen, mit uns darüber nachzudenken, was theoretisch wie praktisch geschieht, wenn wir die Sorge ins Zentrum stellen. Wie kann ein Sorgestreik funktionieren, wenn die Erhaltung des Lebens doch nie ausgesetzt werden kann? Welche Möglichkeiten ergeben sich hieraus für den feministischen Anspruch, Politik im Hier und Jetzt zu machen? Auf welche Weise können existierende (queer-)feministische Konzepte durch das Nachdenken über Ökologien der Sorge erweitert werden?

... Texture
JANUARY 22 2019 | 18:15 | C5.225

Als Projektraum bzw. Projektgruppe, die sich zwischen Universität, Institution, offenem Freundeskreis und kollektivem Lernen bewegt, organisiert texture seit Mai diesen Jahres regelmäßig Veranstaltungen. Gemeinsam mit dem Archipelago Lab aus Lüneburg wollen wir diese Praxis der semi-institutionellen Diskursarbeit selbst zum Thema machen. Aus den Ideen und Hoffnungen des gemeinsamen und kollektiven Lesens und Diskutierens entstehen unmittelbar Fragen nach der Form und Ordnung des Zusammenkommens und den „Arbeitsverhältnissen“, in die man sich begibt. Wir wollen uns selbst fragen: Welche Rolle spielen das Imperativ der projektbasierten Arbeitsweise und das kontrollgesellschaftliche Paradigma in dieser Arbeitsform? Was waren und sind die Hoffnungen und Ängste eines solchen Projektes und ist diese Praxis die einzig attraktive? Von welchen Unzufriedenheiten oder Bedürfnissen ausgehend, erscheint uns diese Praxis als sinnvoll?Wir werden gemeinsam den Text "Gouvernementalität und Selbst-Prekarisierung. Zur Normalisierung von KulturproduzentInnen" von Isabell Lorey lesen und diskutieren. Der Text ist über transversal erschienen und unter diesem Link erreichbar: eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/de

Study Night

DECEMBER 04 2018 / 18:15 / C5.225
Flavia Mereilles (Rio de Janeiro) & Paula Hildebrandt (Berlin)
Women on Streets | Women on Walls

This Study Night deals with feminist activism and resistant practices in Latin America. Focusing on the recent feminist movement in Brazil (2015-2018) Flavia Meireles will contribute her perspectives on thinking what political action could mean in terms of resistance against imposing neoliberalism/neocolonialism and the renewed image of witches. Paula Hildebrandt will share insights from her artistic research and visual ethnography in Bolivia working with women in mining contexts, emphasizing the politics of reproductive labor and domestic life from a transhistorical perspective. Together with Christoph Brunner the two guests will engage in an open polylogue on the aesthetic politics of feminist struggle and protest in light of a decolonial geopolitics.

Our focus on feminist activism in Latin America goes hand in hand with the recent publication on the 8M Movement and the Feminist Strike published by transversal texts. We will together read excerpts from the book, in particular, the contribution of Marie Bardet and Suely Rolnik. The book can be bought at the event for 10€ and/or downloaded here: transversal.at/media/8m.pdf 

This session is conceptualized as Study Night, meaning there will be food and drinks as well as an open and informal setting with enough time for informal conversation. 

Flavia Meireles is Dance Professor at CEFET-RJ (Brazil) and Ph.D. Candidate in Communication and Culture at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is visiting researcher of the Angewandte Theaterwissenchaft (ATW) at Justus-Liebeg Universität (Giessen) with a scholarship from CAPES - Brasil. The present work was realized with the support of "Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior" - Brasil (CAPES).

Born 1976 in Berlin, Paula Hildebrandt initially worked as a political scientist for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in New York, Ghana and Thailand. She holds a PhD from the Bauhaus University Weimar and lectured at various art schools and universities in Germany, the UK, Lithuania and Brazil before turning to art and photography. Her articles and essays appeared in numerous journals, a.o. Arte & Ensaios, Der Wedding, PERIPHERIE, Polar. Currently, she writes a book about the ‘Welcome City’, an artistic research project within the Hamburg-based graduate program ’Performing Citizenship’. www.paulahildebrandt.de

Activist Sense Workshop Series

NOVEMBER 30 2018 | 10:15 | C40.153
Luciana Santos Roça (São Paulo)
Sounding Territories

This short workshop proposes listening protocols to discuss the influence of sound in making space and territories, putting the relation between sound and frontiers into discussion. Sound carries a socio-political aspect, either by language or voice tone or by who speaks and is silenced, figuratively or not. Listening and sounding are not passive acts, whether intentionally or not, both acts are active and provide insights. The sound has a political and aesthetical dimension as well, which makes it a tool of representation and creation. This proposal is intended for anyone who is interested in listening and understanding urban sounds in their context. The workshop can offer ethnographic and sound insights to researchers in cultural studies, architecture, urbanism, sociology, anthropology.

Luciana Santos Roça is a researcher at Nomads.usp, holds a Bachelor degree in Audiovisual and a Master degree in Architecture and Urbanism. She does a PhD at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, and is currently in a research exchange at Cresson, Centre for research on sound space and urban environment, Grenoble, France.

DECEMBER 19 2018 | 18:15 | C5.225
Marc Herbst (London)
Being as it is and the sense to act

This is a talk that looks at the variety of ways the one and the many feel properly situated to struggle. This conversation looks at a variety of subjective situations and political contexts – and looks at when it is the time to struggle versus the knowing that the struggle’s time might be elsewhere, or that you might best place your energy elsewhere. Sometimes the time to act is settled between a variety of objective and subjective positions or just with common senses. While the abstract situation of the researcher or unembedded activist might objectively suggest that action seems to be the only option, subjective relations between the individual or collective, and any other variety of orientations (conditions set between operable horizons, between ones self and others, between what is common sense etc…) suggest there are many reasons to believe that the fight is not now, or not in this place. That is, until that its is clearly the time, when either individual sense, common sense or necessity determine otherwise. 

Through a conversation on various current research and editorial projects (in Barcelona, in London, in France, In Berlin), Marc Herbst, recent PhD from Goldsmiths University of London and co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, will discuss certain feelings in relation to distance and proximity to the active sense. 

Marc Herbst recently received his PhD from Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies and is a long-time co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. His PhD thesis is titled A cultural policy of the multitude in the time of climate change: with an understanding that the multitude has no policy. Though concerned with general questions on the nature of culture in the time of a changing climate, research for the project was done with the Barcelona-based group of the Plataforma De Afectados Por La Hipoteca. He recently co-edited with the Barcelona-based anarchist feminist collective Murmurae the book Situating Ourselves in Displacement (Minor Compositions) and is currently editing several projects including one on punk shamanism and another with the Mauvais Troupe collective on the zad occupation.

Artist in Residence | Maju Martins

OCTOBER 23 2018 | 18:15 | C5.225
Artist Talk with Maju Martins

DECEMBER 12 2018 | 13:00-17:00 | C5.225
Workshop | Frontier Zones in Urban Spaces: Images, Sounds, Movements in History
By Maju Martins and Ursula Kirschner

This workshop is an invitation to reflect and discuss about the concept of Frontier Zones in different contexts. It will present and negotiate the processes and results of three different research and didactic experiences. Two International Summer Schools entitled “Frontier Zones” that took place in Brazil (2015 and 2017) and a seminar entitled Frontier Zones in Urban Spaces at Leuphana University Campus in 2018. The main objective of these experiences was to highlight the value of experience-based learning approaches and the method of documentary filmmaking with the focus on the audio-visual without explanatory words. The aim resided in creating methodologies and knowledges from urban audio-visual exploration applying the techniques of documentary filmmaking as a medium to reveal new insights and readings of contemporary spaces.

The workshop will be divided into two parts. Starting at the Kunstraum, the audience is invited to take part in an audio-visual exhibition that will occur in three different places around the Campus. The projected short films are a result of the seminar. The second part, back at Kunstraum, will include the screening of two films produced during the Frontier Zones International Summer School presenting the ideas and practices involved in those experiences, coordinated by Professor Ursula Kirschner in collaboration with Maria Julia Martins.

Performance
NOVEMBER 13 2018  17:00-18:30 / C5.321|C5.225
(aktionssensor | coming closer)

One-to-one Performance von Clara Wessalowski und Lena Panten
Please register under archipelagolab@leuphana.de

Der Aktionssensor erlaubt uns den alltäglichen Moment der Annäherung neu zu erfahren. Wort und Sound werden als Bedeutungsträger gegeneinander ausgespielt. An die Stelle von Eindeutigkeit und Routine tritt die Möglichkeit, die Dynamik einer Begegnung auszuhandeln und das Verhältnis von Stimme und Stimmung zu befragen.

Das Format der One-to-one Performance, bei dem die Teilnehmenden der Performerin in einem geschützten Raum einzeln begegnen, bietet einen experimentellen Rahmen zur Erkundung körperlicher und konsensueller Grenzen. 

Reading Circle

A Thousand Plateaus
14.11. | 28.11. | 12.12. | 09.01. | 23.01.
18:00-20:00 | C5.225

Documentary/Documentation on Thursdays
C5.225 | 18:00

This semester, we would like to expand our range of activities. In the new format "Documenting on Thursdays" we show selected films and documentaries of central relevance to Cultural Studies. Our aim is to open up documentary and film works as reflective tools for the sensuous understanding and analysis of culture. As you can see there are some remaining Thursdays open to your filmic propositions. 

NOVEMBER 22 | The Stuart Hall Project - John Akomfrah, 2013, 95 min, OmeU

NOVEMBER 29 | I Am Not Your Negro - Raoul Peck, 2016, 90 min

DECEMBER 06 | Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival - Fabrizio Terranova, 2016, 90 min, OmfU

JANUARY 24 | Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961, 94 min

This semester the lab deals with issues of practice and organization. In three formats – the workshop and lecture series “Activist Sense”, the “Hanging Out With…” as well as two workshops on “Urban Commons”, we invited several guests to talk about their experiences between research and political work. Here the focus is on ways and manners of organization, what it means to act collectively and how this opens up new perspectives of thinking and acting. The invited positions range from queer-feminist, to decolonial and activist forms of organization, from book-making to health advice in socially precarious situations as a resistant practice. The program is based on a shared urgency to learn from each other, with the aim of becoming active inside and outside the university by oneself or in complicity, or to engage in conversations with past activities.

Activist Sense Workshop and Lecture Series

With Activist Sense, we link the questions of activity and action, immanent to activism, to the question of sense, in its double meaning - as sensuous and making sense. It is thus about the relations of experience and a politics of sensation in their ability creating new complexes of senses.

24. APRIL 2018 / 18:15-19:45
Katherine Braun (Hamburg / Osnabrück)
Decolonial Perspectives on Care Policies: What Remains of the "Long Summer of Migration"

In her lecture „Decolonial Perspectives on Care Policies: What Remains of the ‘Long Summer of Migration’?“, Katherine Braun describes from a decolonial perspective, based on the massive mobilization of care practices since 2015, the political displacements of the self and the other or the common as well as solidary achievements while tending to the also partly hierarchized conflicts within the care movement. 

03. MAY 2018 // 14:00-16:00
Tina Fritschy (Zurich) & Laura Nitsch (Vienna)
Queer-feminist Survival Training: Precarity, Politics of Friendship and the Yearning for Normality 

How can we cross the fine line between resistance / normality and recognition / precarity, while sharing difference and establishing a politics of friendship and care?

The queer-feminist survival training invites for theoretical, experimental and everyday practical explorations of these complex intricacies. The training is equally a workshop, performance and liminal experimenting. 

19. JUNE 2018 // 18:15 - 19:45
Adnan Softić (Hamburg / Skopje)
Reading: A Better History / Eine Bessere Geschichte / Screening: Bigger Than Life

Adnan Softić (Hamburg / Skopje) reads text passages from his book “A Better History / Eine Bessere Geschichte” – a tale about the mythologization in Skopje as an attempt by the government to create a new original national identity and history.

27. JUNE 2018 // 18:15-19:45
Kelly Mulvaney (Chicago)
Body activity and political action: an experiential workshop

The critical tradition has usually considered political knowledge to be discursive knowledge, a way of knowing and an articulation of known things that takes shape outside the skin and between thinking minds. Yet critique of these premises is also not “new” (or necessarily “beyond” critique): we can think of calls for reflexivity, situated thinking, focus on bodily materiality and affect theory – for example – as attempts to grapple with the realities of embodiment with respect to what we know and how we come to know, which is always also political. In this experiential workshop we will consider space, place, and the body in the making of political knowledge. We will proceed by taking the call for reflexivity in a less popular direction: inward. What can attention to our own embodied realities teach us about the way we inhabit the world as political beings? How might attention to our bodies invite us to think differently about activity, action, and activism? A lecture drawing on multi-year activist/ethnographic research with political collectives in multiple countries will complement the exploratory approach of the workshop.

Hanging Out With...

With this format, we propose to actually hang out together, to share time and space to engage with the materials we are interested in while being together, thus liberating us from the pressures of only participating if you are prepared. Guests bring along material that we engage with together or divagate from it.

25. APRIL 2018 / 18:15
... the Lab

The first hanging out takes place with us. The ArchipelagoLab introduces itself and we invite everyone to come by and get to know us by snacks and a glass of wine.

16. MAY 2018 / 18:15
... Medibüro & Poliklinik

The Medibüro Hamburg and the Poliklinik Veddel speak together about the current health situation for illegalized and marginalized people, their community work and the challenges of maintaining a resistant practice.

03. JULY 2018 / 18:15
... Esther Meyer

Esther Meyer is bringing policy-texts from the last climate conference in Bonn and discussing them with regard of the newest developments in the recognition of indigenous non-governmental communities.

Workshops on Urban Commons (initiated by Konstanze Scheidt)

The two-part workshop is devoted to Urban Commons and Commoning: self organized, collective projects in urban space and the considered material and immaterial resources. Since years initiatives like „Recht-auf-Stadt“ struggle for a city for all, but the privatization of public places, spaces and facilities is still on the forerun while ever rising rents forces more and more people to the margins of the cities. To counteract and to establish an alternative urban development, the concept of Urban Commons in theory and practice came into focus, and not least the question of how they resonate with one another. Which resources and forms of organization are necessary? How can it be succeeded that city initiatives cooperate with city politics without triggering gentrification processes and thus dynamics of displacement? Or should these initiatives remain independent for that very reason? How can a productive networking of alternative projects work out, so that not only existing structures are being retained, but room for new emerges?

06. JUNE 2018 / 16:00-18:00
Theory and Practice
Guests: Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse (Urban Commons Cookbook) & Hajo Toppius (Hacking Urban Furniture)

Our guests Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse and Hajo Toppius give us an insight into their work as a scientist or cultural worker to discuss together possibilities and challenges of the inter-connection between academic research and the practical application of Urban Commons. 

Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse (Urban Research Lab) started lastly a successful campaign to finance the „Urban Commons Cook Book“. Furthermore she is co-founder of the Urban Commons Research Lab and researches on integrated post-industrial urban development with a focus on cultural and creative economy, dynamics of the real estate market, and urban development from below as well as Urban Commons.

Hajo Toppius founded the club gallery „Antje Öklesund“ in Berlin in 2006, which was a platform for young artists and musicians for 10 years before the area was bought by a big investor. Moreover he is co-founder of „Kollegen 2,3 | Bureau für Kulturangelegenheiten“. 

13. JUNE 2018 / 16:00-18:00
Do It Yourself

For the second session, we are inviting initiatives and organizations such as the house mosaique in Lüneburg to discuss together what Urban Commons, that are rather negotiated in the context in bigger cities, can mean for small towns like Lüneburg. What challenges do exist in small cities that differ from that in cities like Berlin or Hamburg? Where is the need for concrete action? This part of the workshop is intended to bring interested students, local residents and initiatives together to develop ideas and planning together future projects or the developments of already existing ones.