Previous Semesters
The Center for Critical Studies (CCS) was launched in November 2022. The following provides an overview of just some of the events organised or hosted by CCS and its constituent institutions in previous semesters. For an overview of forthcoming events, click here.
30.01.2024 – "Langeweile Aushalten": A Discussion with Heiner Goebbels and Anne Gräfe
Book presentation and discussion
"In ihrem Buch 'Langeweile Aushalten - Kontingenzerfahrung in der Gegenwartskunst' befragt Anne Gräfe die Kraft der ästhetischen Langeweile: Was können wir von der Langeweile erwarten? Wohin führt uns diese Stimmung als besondere ästhetische Erfahrung? In den genreübergreifenden künstlerischen Arbeiten von Heiner Goebbels lassen sich ästhetische, gesellschaftliche, philosophische und darin oftmals politische Motive dieses menschlichen Erfahrungsbereichs aufdecken, die in einem Plädoyer für das Aushalten einer radikalen Kontingenz münden. Im Gespräch zwischen Heiner Goebbels und Anne Gräfe wird im Kontext einiger künstlerischer Arbeiten von Heiner Goebbels die immanente Logik und Vorstellungen von Zeit als Behauptung einer disruptiven Erfahrung der Dialektik der ästhetischen Langeweile eröffnet und erfragt, welche Formen der Aufmerksamkeit die ästhetische Erfahrung der Langeweile bietet."
Professor Dr h.c. Heiner Goebbels is a composer and theatre maker, was Professor of Artistic Practice at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen from 1999 to 2018, was Director of the Ruhrtriennale - International Festival of the Arts from 2012-2014 and President of the Hessian Theatre Academy from 2006 to 2018. His artistic oeuvre includes scenic concerts, audio pieces, compositions for ensemble and large orchestra, as well as sound and video installations, which have been exhibited at the Documenta 1987 and 1997, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris 2000, in London 2012, Lyon 2014, Dresden 2016, Moscow 2017 and many other places. Goebbels' installation "Landscape 3" will be on show at the Kunstraum.
The event will be in German language.
24.01.2024-25.01.2024 – Alienating Presents. Recovering Futures: On Futures Industries and the Political Imagination
Workshop
Organized by Liza Mattutat (Cultures of Critique) and Lukas Stolz (Cultures of Critique)
Panel discussion with Bahar Noorizadeh (London), Katia Schwerzmann (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Richard Seymour (London) and Günseli Yalcinkaya (London)
Workshop contributions by Jandra Böttger (FU Berlin), Volha Davydzik (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Alan Diaz (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Laura Hille (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Liza Mattutat (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Donovan Stewart (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Lukas Stolz (Leuphana University Lüneburg) and Julian Volz (Leuphana University Lüneburg).
Talking about the future is not so easy today. It risks depoliticisation from two opposing sides. Our political imagination oscillates between feelings of hopelessness and fatalism on the one hand, and hollow stories of cruel optimism on the other. Both doom via irreversible climate catastrophe or AI and salvation via technology and green capitalism seem to be waiting just around the corner. All the while, the idea of progress lingers around like a ghost, clearly no longer alive, it refuses to disappear.
In order to avoid nostalgia and futile calls for utopias, the workshop "Alienating Presents, Recovering Futures" addresses questions of future(lessness) and the political imagination from a materialist perspective. We start from the assumption that power has always produced images of the future to program the present according to its interests. Today, this role has been taken over by "futures industries," a concept we borrow from cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun. It allows us to ask how the current imaginative impasse is produced: How can we analyse the workings of today‘s futures industries and what are the material forces that shape our imaginative worlds? Which hegemonic projects compete for our imaginaries of the future, who's part of them and who benefits from them? Beyond a paranoid reading of the present, where can we find latent traces of the not-yet in existing contradictions? What are the terms, concepts, and images that could help us alienate ourselves from the present in order to recover (past) futures? In short: how can we move from the return of history to the return of the end of capitalism?
The workshop is a cooperation between the Cultures of Critique DFG Research Training Group and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).
24.01.2024 – Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Asylum and Diaspora - B Camminga and Paul Onanuga
Lecture by B Camminga
This event will be introduced and feature a response by LIAS Fellow Paul A. Onanuga.
Recent years have seen increased scholarly and media interest in the cross-border movements of LGBT persons, particularly those seeking protection in the Global North. While this has helped focus attention on the plight of individuals fleeing homophobic or transphobic persecution, it has also reinvigorated racist tropes about the Global South. In the case of Africa, the expansion of anti-LGBT laws and the prevalence of hetero-patriarchal discourses are regularly cited as evidence of an inescapable savagery. The figure of the LGBT refugee – often portrayed as helplessly awaiting rescue – reinforces colonial notions about the continent and its peoples. Queer and Trans African Mobilities draws on diverse case studies from the length and breadth of Africa, offering the first in-depth investigation of LGBT migration on and from the continent. In this talk, I consider some of the drivers and impacts of displacement linked to sexual orientation or gender identity and challenges regarding why LGBT Africans move, where they are going and what they experience along the way.
B Camminga (they/them) is a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, and a research associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand. They work on issues relating to gender identity and expression on the African continent with a focus on transgender migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Their first monograph, Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa, received the 2023 South African Academy of Sciences Emerging Scholars book award, the 2019 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies (with Aren Aizura) and honourable mention in the Ruth Benedict Prize for Queer Anthropology. B is co-editor of Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in Africa’s ‘Gay Capital’ (2019) with Zethu Matebeni, Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Diaspora, and Asylum (2022) with John Marnell and East African Queer and Trans Displacement (forthcoming) with John Marnell, Barbara Bompani and Kamau Wairuri.
This event is hosted by the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), and the Gender and Diversity Research Network.
17.01.2024 – Workshop: Disruption, Conspiracy, Revolt
Workshop with Donatella di Cesare (Rome/Lüneburg), Christine Achinger (Warwick), Leo Roepert (Hamburg), Astrid Séville (Lüneburg)
The Disruptive Condition confronts us with a paradoxical entanglement of rupture and continuity. While figures of absolute rupture have long lost credibility, calls for a break with ways of life and referential systems for the benefit of the preservation and reproduction of existing economic orders enjoy great popularity. This disruptive dialectic of continuity and discontinuity creates increasing cognitive and emotional dissonances that give rise to resignation but also resentment, prejudice and acts of violence, which find their expression in political movements that take their cue from the fascist movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Faced with the ever-increasing degree of organisation of the capitalist social formation and the decreasing scope for individuals to reconfigure their relations to the world, the return to traditional forms of domination and the schemes of identification they afford seems to offer consolation to many. In this, conspiracy theories play a key role. At the same time, we see a proliferation of insurrectionist movements that focus on a revolt against that which exists rather than on identifying allegedly all-powerful conspirators. How do these diverging forms of dissidence, of disruption, relate to each other? How are conspiracy theories and political action connected in attempts to deal with or change the Disruptive Condition? What is the role of conspiracy in the supposed resolution of the contradictions of contemporary societies?
Programme
14.00-15.00 Donatella di Cesare: Enframing of Power, Depoliticisation, Revolt
15.00-15.45 Astrid Séville: Micropolitics of Anticomplottism
15.45-16.15 Coffee break
16.15-17.00 Leo Roepert: The Conformist Revolt. On the Dialectic of Adaptation and Destructivity
17.00-17.45 Christine Achinger: Politics of Non-Identity?
17.45-18.00 Concluding discussion
Chair: Nicolas Schneider (Leuphana)
This workshop will be held in German
Speaker bios
Astrid Séville is Professor of Political Science with a focus on Political Theory at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
Christine Achinger is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Warwick.
Donatella di Cesare is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Sapienza University.
Leo Roepert is a sociologist and Research Associate at the University of Hamburg.
17.01.2024 – Twice - Opening and presentation - Park McArthur
Opening and presentation
With Nina Bartnitzek, Leonie Dinkloh, Daniela Fernanda Oliva Garcia, Patricia Fritze, Paula Gottschalk, Smilla Grubert, Rachel Haidu, Madeleine Häusler, Esther Heltschl, Elaine Lillian Joseph, Ann-Charlott Junior, Annelie Kebschull, Jacqueline Klemm, Antonina Kovacevic, Sophie McCuen-Koytek, Annelie Lau, Jordan Lord, Jan Müggenburg, Mariia Rakhmanova, Lea Marie Schöpper, Lili Berenike Merit Schröder, Wilson Sherwin, Chiara Steinmann, Elizaveta Voronova, Christopher Weickenmeier, Chiara Welter
Park McArthur exhibition. January 18–February 11, 2024. Kunstraum.
The Kunstraum is pleased to present Twice, a project with artist Park McArthur and MA students at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. An October 2023 listening session of McArthur’s work at the Kunstraum launched the project, which continued into January 2024 with weekly hybrid seminar meetings. Guided by disabled artists’ ongoing experiments in description and by in-class guest lectures by historian and critic Rachel Haidu, audio describer and SoundScribe co-founder Elaine Lillian Joseph, and artist and writer Jordan Lord, the seminar studied creative practices of transcription, captioning, imagination, and distributed experience bound to the materiality of disability access (Geelia Ronkina “On Projects 195” The Contemporary Journal, 2020). Participants will draw Twice to a close by collectively producing audio descriptions in German and English. The recorded descriptions and transcripts will remain on the Kunstraum’s website following their public debut on January 17, 2024. This debut will include a student-led live tour in English. McArthur’s Kunstraum exhibition will be open to the public from January 18–February 11, 2024. For access and programming inquiries please write kunstraum@leuphana.de.
16.01.2024 – Donatella di Cesare: Democracy and Anarchy. At the Source of their Repressed Connection.
Lecture by Donatella di Cesare
There are at least two ways of thinking about democracy today: a moderate-liberal one that considers it as a system of rules and procedures to be constantly improved, and a radical one that seeks to recover its conflictual potential. Grasped at its root, democracy reveals its connection to anarchy. Since its emergence, democracy has put into question both the arché, a power that claims to be original, and the télos, the goal (as Reiner Schürmann had already suspected). What is key is the concept of kratos, capacity, the power of the people, which is necessarily an-archic.
Donatella di Cesare is professor of theoretical philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome. Recent publications include Conspiracy and Power (2023), The Time of Revolt (2021), The Political Vocation of Philosophy (2021) and Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration (2020). The lecture is based on her new book Democrazia e anarchia. Il potere nella polis, which will be published with Einaudi (Turin) in February 2024.
Lecture language: German
09.01.2024 – Nach Solingen. Politiken ungleicher Verletzbarkeit im Kontext rassistischer Gewalt - Çiğdem Inan
"Ausgehend von der Verleugnung von Rassismus und den Mechanismen der Opfer-Täter*innen-Umkehr, die bei rechten und rassistischen Anschlägen und so auch nach dem Solinger Brandanschlag zutage traten, verhandelt Çiğdem Inan in ihrem Vortrag die ungleiche Verteilung von Verletzbarkeit innerhalb migrationspolitischer Sicherheits- und Sorgediskurse. Aufgezeigt wird, wie Trauer und Angst den umkämpften Schauplatz bilden, auf dem die Verletzbarkeit von Personen, die von Rassismus betroffen sind, zugleich aberkannt, wieder angeeignet und ausgehandelt wird. Inwiefern kann aus Trauer-, Verlust- und Enteignungserfahrungen im Kontext rassistischer Gewalt eine politische Handlungsmacht hervorgehen, die kraft einer anderen sozialen Relationalität Aufteilungen in verletzbares und nicht-verletzbares Leben abzuschaffen vermag?"
Çiğdem Inan is a sociologist who lives and works in Berlin. Her teaching and research focus on affect theory, post-structuralism, critical sociology of migration, 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 negotiates classical and non-classical philosophies of the affective together with critical theories of racism. She is part of the publishing collective b_books (Berlin) and editor of the publication series re fuse.
The event takes place in German language.
Hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS)
20.12.2023 – The Work of Drag - Olympia Bukkakis
Workshop
On December 20, the Kunstaum and the Center for Critical Studies are pleased to host a workshop, guided by drag artist and choreographer Olympia Bukkakis. The workshop will attend to the work that goes into drag and the material conditions of a performative practice that purposely blurs the site of its production, whether that's the stage aka the factory, gender or the scene. Haunted by the spectre of autonomy, drag like all art, "expels labour and declares a formal freedom from it while being just as subordinated to capital as any other form of social production" (Vishmidt and Stakemeier). The art of Bukkakis, in turn, insists on a formal nonseperability of the right lipstick, Marxism, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and her friends and collaborators, making her the perfect interlocutor for thinking about art's surpressed and/or neurotic relationship to theories and politics of labour. Internationalist Drag Union, when?!
The workshop will be structured around two short texts chosen by Bukkakis and circulated beforehand. To participate, please register by writing to kunstraum@leuphana.de by Friday 15 December.
Bio: Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. Since graduating from the SODA masters at the HZT she has premiered a number of new works including, Gender Euphoria (2019), Work on Progress (2019), Under Pressures (2019), A Touch of the Other (2020), Too Much (2021), and replay (2023). Her practice is situated within, and inspired by, the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance. www.olympiabukkakis.com
19.12.2023 – Material Performance - Olympia Bukkakis with Dagat Mera
Performance
Drag queen and choreographer Olympia Bukkakis will present a version of "Material Performance". In this piece Olympia works with, against, for, and under 10 meters of red fabric. This time she is joined by artist and janitor Dagat Mera in a performative exploration of labour conditions, queer aesthetics and the search for leftist, materialist art.
A workshop with Olympia Bukkakis will be held the following day, Wednesday 20 December, at 10:15 am. See here. Both events will take place in English. They are organised by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS) in cooperation with the Kunstraum and the Gender and Diversity Research Network.
Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. Since graduating from the SODA masters at the HZT she has premiered a number of new works including, Gender Euphoria (2019), Work on Progress(2019), Under Pressures (2019), A Touch of the Other (2020), Too Much (2021), and replay (2023). Her practice is situated within, and inspired by, the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance. Website: www.olympiabukkakis.com
Dagat Mera moved from Mainz to Hamburg after graduating from high school in 2021 and is active there both artistically and politically. His focus is storytelling through visual and time-based media. In addition, he gave various creative workshops and workshops on political education. Since 2022 he studies at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HfBK).
12.12.2023 – CCS Kolloquium - Anna Kipke with Mimmi Woisnitza
Kolloqium
The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat.
This meeting of the colloquium will take place in German.
22.11.2023 – Bread and Rose Perfume: politics of abundance and pleasure against precarity - Wilson Sherwin
Lecture
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the peak of the Vietnam war, poor Black welfare recipients across the United States organized to demand not only access to the welfare provisions to which they were already entitled, but the expansion of those benefits beyond simple needs. Examining unfinished project of the welfare rights movement and its remarkable antiwork politics, provides insights into how capaciously defined needs and desires may help usher us beyond capitalism and towards alternative social and economic arrangements.
Born and raised in New York City, Wilson Sherwin, PhD (she, her) has worked as an electrician, a nanny, a translator, and a documentary film producer. She is currently a sociologist who writes and teaches about social movements, political economy, and public policy. Wilson is a research fellow at Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society.
A cooperation between Center for Critical Studies, Kunstraum and the Gender and Diversity Network
21.11.2023 – Linke Melancholie - Christian Voller
Kolloqium
"Was heißt linke Melancholie? Häufig wird damit der Zustand der gegenwärtigen Linken beschrieben, deren Enttäuschung über das Scheitern alternativer Gesellschaftsentwürfe in eine nachgerade ontologische Schwermut gekippt sei. Dagegen hielt bereits Walter Benjamin (auf den man sich gerne beruft) Melancholie eher für ein Symptom der Anpassung ans Bestehende. Christian Voller versucht, die kritischen Wurzeln des Begriffs freizulegen und dabei insbesondere die "Fähigkeit, sich zu ekeln" (W. Benjamin), gegen die Routine linker Trauerarbeit in Anschlag zu bringen."
The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat.
This meeting of the colloquium will take place in German.
14.11.2023 – Narzissmus im Postfordismus. Begriff und Gegenstand zwischen Individual- und Sozialpsychologie - Lutz Eichler
Lecture
As part of the "Lüneburger Arbeitsgespräche für Kritische Theorie", the social scientist and child therapist Lutz Eichler will give a lecture on narcissism in post-Fordism. Afterwards there will be time for extensive discussion on the topic.
"Der globale Zusammenhang war einerseits noch nie so dicht und der Einzelne so intensiv vergesellschaftet wie heute. Er ist durch und durch Produkt einer Weltwirtschaft und Weltkultur. Andererseits ist jeder ökonomisch vereinzelt und die Kultur ist in zentralen Dimensionen individualistisch. Sie betont und belohnt Einzigartigkeit, Genius, Kreativität – solange sie marktgängig sind.
Während der Grad der Vergesellschaftung und damit der Abhängigkeit vom System steigt, steigt das glatte Gegenteil, ein individualistisches Selbstideal ebenso. Kollektivierung und Individualisierung bilden zwei in sich vermittelte Gegenpole, die unreflektiert eine negative dialektische Dynamik aufrechterhalten und befeuern. Allerdings sind die beiden Pole nicht gleichberechtigt. Die Übermacht des Systems ist gewaltig. Jeder Einzelne ist demgegenüber ohnmächtig. Der subjektive Blick auf die soziale Objektivität ist von sozialer Angst gekennzeichnet: Die Angst „nicht voranzukommen“ oder nur geduldet, mitgeschleift oder gar exkludiert zu werden.
In dieser Situation greifen viele auf einen Modus der Konfliktverarbeitung zurück, den man narzisstisch, verstanden als normalpathologischen Idealtyp, nennen kann. Es ist eine Art Schiefheilung, ein verunglückter Reparationsversuch mit Krankheitsgewinn. Dieser Typus verdrängt die Angst und verleugnet seine naturale und/oder weltgesellschaftliche Embeddedness bei unbewusst fortbestehenden Symbiosewünschen. In einer Kompromissbildung zwischen Individualität und Kollektivität wählt er eine identitätsstützende exkludierende Wir-Gruppe-Identität (Ethnie, Nation, Religion).
Dieser Narzissmus ist zur Vergesellschaftung wahlverwandt. Charakteristisch für ihn ist die Gleichzeitigkeit einer Identifikation mit imaginären Kollektiven und einer idealisierten Selbstvorstellung, hinter der verdrängte Angst, Ohnmacht und Wut lauern. Narzissmus kann man so fassen als Karikatur von Autonomie, Nationalismus als Karikatur von Solidarität.
Im Vortrag soll der Begriff des Narzissmus umrissen und die Verbindung zum Autoritarismus diskutiert werden."
Organised by: Heiko Stubenrauch, Christian Voller
02.11.2023 – Researching Care: Biological, Social and Ecological Reproduction in Times of Crisis
Workshop
Organisation: Julia Böcker (ISKO) and Liza Mattutat (Cultures of Critique research training group)
At the Researching Care workshop, Leuphana scholars will meet to discuss their ongoing research projects on questions of biological, social and ecological reproduction. At the workshop, we will discuss the questions and motivations that guide our research on reproduction. We will discuss the questions and motivations that guide our research on reproduction, and reflect on the different theoretical approaches and methods we employ. In addition to collegial feedback, our goal is to identify connections between our projects that may be followed up by collaborations. With contributions by Julia Böcker, Volha Davydzik, Anne Gräfe, Laura Hille, Liza Mattutat, Heiko Stubenrauch and Christina Wessely.
The workshop is a collaboration between the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group, the Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organisation, the Gender and Diversity Research Network and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).
Discussions will be held partly in English and partly in German.
A flyer with all information about the programme can be found here.
24.10.2023 – Sprechen, Schreiben, Lesen: Muttersprache und Chatbots – Marietta Kesting
Lecture
“Wer kann sprechen, schreiben und lesen lernen, so wie es Kindern in der Grundschule beigebracht wird? Und in welcher Sprache wird unterrichtet? Ko-Schreiben mit Bots verändert Ideen von Autor:innenschaft, aber auch Modelle von Sprache und Lernprozessen. Heutzutage ist es schwierig zu beantworten, wie viele nicht-menschliche Nutzer:innen in sozialen Online-Medien agieren. Der Vortrag diskutiert unterschiedliche Inszenierungen von Autor:innenschaft im Digitalen, anhand von Beispielen aus der Medienkunst und Schreibexperimenten von menschlichen Autor:innen zusammen mit künstlichen Intelligenzen.”
Marietta Kesting ist Medien- und Kulturwissenschaftlerin, sie unterrichtet derzeit an der Universität Potsdam und ist Forschungskoordinatorin am Institute for Cultural Inquiry, ICI Berlin. Zuvor war Kesting von 2016-22 Juniorprofessorin für Medien- und Kunsttheorie an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Kesting ist seit 2004 Teil des Verlagskollektivs b_books, Berlin. Zuletzt erschien Human After Man hg. mit S. Witzgall bei diaphanes.
17.10.2023 – Zoopolitics of Life and Death: Critical Animal Studies Graduate Conference
Conference
Organized by: The Center for Critical Studies (CCS) and Institute of Philosophy and Art History (IPK) conjointly with THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Ca’Foscari University of Venice.
This two-day international conference brings together graduate students and early scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences to critically address the multifaceted issue of politics of life and death of nonhuman animals.
The concepts of zoopolitics and biopolitics have traditionally been addressed separately, based respectively on a distinction of zoé and bios. These, as two different Greek terms for “life” have been used, in the first case, to merely refer to the lives of nonhuman animals, and the second to a distinctively human form of life. However, these terms need to be articulated together to address the multispecies composition of contemporary natureculture assemblages and their lively capital.
Following the principles of Critical Animal Studies, the conference thus adopt a holistic approach to confront oppressions, shared exploitation and vulnerability, but also to put liveability and flourishing according to a total liberation framework to the forefront.
Keynote Speaker: Benedetta Piazzesi. EHESS/Centre de recherches historiques, Paris
Biopolitics and Zootechnics: Historicising Power over Animals
Find the full program here and a the book of abstracts here.
04.07.23 – ‘In Between Subjects’ – Amelia Jones
Lecture
“This presentation gives an overview of Jones’s book In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Subjects, with attention to deeper motivations behind its development, and tracks her thinking about the intersection of “queer” and “performance” or “performativity” since the book was published. Given the rise of anti-trans culture wars and legislation in the United States, for example, what does it mean to historicize this intersection? What aspects of the intersection can be revitalized to empower the struggles for trans existence and political rights today?”
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor at Roski School of Art & Design, University of Southern California. Publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012) and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, co-edited with Erin Silver (2016). Her catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020) was listed among the “Best Art Books 2020” in the NY Times, and the curated show was listed among Top Ten 2021 exhibitions in Artforum (December 2021). Her book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance was published in 2021. Her current work addresses the structural racism and neoliberalism of the twenty-first century art world and university.
This lecture is organised by the Cultures of Critique DFG funded research training group, the Center for Critical Studies and the Gender and Diversity Research Network. It is organised in cooperation with the Collaborative Research Center "Intervening Arts", A06 "Artistic Life Practice as Intervention" and it will take place in English.
Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
21.06.23 – ‘A Philosophical Dissolution of History: The Myth of Year 1’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Susan Buck-Morss
Lecture
“Dissolving the history of “origin” stories means unravelling of modernity’s myth about itself. National/religious/cultural traditions are exclusionary histories. Against these conventions of the ownership of slices of historical time, I argue for a communist inheritance of the past.”
Susan Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYC, where she is a core faculty member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is Professor Emeritus in the Government Department of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. She is the author of numerous books including Year 1: A Philosophical Recounting (2021), Revolution Today (2019), Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (1977).
This event is hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), the CCS Working Group on the Disruptive Condition, and the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group. The event will take place in English.
Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
20.06.23 – ‘CCS Colloquium’ – Liza Mattutat
Colloquium
The Center for Critical Studies research colloquium takes place three times a semester, with CCS members invited to present their research in progress.
In this session, Liza Mattutat will present the following paper: “Care in Crisis: History and theory of experimental organisation of care work
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of crisis diagnoses that focus on the state of care work. Liza Mattutat's project Care in Crisis explores these diagnoses, their historical predecessors and the antidotes that the (early) history of feminism developed in response to such experiences of crisis. At the CCS Colloquium, she will tell us about her research trip to Los Angeles planned for August, during which she will focus on the utopian community of Llano del Rio (1914-1918). There, the architect Alice Constance Austin drew up plans for a ‘socialist city’ in which individualised domestic labour was to become obsolete.”
The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat. The event will take place in German.
Website: https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/center-for-critical-studies/colloquium.html
Contact: mattutat@leuphana.de or heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
14.06.23 – ‘Counter-Communities’ –Daniel Loick
Colloquium
Daniel Loick will present a chapter from his as yet unpublished book about “Counter-Communities” for discussion.
Daniel Loick is Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. His research focus lies in the fields of political philosophy, legal, cultural and social philosophy, social theory and political theory. He has published four books, Kritik der Souveränität (2012, an English translation was published in 2018 as A Critique of Sovereignty), Der Missbrauch des Eigentums (2016), Anarchismus zur Einführung (2017) most recently Juridismus. Konturen einer kritischen Theorie des Rechts (2017).
The event will take place in English.
Organisation: Colloquium PLG – Philosophie
Contact: heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
31.05.-28.06.23 – ‘DEADTIME (“Maggie’s Solo”) – Cally Spooner and Will Holder
Exhibition
“Maggie’s Solo” is a 44’16” audio recording of Maggie Segale dancing in “early 2020”. The piece by Cally Spooner was also filmed, but the film will not be shown.
I met Cally in 2014 which we both forgot. Will said he remembered me from Berlin, … Cally, Will, Maggie and I have never been in the same place. Cally and Will will come to Lüneburg on May 30, Maggie will be missing and we will miss her.
Starting tomorrow, Will and Cally will write for an hour a day, here, about, alongside and in assistance to “Maggie’s Solo”—a solo as much as a constellation. They will write for two weeks in advance of the opening and until two weeks before the end.
Once a week, usually Wednesdays, parts of this writing will also appear in and around the Kunstraum. As always, this will be a little too late, which incidentally has become our favorite time to meet.
For the opening on May 30, 6pm, Cally, Will and I will have a public conversation with the students enrolled in the seminar “Assisting and the Arts of Service”.
-- Christopher Weickenmeier, May 17, 2023
Will Holder is an English typographer based in Brussels. Holder explores the organisation of language around artworks through printed matter, live readings and dialogues with other artists. Particular attention is placed on an oral production of value and meaning around cultural objects, and how live, extra-informational qualities might be analysed, documented and scored. He is editor of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts. Together with Alex Waterman, he edited and typeset operatic scores for Yes, But Is It Edible?, the music of Robert Ashley, for two or more voices. In 2015 he received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. He is also the founder of the publishing imprint uh books.
Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media — on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in recent group exhibitions at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; FRONT Cleveland Triennial; BY ART MAT- TERS, Hangzhou; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MAMbo, Bologna; Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; and REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles. Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slim Volume/ Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella Collapsing in Parts was published by Mousse in 2012. She is currently a research fellow at Overgaden, Copenhagen, in association with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Copenhagen (2021–24).
Thank you to Tamara Antonijevic, Nina Bartnitzek, Prof. Susanne Leeb, Team of O–Overgaden and Maggie Segale.
Kunstraum, Leuphana University of Lüneburg: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en/projects/deadtime-maggie-s-solo-mit-cally-spooner-und-will-holder
Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
10.05.23 – ‘Antonio Negri: A Philosophy of Subversion - From the Social Worker to Biopolitics’ – Serhat Karakayali and Roberto Nigro
Lectures
“These lectures form part of a translocal series marking the 90th birthday of Antonio Negri: a key figure within Italian Operaismo, a participant in the Autonomia movements of the 1970s, and a political philosopher whose work has engaged the thought of Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx and Foucault in order to comprehend transformations in capital, labour and revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By focusing on some of the most important political and philosophical notions Negri has elaborated since the 1970s, this event will explore their relevance for contemporary analyses and the critique of capitalistic relations of power.”
The two papers presented by Serhat Karakayali and Roberto Nigro will be in English. They will be streamed and audio archived along with others in this series at: https://transversal.at/
Roberto Nigro is professor of philosophy at Leuphana University. His book Antonio Negri: Une philosophie de la subversion was published in March 2023. Serhat Karakayali is professor of migration and mobility at Leuphana University. He is the co-editor of Empire und die biopolitische Wende: Die internationale Diskussion im Anschluss an Hardt und Negri (2007).
Hosted by the Center for Critical Studies.
Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
09.05.23 – ‘The Housewife and the Dragon: Visualizing Insubordination in Operaismo and Autonomia’ – Jacopo Galimberti
Lecture
“During the 1960s and 1970s, Operaismo and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents in Italy. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these social movements inspired many visual artists; in fact, Workerism and Autonomia also developed into complex cultural trends involving a plurality of aesthetic approaches, a distinctive iconography, an epistemology and a theory of culture. Based on extensive archival research, this talk will discuss two thematic threads of Images of Class. Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso, 2022): the political iconography of the worker as a monster and that of the housewife as an unruly subject unsettling both social reproduction and the principles of Marxism.”
Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and assistant professor at IUAV (Venice). He is the author of Individuals against Individualism. Western European Art Collectives (1956–1969) (Liverpool University Press, 2017), Détournement & Kitsch. Die Postkarten von Hans Peter Zimmer/Les cartes postales de Hans Peter Zimmer (Les Presses Universitaires de Nanterre, 2021) and of Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso Books, 2022). He also co-edited several books including Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Manchester, 2020) and the latest thematic issue of The Oxford Art Journal, which is devoted to the representation of social classes in contemporary art.
Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
03.05.23 – ‘Emergency Politics’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Jonathan White
Lecture
“From economics to international security, pandemics to climate change, we live in an age of emergency politics. Not only do governments make policy in the name of managing urgent threats, but opponents criticise them for missing the real threats and fighting the wrong emergency. This presentation will consider some of the distinctive problems this creates for democracy, whether emergency politics should be embraced by progressives nonetheless, and how democracy might adapt to these demanding conditions.”
Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. He has held visiting positions at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies, Harvard, Stanford, the Humboldt University, Hertie School, Sciences Po Paris, and the Australian National University. Books include Politics of Last Resort: Governing by Emergency in the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Meaning of Partisanship (with Lea Ypi, Oxford University Press, 2016), and Political Allegiance after European Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He was awarded the 2017 British Academy Brian Barry Prize for Excellence in Political Science.
This event is organised by the CCS research initiative “The Disruptive Condition”.
For more information, please contact: nicolas.schneider@leuphana.de
27.04.23 – ‘weight, véhicules and telepathy, how la facultad feels at a distance’ – Catalina Insignares, Henrike Kohpeiß, Myriam Lefkowitz
Public Presentation, Kunstraum Leuphana University of Lüneburg
“Dedicated to exiled people and those who assist them, la facultad is a site where our dormant sensory faculties are exercised, so that we can hear, study and amplify them in collaborative situations. For the public talk on April 27, Lefkovitz and Insignares depart from written reflections on la facultad (and its different iterations since 2017), drawing out some of the ideas in dialogue with the philosopher Henrike Kohpeiß. The talk approaches an ongoing project at a distance.”
Catalina Insignares is a Colombian choreographer and dancer based in Brussels. She studied dance in Canada and France, and completed a Master’s degree in Choreography and Performance at the University of Giessen, Germany. She’s interested in how to use the sensorial and fictional means of the body and of touch to develop ways to communicate with the invisible. Since 2015, she collaborates with Carolina Mendonça, maintaining a very close complicity in different manners of working together. Reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caresses and massages populate these encounters. And since 2017, she has been working with Myriam Lefkowitz as a performer and also in a collaboration that seeks to infiltrate sensory practices from the social and political realities of exiled people (La facultad). From 2019 to 2022 Catalina developed her research as part of DAS THIRD in Amsterdam. Since 2019 she is a co-curator at the Gessnerallee in Zurich.
Dr. Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher from Berlin. She completed her PhD on “Bourgeois Coldness” in 2022 and works as a research assistant at the CRC Affective Societies at Free University, Berlin. Her work and teaching focuses on Critical Theory, Black Studies, Feminism and Affect Theory. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer.
An artist choreographer, since 2010 Myriam Lefkowitz’s research has focused on questions of attention and perception, using different immersive mechanisms involving direct relationships between spectators and artists. Myriam Lefkowitz’s work was presented at the 55th Venice biennale (“Oo”, Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavilion), the CAC Vilnius, Med15 (Medellin), the Garage (Moscow), the Creative Time Summit (Stockholm), Situations (Bristol), the Talbot Rice Gal¬lery (Edinburgh), the Kadist Foundation (Tokyo and San Francisco), the Kaaitheater (Brussels), the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, La Galerie (Noisy le sec), La Ferme du Buisson... After following the SPEAP programme (master’s in art and political experimentation, Science Po, Paris founded by Bruno Latour) in 2011 she became a member of the programme’s teaching committee for 2 consecutive years. Deeply involved in teaching, she is regularly invited to conduct workshops (HEAD, ERG Brussels, Mejen in Stockholm, the Beaux-Arts in Reims, Besancon, Quimper, Angouleme, Bourges, as part of the master Ex.Erce, the dance department at Paris 8).
Website: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en
Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
26.04.23 – ‘Political and Moral Existentialism as a Heideggerianism: on Beavoir and Heideggerian Ontology’ – Manon Garcia
Colloquium
Manon Garcia is a Junior Professor of Practical Philosophy (tenure-track) at Freie Universität in Berlin. Her primary research is in political philosophy, feminist philosophy, moral philosophy. She also works on 20th Century French philosophy and philosophy of social sciences, especially economics.
Organisation: PLG – Philosophy Colloquium
Contact: roberto.nigro@leuphana.de, heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
25.04.23 – ‘Der Riss in der Zeit, Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
Lecture
“Koselleck outlined his theory of historical knowledge in ever new attempts throughout his life. Based on unpublished material from the estate, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann reconstructs Koselleck's intellectual biography and his unwritten book: his history. History happens in time. But how? As progress in the ascending line? Or as a cycle in the eternal return of the same? The historian Reinhart Koselleck has added a third to these two common notions: it is not history that repeats itself, but rather the conditions of possible histories. Only when we know what is repeated do we recognize the surprisingly new: the crack in time.”
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Professor of the History of European Late Modernism at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2017 he received the Guggenheim Foundation Prize.
Der Riss in der Zeit - Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik will be published on 17 April, 2023 with Suhrkamp.
Organised by the CCS research initiative “The Disruptive Condition”.
Contact: anne.graefe@leuphana.de
18.04.23 – ‘CCS Colloquium’ – Heiko Stubenrauch
Colloquium
The Center for Critical Studies research colloquium takes place three times a semester, with CCS members invited to present their research in progress.
In this session, Heiko Stubenrauch will present the following paper: “Unbegrenzte Phantasien: Triebstruktur und neoliberale Gesellschaft
“In der Moderne wurde die Verinnerlichung von Begrenzungen und Normen oft als Schlüsselmoment beschrieben, wenn es um die Frage geht, wie Macht und Herrschaft unter Bedingungen formaler Freiheit Wirksamkeit erlangen. Einige zeitgenössische Machtformen hingegen scheinen einer anderen Logik zu folgen. Das Spezifische neoliberaler Subjektivierung scheint nicht in der Verinnerlichung von Begrenzungen oder Normen, sondern im Evozieren von Phantasien der Grenzenlosigkeit zu liegen, hinter denen tatsächlich bestehende Grenzen und Machtgefälle schwer greifbar und angreifbar werden: So wird postfordistische Arbeit häufig von Phantasien eines grenzenlosen Könnens oder Erfolgs angetrieben, mit denen in einer tendenziell von (sichtbaren) Hierarchien befreiten, dafür vermehrt von Wettbewerb durchsetzten Arbeitswelt die Flucht nach vorne angetreten wird. Darüber hinaus evoziert zeitgenössisches Marketing Phantasien eines grenzenlosen Genießens, in deren Schatten Mangel schwerer zu ertragen ist und zwanghaft durch den Konsum von vor allem kulturindustriellen Waren gestillt werden muss. In meinem Vortrag werde ich mich auf die Thesen konzentrieren, die postfordistische Arbeit betreffen.”
The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat.
Website: https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/center-for-critical-studies/colloquium.html
For more information, please contact mattutat@leuphana.de or heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
18.04.23 – ‘Is Bolsonarismo Over? Making Sense of the Far Right in Brazil and Globally’ – Rodrigo Nunes
Online Lecture
“After four years under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has voted to bring former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva back into power. A tighter race than most expected and a series of increasingly daring protests afterwards suggest, however, that this electoral setback is not yet the end for the social and political force that Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign catalysed. Situating Bolsonarismo in the broader context of a resurgent far right, this talk will examine the conditions that made it possible in order to ask what its permanent defeat would entail – and what that means for the incoming Workers’ Party (PT) government.”
Rodrigo Nunes is a senior lecturer in political theory and organisation at the University of Essex. He is the author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021) and Do Transe à Vertigem: Ensaios sobre Bolsonarismo e um Mundo em Transição [From Trance to Vertigo: Essays on Bolsonarismo and a World in Transition] (Ubu, 2022), as well as articles in several international publications.
This event is organised by Ben Trott and Raphael Daibert. It is hosted by the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).
14.-15.04.23 – ‘Assistances (Working Title)’– Valentina Desideri, Stefano Harney, Jason Hirata, Will Holder, Annick Kleizen, Cally Spooner, Eric Golo Stone, Mathilde Supe, Terre Thaemlitz, Marina Vishmidt
Public Workshop, Kunstraum Leuphana University Lüneburg
“30 years after Andrea Frasers and Helmut Draxlers seminal project “Services” at Kunstraum Lüneburg, a two-day workshop returns to the matter of artistic labor. Only it doesn´t…directly at least. Haunting “Services” and rarely addressed, the workshop proposes to shift focus towards the one doing much of the work aka the assistant.
“Contemporary theater and art production, institutionalized or not, often rely on poorly paid assistants and usually unpaid interns in order to function smoothly, but to be an assistant never means the same. The assistant can be anyone and noone; they could be a 15th-century painting apprentice, dramaturge, director’s assistant, editor, stage and light technician, secretary, assistant designer, assistant conductor, production manager, production assistant, cleaning staff, student assistant, personal assistant, curatorial assistant, assistant curator, mother, emotional caretaker, professional caretaker, a friend - anyone whose job is to maintain, manage, advise and enable the work of the artist. It’s redundant to say that the line between those is never clear.
“In the art field, there are a great many maintainers of the work of others. When their work is adequately valued, a rarity still, it is usually because their necessity is articulated through a blurry framework of care and need, one that’s structurally distorted by the pervasive ableism of capitalist society. The economy of assistance is captured by a logic of exchange, and financial and personal debts are accumulated and inherited unevenly. Regardless of the type of production and conditions in which they work, the forever “young” assistant is usually expected to love their work, a work whose end takes place in the future. When that future arrives (it rarely does), the artist has to carve out and separate themselves from their (inner) assistant, a complicated psychosocial operation that often results in volatile divisions of labor. Meanwhile, the assistant is always available, flexible, ready to jump in for the sick, stressed and exhausted artist, gallerist, other assistant. It could be said that the assistant is in a constant training in the arts of service; to paraphrase Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, training becomes the discipline. If we were to acknowledge the so called Malerschwein (painter pig) in the room, then only to understand the assistant as a symptom of their historically contingent pathology.
“The assistant who doesn’t identify with their work is often a bringer of horrible mood, which is not to be underestimated. In fact, it can serve us as a methodology; if assisting is nothing but a job, the bubble of the seemingly natural flow of artistic creativity and genius bursts. In the end, all that genius is just material for the assistant to handle and maintain. If assisting is charged with the promise of the artistic future, autonomy, and proprietary authorship, what would it mean to do this work without it? And would this shift allow for a different response to the material conditions in which we find ourselves? Bringing together theorists, assistants, and artists, and drawing on concepts such as affordance, dependance, and deproduction, the workshop aims to dwell in a suspended moment in which there’s no art, in the broken promise of life in art, where there’s only a continuous flow of work.”
For more information on the participants, the schedule and matters of accessibility, please refer to the homepage.
Organized by Tamara Antonijevic and Christopher Weickenmeier
Student Assistants: Nina Bartnitzek, Manuel Clancett, Patricia Fritze
Website: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en
Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
12.04.23 – ‘William James in the Anthropocene, Or: The Politics of Pragmatism in a New Climatic Regime’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Melanie Sehgal
Lecture
“In this talk, I propose to think with William James (1842-1910) in the face of today’s unfolding climate emergency, thereby putting James’ thought to a pragmatist test: what can we do with James today at a time marked by an unprecedented extent of ecological devastation? I will single out two dimensions of James’ work that seem particularly pertinent for thinking through the havoc that extractivist modes of production and habits of thought have wreaked: his notion of experience and the pragmatic method. In this way, I will outline the particular politics of James’ pragmatism and its relevance in and to a new climatic regime.”
Melanie Sehgal is Director of Research at the Institute for Basic Research into the History of Philosophy at Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Her work is situated at the crossroads of process philosophy, the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, aesthetics and the history and historiography of philosophy. She is the author of A Situated Metaphysics. Empiricism and Speculation in William James and Alfred North Whitehead, published by Konstanz University Press in 2016, and numerous articles on process philosophy, aesthetics and transdisciplinary practices. Currently, she is working on a book on “The Arts of a New Climatic Regime”.
Organised by the CCS research initiative “The Disruptive Condition”
Contact: anne.graefe@leuphana.de
16.–17.3.23: 3rd TUDiSC Conference: Disruptive Worldmaking: Technology, Design, Art
Technische Universität Dresden
The programme for the public part of the conference can be accessed here.
Winter Semester Pier Paolo Pasolini Film and Lecture Series
Five screenings and lectures marked what would have been the hundredth birthday of Pasolini. This included a screening of the director’s second film, Mamma Roma from 1962, followed by a lecture by Isabelle Chaplot on Pasolini’s Roman films, titled ‘Terrains vagues und Heteropien’ (03.11.22). Theresia Prammer spoke about Pasolini’s poetry as a language of love (15.11.22). Her lecture was accompanied by a screening of Pasolini’s documentary film, Das Gastmahl der Liebe, in which he interviewed young and old alike about their sexual lives. Tjark Kunstreich’s lecture, ‘Warum Sodom kein Heimatland ist’, addressed Pasolini’s meaning for the theory of same-sex desire (18.12.22). On 23.01.23, Pasolini’s 1968 film Edipo Re was screened, and the series closed on 31.01.23 with a lecture by Florian Huber on Pasolini’s Teorema.
The series was organised by Christoph Görlich.
Winter Semester Lecture Series – ‘Hauptwerke deutschsprachiger Erzählprosa seit 1989.’
Fourteen literature scholars each presented and discussed one work of German language prose, written after the political rupture of 1989. Each set out why that particular book should continue to be read, discussed, remembered and passed down. The series included the following presentations: Sven Kramer on Christa Wolf’s Was Bleibt, Florian Huber on Peter Waterhouse’s Krieg und Welt, Tanja van Hoorn on Brigitte Kronauer’s Teufelsbrück, Martin Scheirbaum on Wolfgang Hilbig’s Ich, Steffi Hobuß on Doron Rabinovici’s Suche Nach M., Silke Horstkotte on Shida Bazyar’s Drein Kamaradinnen, Ulrike Steierwald on Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, Axel Dunkber on Lutz Seiler’s Kruso, Matthias N. Lorenz on Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur, Inge Stephan on Eldriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten, Ulrike Vedder on Ursula Krechel’s Landgericht, Julia Patrut on Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel, Doerte Bischoff on Abbas Khider’s Der Falsche Inder, Sarah Schmidt on Felicitas Hoppe’s Hoppe.
The lecture series was organised by Sven Kramer.
31.01.23 – ‘The Wages for Housework Campaign: What Yesterday’s Struggles Mean for Today’. Workshop with Silvia Federici (Hofstra University, NYC)
Silvia Federici gave a lecture on the history of Wages for Housework, feminist movements of the 1970s and their reception today. This was followed by a critical discussion and reflection on the histories and presents of feminist organizing around social reproduction.
The event was a collaboration between the Research Training Group ‘Cultures of Critique’ and the Center for Critical Studies.
24.01.23 – CCS Colloquium: Christina Wessely and Chiara Stefanoni
Christina Wessely presented and discussed her forthcoming book, Liebesmühe, and Chiara Stefanoni presented and discussed a paper titled, ‘Conceptualising Animal Resistance: Questions and Approaches’.
For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
17.01.22 ‘Artistic Activism-Interventions and New Forms of Storytelling’ studio talk by Paula Hildebrandt and Kathrin Wildner
This open conversation with artistic research activists, authors and publishers Paula Hildebrandt and Kathrin Wildner explored the relationship between research, art and activism, and the narratives and modes of expression for this relationship.
This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
10.01.23 – CCS Colloquium: Ulrike Steierwald and Christoph Brunner
Ulrike Steierwald presented her project ‘Layers of Visibility: On Contemporary Aesthetics of Materiality in “Retinal” Fine Arts’ and Christoph Brunner presented a paper titled, ‘Infrastructures of Feeling: Power and (Non)-Sense in Far-Right Online Activism’.
For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
15.12.22 ‘Aesthetics of the (New) Right: Misogyny, Antigender and “Right” Feminism (in Germany)’ workshop with Sophia Bembeza, Julia Haas and Christoph Brunner
Part of a workshop series on the aesthetics and online practices of the ‘new right’. This session looked at the complex issues of misogyny, anti-feminism and right-wing feminism.
This event and the workshop series were organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
14.12.22 – ‘Geschichte und Geschehen’ lecture by Reinhard Blänkner
This lecture by the cultural historian Reinhard Blänkner (Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder) outlined the problematic confusion of history, memory and happening and the related question of the availability or unavailability of history itself. Its argument thus aimed at a systematic distinction between history and happening as well as at the question of the historical conditions and conceptual possibilities of a ‘history’ (Historie) after ‘history’ (Geschichte).
The workshop was organised by the research initiative ‘The Disruptive Condition’.
13.12.22 - CCS Colloquium: Timon Beyes
Timon Beyes presented and discussed his forthcoming book, Organizing Colour: Toward a Chromatics of the Social.
For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
08.12.22 – 28.01.23 – ‘Unterwerfung’ exhibition by Philipp Gufler.
Solo exhibition, tracking the various ways in which Philipp Gufler stages archival queer material, seeking to escape the heteronormative capture of a resistant past.
The exhibition was accompanied by a lecture performance by Susanne Sachsee (Cheap Collective) (07.12.2022), screenings of films by Zoe Leonard and Catherine Saalfield, Philipp Gufler and Liane Klinger (08.12.2022), a presentation by Sunil Gupta (24.01.2023), and a panel event titled ‘A Trans Hirschfeld Renaissance’ with Leah Tigers, Dean Erdmann, Maxi Wallenhorst and Raimund Wolfert (25.01.2023).
The exhibition and accompanying program took place at the Kunstraum Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
01.12.22 – ‘Did You Know That “Dammit I’m Mad” Spelled Backwards Is “Dammit I’m Mad”?’ artist talk by Jana Vanecek
Artist, author and researcher Jana Vanecek’s lecture presented and discussed two works from her artistic research project on neurodiversity, mental health and co-authorship.
This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
29.11.22 – ‘Argentina’s Feminist Insurgency and Struggles over Social Reproduction’ lecture by Liz Mason-Deese
The researcher and translator, Liz Mason-Deese, a participant in feminist and workers’ movements in Argentina, addressed the massive, innovative and radical feminist movements that have emerged in Argentina and much of Latin America in recent years, both in opposition to gender-based violence and in demand of new rights – such as the right to abortion.
Organised by Ben Trott, hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network and Center for Critical Studies.
24.11.22 – ‘Yet We Laugh’ lecture performance by Gabriel Francisco Lemos
This speculative lecture performance by the composer, visual artist and researcher Gabriel Francisco Lemos explored some of the reasons why we become possessed by laughter.
This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
17.11.22 – ‘Going To, Making Do, Passing Just the Same’ talk by Edith Brunette and François Lemieux
The artists, authors and researchers Edith Brunette and François Lemieux presented their recent project, Going To, Making Do, Passing Just the Same made up of an installation, videos, performances and a book.
This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
16.11.22 – ‘Im Schwindel der Unterbrechung: Bernard Stieglers Denken des komputationalen Nihilismus’, lecture by Erich Hörl
This lecture by Erich Hörl (Leuphana University) reconstructed Bernard Stiegler’s disruptive thinking. Stiegler has uncovered being-in-disruption as the key determinant of contemporary computational nihilism. This is the historical-theoretical core of his far-reaching philosophical-diagnostic effort. Hörl argued that Stigler’s thought proves itself to be an expression of the prevalent socio-historical experience that perceives our time as essentially crisis-like, interrupted, disturbed – and whose social constitution can be developed as ‘the disruptive condition’ to which we are subject.
The lecture was organised by the research initiative ‘The Disruptive Condition’.
08.11.22 – CCS Colloquium: Launch
CCS Colloquium Launch, with short talks by Christoph Brunner, Anna Kipke, Sven Kramer, Liza Mattutat, Roberto Nigro, Beate Söntgen, Heiko Stubenrauch, Ben Trott und Mimmi Woisnitza.
For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
7.-8.11.22 – ‘Geschichtstheoretische Konsultationen I: Zur Genese und Reichweite der Frage geschichtlicher Erfahrung’ – Workshop with Falko Schmieder and Christian Geulen
This workshop with the historians Falko Schmieder (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturfoschung) and Christian Geulen (Universität Koblenz, Landau) addressed the central historico-theoretical questions that have arisen in the course of conceptualizing ‘the disruptive condition’.
The workshop was organised by the research initiative ‘The Disruptive Condition’.