Archive

How should art and ethnographic museums structure processes of restitution or recontextualization of objects, seek new accessions and serve new publics?

While the imperative of “decolonizing” the museum is frequently invoked, we are still clarifying what precisely this should involve. The pressing question of today is no longer the "that" but the "how". We are in the middle of thinking how art and ethnographic museums should reorganize collections formed from, or in support of, colonial violence. How should they structure processes of restitution or recontextualization of objects, seek new accessions and serve new publics?This one-day conference at MARKK brings together museum practitioners, artists, theorists and historians. It explores what materials, techniques, languages and concepts have been used to contradict the colonial model of the museums. How are new spatial experiences created? How are different ways of exhibiting developed? How can museums establish new relations of inclusion and response to their stakeholders, both local and transnational? Ultimately, where should the Twenty-First century museum be going now?

Tuesday, June 11, 2024, 9 am – 3 pm
Museum am Rothenbaum Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK), Rothenbaumchaussee 64, Hamburg

Programme:

"The Historian as an Agent in Museum 'Decolonisation"
Pierre Singaravélou, Professor of Modern History, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

"Snapshot of an Exhibition at a certain place at a certain Time. The exhibition RESIST! The Art of Resistance at the RJM (2021)"
Nanette Snoep, Director Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum Cultures of the World

"Rethinking the Museum after Apartheid: Voice, Practice, Materiality"
Clive van den Berg, Artist, curator, designer

"Tour through the Saltpeter Exhibit 'Weißes Wüstengold, Chile – Saltpeter und Hamburg'"
Christine Chavéz, Curator of Collections from the Americas, Museum am Rothenbaum Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK)

"'We have always been here': Indigenous Presence in Museums"
Fernanda Pitta, Professor in the Art Research, Theory and Criticism, Division of the Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo

"MARKK Then and Now"
Barbara Plankensteiner, Director Museum am Rothenbaum Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK)

Campus Halle 25
Universitätsallee 1
D - 21335 Lüneburg

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past”. – Really?

This quote by Thomas Jefferson is written in the foyer of the library of Leuphana University. It is part of an artwork by Christian Philipp Müller, "Branding the Campus" (1996-98), for which the University of Virginia, designed by Jefferson, was the starting point to think about the “ideal” university. Thomas Jefferson was not only one of the "founding fathers" of the USA, he was also a slave owner - a fact that raises the question of how we deal with the quote from today's perspective. On day 1 of the workshop researchers – Verena Adamik, Sarah Kreiseler, Jenna Owens, Hannah Spahn, Ruth Stamm – and student groups give insights into multiple histories: Thomas Jefferson’s idea of Enlightenment, campus architectures, archives and silent narratives, North German linen production within the Atlantic slave trade and other topics. On the second day we will develop proposals on how to deal with the quote in the foyer. It will start with a presentation by the poet and researcher Yvette Christiansëreflecting on “Why poetry?” could be an entry into the discussion.

This workshop is part of the seminar “Institutional Critique” (BA Kulturwissenschaften), but other students are explicitly welcomed (you can come day 1 or day 1&2). If you are not part of the seminar, please register with frieder.janz@leuphana.de

PROGRAM

June 7

10:00-11:00

Introduction & “Branding the Campus”: Susanne Leeb (Professor for Contemporary Art, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)

11:00-12:00

Transforming Jefferson's Enlightenment:Hannah Spahn (Visiting Professor for American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin)

12:00-12:30

History of Leuphana University: Kenny Lühmann, Julia Knapmeyer, Philine Held, Lilli Ritter, Annika Weiß (Students of the seminar Institutional Critique)

Liberal Education at Leuphana: Mika Steffan, Vanessa Spors (Students of the seminar Institutional Critique)

12:30-13:30
Break

13:30-14:30

Slavery at Monticello: Recovering Historically Silenced Narratives: Jenna Owens (Oral Historian, Monticello, Virginia)

14:30-15:00

Campus Architectures: Anna Blecker, Finia Dorenberg, Emil Weber (Students of the seminar Institutional Critique)

Architectures of Libraries: Charlotte Dansberg, Rasmus Gaida, Stina Fisahn (Students of the seminar Institutional Critique)

15:00-16:00

Black Futures in Jim Crow USA: Verena Adamik (Lecturer and Researcher of American Studies, Universität Potsdam)

16:00-16:30

Break

16:30-17:30

Linen Trade and Slavery. Tracing Transcultural Entanglements in the Lüneburg Region: Sarah Kreiseler (Director of Rundlingsmuseum Wendland, Lübeln) and Ruth Stamm (Research Assistant, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)

June 8

10:00-11:00

Why Poetry?:Yvette Christiansë (Poet and Professor for Africana Studies, Barnard College, New York, Public Fellow at LIAS in Culture and Society, Lüneburg)

11:00-12:00
Summaries and constitution of working groups

12:00-18:00
Working groups and plenary discussions

Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science, Cambridge University

Discussant: Christina Wessely, Professor for Cultural History, Leuphana University Lüneburg

During the urgency of the climate crisis it has become ever more important to understand the genealogy of the very notion of climate and its political and scientific senses. There have been several consequential changes in the scope of the terminology of climate, many linked quite directly to the interests of colonial and of economic domination. Transitions, in particular, from climate understood in the high enlightenment as a geographical and a cartographic concept to more recent imperial models of global temperature, linked very closely to the material methods used by practitioners observing and changing climates, with the closely associated notion of climate proxies, have had very significant consequences, both for aggressive policy and for common understanding.

Leuphana Campus, Lecture Hall 3

Gildas Salmon examines the emergence of the modern comparative sciences in the context of colonialism. He argues that these sciences emerged from the imperative of colonial authorities to govern other societies. Salmon emphasises the importance of colonial knowledge for the development of the human sciences and refutes the concept of orientalist knowledge as a purely European construction. Rather, it was an appropriation of non-European knowledge for the benefit of the colonial power. Because it was alien to the cognitive frameworks imported by the colonial administrators, it was able to have such a profound effect on European knowledge by providing them with more powerful tools of analysis than they had previously had at their disposal. He examines India, specifically Bengal, as the first large Asian territory and population to come under European rule and shows how this knowledge influenced the colonial power structure. He argues that the hybridisation of Brahmanical and European knowledge led to a new form of knowledge contribution that was specific to the British Empire.

With Rosalind Morris, Richard Drayton, LIAS Senior Fellows

Leuphana Campus | Central Building C40.606

The lecture will aim to offer some orienting notes toward the biography of Stuart Hall David Scott is in the process of writing. Rather than a fully detailed account of the "conjuncture of 1956," he will urge that this conjuncture is crucial to the overall story of Stuart Hall's life and work because it forms a hinge that connects and separates his formative years as a colonial subject in Jamaica in the 1930s and 1940s and the first emergence of the political intellectual, Stuart Hall, in the middle 1950s.

David Scott, Ruth and William Lubic Professor, Columbia University, New York
Richard Drayton, LIAS Senior Fellow (introduction)
In cooperation with the Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique”

Leuphana Campus, Lecture Hall 3

In a gripping film drama, director Abderrahmane Sissako takes the audience into an African society that is trapped in an economic system with devastating consequences.
At a court hearing in a courtyard in Mali's capital Bamako, two interest groups clash: the citizens of a country that has to comply with the dictates of international financial institutions under an agreement, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The citizens accuse the institutions of being responsible for poverty in African countries through the disastrous consequences of a "development policy". Director Abderrahmane Sissako stages a dramaturgical combination of everyday life and negotiations, real and fictional characters, as well as hope and hopelessness. "The real drama here in Africa is not those who die, it's those who stay and who are disappointed, who have lost all hope," says Sissako about "Bamako".

Mali, 2006 - Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
118 min. - Original with English subtitles

Introduction and discussion: Susanne Leeb.
Free Admission.

SCALA Arthouse Cinema, Apothekenstr. 17, 21335 Lüneburg

Following a screening of her 2014 film Profession: Documentarist Mina Keshavarz will share reflections on her documentary film practice. Profession: Documentarist emerged at a time when Iranian filmmakers were particularly challenged to tell the stories that needed to be told. Now ten years later the situation for Iranian filmmakers is once again difficult. She will discuss the artistic practices she has developed and continues to develop in order to give voice to the experiences of Iranian women struggling to live their lives in the face of oppression.

Leuphana Campus, C40.324

"Profession: Documentarist" is a vivid example of the feminisation of Iranian civil society in recent decades. Seven independent Iranian female documentary filmmakers take us into their personal and professional worlds, in an Iran that continues to be plagued by political, social and economic crises. In seven autobiographical chapters, it becomes clear that the decision to become a documentary filmmaker in Iran is a courageous one that often jeopardises one's own freedom. These women are driven by the need to document their world and the forces that constantly restrict their freedom of movement. Whether they are making a film about department stores in Tehran that feature mannequins with severed heads and breasts, or about the singers they loved as children who have been banned from radio and television since the revolution, or about the great wave of hope that comes with every election, these women directors offer a rare and incisive insight into Iran today, a country they continue to love, even as they want it to change.

Iran, 2014 - Directors: Shirin Barghnavard, Firouzeh Khosrovani, Farahnaz Sharifi, Mina Keshavarz, Sepideh Abtahi, Sahar Salahshoor, Nahid Rezaei
80 min. - Original with English subtitles

Introduction and discussion: Mina Keshavarz and Katja Rieck.
Free admission.

SCALA Arthouse Cinema, Apothekenstr. 17, 21335 Lüneburg

On March 19, Prof. Dr. Boukje Cnossen (Professor of Entrepreneurship, Organization and Culture and LIAS Faculty Fellow) and Lena Kostuj (PhD Candidate and LOST community manager) will host a one-day workshop exploring the organizational dynamics underpinning empirical phenomena related to and resulting in societal polarization. The workshop is organized on behalf of the LIAS (Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture and Society) and LOST (Leuphana Center for Organization and Social Transformation). LIAS fellow Dr. Adrià Alcoverro, Dr. Elanor Colleoni (IULM University Milan), and Dr. Jennifer Schnepf (University of Groningen), will offer lectures highlighting the organization of polarization from different disciplines. Furthermore, ongoing research projects will be presented and discussed. The workshop is accompanied by lunch and dinner.

Tuesday | 19 March | 09:00 am
Leuphana University, Campus, Central Building, C 40.601

Award-winning poets and writers, Yvette Christiansë (“Castaway”, “Imprendehora”, “Unconfessed”), and Rosalind Morris (“The Deep”, “Current”), read from new and published works. Both writers move deftly between their research in archives and far-flung worlds linked by colonialism, especially in southern Africa, and their personal experiences, while meditating on the unspoken and the unseen. Bridging the intimate and the world-historical in forms that range from the lyric to the verse epic, their work, which includes collaborations on two operas, gives form to the haunted present with urgency and careful beauty.

Venue: Museum foyer, Admission is free

"Deux jours, une nuit"

In this seemingly unadorned drama by the Belgian independent filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, told in the pared-down style of social realism, Sandra (Marion Cotillard) has two days to prevent her dismissal from the small factory near Liege she works at.
Under pressure from management, almost all factory workers vote in favour of firing their colleague Sandra, who is recovering from depression, in exchange of a bonus payment of 1000 euros for each worker. Sandra has one weekend to persuade her coworkers to change their vote so that she can keep her job. "Deux jours, une nuit" describes the economisation of human relationships - a sobering stocktaking of overwhelming clarity - against the background of a struggling region. 

Belgium, 2014 - Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
95 min. - Original with English subtitles

Admission free

This workshop invites researchers to investigate the treatment of time and history in two very different socio-political contexts of nationalism. For one, we are asking after the histories, presents, futures and timelines that colonized, marginalized and/or brutalized peoples created in their (often emancipatory) formations of nationalist thought, contesting the enforced temporalities of their oppressors. On the other, and by way of contrast, we want to examine the present rise of the extreme right  and the use of puzzling and contradictory totalizing temporalities to re-define the present in order to signal a reactionary future within the current market rule order.

The workshop "Totalizing Temporalities" provides space for academic exchange. We explicitly avoid a panel structure, in order to have engaged and long discussions and flexible formats. We kindly ask our speakers to provide a very short (max. three sentences) outlook on their research topic in advance. At the workshop, every guest will have ten to fifteen minutes to present their research in relation to the topic outlined and the texts we circulated. After these short introductions, we will facilitate debates, looking for possible overlaps or collaborations.

Due to limited space, we kindly ask anyone interested in joining us to contact us via (cora.kueppers@leuphana.de) and supply a short statement on their research and their tentative contribution by the 9th February.

For more information, please contact the organizers, Adriá Alcoverro and Verena Adamik.

Confirmed participants so far: Prof. Dr. Richard Drayton (King's College London), Ben Hundertmark (Leuphana); Dr. Felix Hüttemann (Universität Paderborn); Dr. Michaela Keck (PD, CvO Universität Oldenburg); Prof. Dr. Michael Koß (Leuphana); Prof. Dr. Andrea Kretschmann (Leuphana); Cora Küppers (Lauphana); Lara Rowitz (Leuphana); Prof. Dr. Hannah Spahn (FU Berlin); Dr. Simon Strick (ZeM Brandenburg); Milan Stürmer (Leuphana); Dr. Katherine Williams (Cardiff University)

more tba

The multi-award-winning writer Katja Petrowskaja ("Vielleicht Esther") reads from her latest book “Das Foto schaute mich an”. The short pictorial reflections are based on her long-standing weekly column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. In it, Petrowskaja proves herself to be a master of the literary snapshot and presents us with her fleeting and at the same time haunting reading of images that are often discovered by chance.

Thursday, 08/02 | 6:00 pm
Museum Lüneburg, Willy-Brandt-Str. 1

Admission is free. Followed by a discussion.
R.S.V.P. at lias.event@leuphana.de

In the LIAS film series in cooperation with the SCALA programme cinema, international films on cultural and socially critical topics are accompanied by introductions and discussions every month.

"The Secret in their Eyes"

In 1999, retired Argentinian federal justice agent Benjamín Espósito is writing a novel, using an old closed case as the source material. That case is the brutal rape and murder of Liliana Coloto. In addition to seeing the extreme grief of the victim's husband Ricardo Morales, Benjamín, his assistant Pablo Sandoval, and newly hired department chief Irene Menéndez-Hastings were personally affected by the case as Benjamín and Pablo tracked the killer, hence the reason why the unsatisfactory ending to the case has always bothered him. Despite the department already having two other suspects, Benjamín and Pablo ultimately were certain that a man named Isidoro Gómez is the real killer. Although he is aware that historical accuracy is not paramount for the novel, the process of revisiting the case is more an issue of closure for him. He tries to speak to the key players in the case, most specifically Irene, who still works in the justice department and who he has always been attracted to but never pursued due to the differences in their ages and social classes. The other issue is that Gómez is still at large, no one aware if he is alive or dead. But as Pablo at the time mentioned that passion is one thing that cannot be changed in behavior, Benjamín learns now that that premise still holds true

Argentinia, Spain 2009 • Director: Juan José Campanella
129 Min. • Original with English Subtitles

Free Admission

Campus | Central Building | C40.704
24 January 2024, 4:00 - 6:00 pm

With an introduction by Paul Onanuga, LIAS Fellow.
An event in cooperation with the Centre for Critical Studies and the Leuphana Gender and Diversity Network.

B Camminga is a Fellow at Kulturlabor, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin.

Campus | Lecture Hall 3
23 January 2024, 6:00–8:00 pm

Introduction: Rosalind Morris, LIAS Senior Fellow

Although Portugal and Britain signed an anti-slave trade treaty in 1817, the persistent demand for unfree labor continued well into the latter part of the Nineteenth Century in the Mozambique Channel. Both nations operated maritime patrols. Those liberated from slaving vessels were called Liberated Africans by the British, or Libertos by the Portuguese. Depositions and testimonies by those liberated and supposedly free often contain dual, if not competing, perceptions of evidence and value. On one hand, a colonial official is tasked with the bureaucratic function of gathering information about abductions and liberation. On the other hand, the newly liberated account for themselves in a context that does not give weight to ‘information’ extraneous to basic evidence: the when of captivity, the where, the when and how of liberation and, if possible, the who of the trader. The deposition of a woman named Maria, liberated from a slaving dhow in August 1873, embodies a complex deictic understanding of where she finds herself and the world she came from. She articulates geographical and environmental knowledge, as well as her understanding of delicate political relations of compromise in which slavery is ‘un’-ended and freedom is deferred through a requirement of apprenticeship after rescue.

Yvette Christiansë is Claire Tow Professor of Africana Studies and English Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York.

Campus | Central Building | C40.704
11 January 2024, 6:00 bis 7:30 pm

How can recollections and invocations of past struggles inform contemporary campaigns against injustice? Drawing on material from his book Premonitions and following the insights of Walter Benjamin, movement-based scholar AK Thompson highlights the promise of a political approach founded on images.

AK Thompson is a movement-based scholar and an award-winning educator. Currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, Massachusetts), his research draws on critical theory to examine how social movements become sites of racial and cultural contestation. Thompson is the author and editor of numerous books, including, most recently, Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt. His work has appeared in journals including Social Movement Studies, Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Alongside these scholarly contributions, he has also been featured in popular venues like Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Introduction by the writer Katja Petrowskaja (LIAS Public Fellow).

According to official figures, 10,000 children are currently living in the Donbass war zone, many of whom have suffered from the shelling and lost their parents and relatives. In his film Terykony (Ukrainian for "pile of bones"), Taras Tomenk (*1976) documents the landscape of Donetsk and its typical mountains of coal waste and embeds the story of the children of this region, for whom the war has become a part of their lives.
Nastya was six years old when three rockets fired by the Russian army hit her house on New Year's Eve. She survived, but lost her father, her childhood and her faith in life. For people like her, the war has become something commonplace, like the Donetsk landscape outside the window. But Nastja has dreams. Like every girl, she dreams of a new house and a dog and keeps writing letters to Father Christmas asking him to bring her father back. By means of documentary observation and preserving her personal space, Tomenko succeeds in bringing us closer to the drama of children's lives at the front.

Ukraine, 2022 - Director: Taras Tomenko
80 min - Ukrainian original with English subtitles

SCALA Programmkino Apothekenstr. 17, 21335 Lüneburg

Fish Eye

In his first documentary film, musician, photographer and filmmaker Amin Behroozzadeh explores industrial fishing. Skilfully interweaving images, sound and music, the award-winning director tells the story of his four-month journey on the largest Iranian fishing boat in the Indian Ocean, on which the crew goes about its work: catching 2000 tonnes of tuna. His work on this film took a total of eight years and, ccording to Behroozzadeh himself, put the sushi lover off eating fish. Between poetry and social criticism, FISH EYE is a visual essay that reflects on the mechanisms of capitalism through industrial fishing.

Followed by a discussion with director Amin Behroozzadeh and an introduction by ethnologist Dr Katja Rieck (LIAS).

Iran, 2020, Director: Amin Behroozzadeh
70 min - Original with English Subtitles

Free admission

SCALA Arthouse Cinema | Apothekenstr. 17 | 21335 Lüneburg

30. November 2023, 5:30 – 7:00 pm
Campus | Central Building C40.501

Many democracies around the world are facing the challenge of confronting right-wing populist movements. Miguel Urbán Crespo has engaged for years both in national and European politics. On the basis of his newest book "Trumpismos. Neoliberales y Autoritarios",he will reflect on right-wing populism as a global political phenomenon and what can be done to mobilize against it.

Miguel Urbán is a member of the Left Group of the European Parliament representing Spain. Before joining the EU Parliament, he was a co-founder of the Spanish left-wing party Podemos. His three books also testify to his engagement with the new right and the mobilization of resistance against it: "El viejo fascismo y la nueva derecha radical" (2014), "La emergencia de Vox. Apuntes para combatir a la extrema derecha Española" (2020) and "Trumpismos. Neoliberales y Autoritarios" (2023).

The lecture deals with the role of law, jurisprudence and legal education in the socio-ecological transformation. Using two current debates - around deep sea mining and the valorisation of housing - the lecture explores ways to move beyond a critique of law that exposes its complicity in an extractive political economy, to a transformative law that interrupts and resists extraction to instead support the commons and commoning.

With an introduction by Erich Hörl, LIAS Co-Director.

Prof. Dr Isabel Feichtner, Professor of Public Law and International Economic Law University of Würzburg.

Wednesday, 29 November 2023, 6 pm
Central Campus Building // C40.704

LIAS Faculty Fellow Boukje Cnossen has been Professor of Business Administration, especially Entrepreneurship, Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg, since July 2021.

Her research focuses on 'organising practices' in the cultural and creative industries, particularly examining the influence of space on creative practices. In current and previous research projects, she has investigated coworking spaces, creative hubs and artist collectives. With an increased interest in the organisational processes of artistic and creative practices, Prof. Cnossen's research draws on the communication-constitutes-organization (CCO) approach as well as insights from actor-network theory. As an active member of the CCO community as well as the Entrepreneurship-as-Practice (EaP) community, her collaboration and research extend across national and academic boundaries.

Tuesday, 21 November 2023, 6pm
C40.704 // Campus Universitätsallee

21 November 2023, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Campus | Central Building C.40.601

With an introduction by Susanne Leeb, LIAS Academic Co-Director.

Isabel Feichtner and Radha D’Souza will introduce the subject of housing rights in two different urban contexts: Berlin in Germany, and Mumbai in Maharashtra, India, as the points of departure for their conversation. Drawing on their experiences of working with housing rights movements in the two cities, Feichtner and D’Souza will expand their discussion to wider questions about land ownership, commoning and community ownership, property rights, constitutional rights, and social justice.

Prof. Dr. Isabel Feichtner is Professor of Public Law and International Economic Law University of Würzburg and Fellow of the New Institute, Hamburg.

Neighboring Sounds

Life in a middle-class neighborhood in present-day Recife, Brazil takes an unexpected turn after the arrival of an independent private security firm. The presence of these men brings a sense of safety and a good deal of anxiety to a culture which runs on fear. Meanwhile, Bia, married and mother of two, must find a way to deal with the constant barking and howling of her neighbor's dog. A slice of 'Braziliana', a reflection on history, violence, and noise.

Brazil 2013 • Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
131 Min. • Original with Englisch Subtitles

Free Admission

https://www.scala-kino.net/filme/neighbouring-sounds

As a response to the openly racist epic film 'Birth of a Nation,' which was accompanied by protests, Oscar Micheaux's 'Within Our Gates' is still considered a cinematic indictment of discrimination against African Americans in the USA.

The silent film drama by director Oscar Micheaux, which depicts the living conditions of African Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, is considered the oldest surviving film by an African American director.

America, 1919. Abandoned by her fiancé, Sylvia returns to her home in the southern USA and becomes involved with a school for poor African-American children that is threatened with closure. When her wallet is stolen, she meets Dr. Vivian, who falls in love with her. Coincidentally, she also meets the rich American Elena Warwick, who gives Sylvia the money she needs to go to school. Meanwhile, Dr. Vivian visits Sylvia's cousin Alma in the north and learns about the family's tragic fate, which includes a murder and a lynching...
Micheaux's sometimes violent drama reveals the complexities and everyday discrimination in the lives of African-Americans; it is an early, haunting document of systematic racism in America. Micheaux's work was long considered lost. Censored and abridged several times, the film has now become an important document of racism after the First World War. The Library of Congress put it on its list of US films in need of special protection. It had commissioned a restoration in 1993 after a copy entitled "La Negra" turned up in Madrid.

USA, 1920 - Director: Oscar Micheaux
79 min. - Silent film (with English intertitles).

Free admission - Introduction in English: Dr. Verena Adamik (LIAS Fellow).