»One night I wandered into a rock-n-roll club named CBGB’s. The lights went boomp boomp boomp the drum went boomp boomp boomp the floor went boomp boomp boomp. Boomp boomp boomp entered my feet. Boomp boomp boomp entered my head. My body split into two bodies. I was the new world.« Das vorangestellte Zitat schildert ein Erlebnis der Hauptprotagonistin aus Kathy Ackers Roman Blood and Guts in High School. Es verdeutlicht die Wucht und Intensität, mit der subkulturelle Orte – in diesem Fall der Punk Club CBGB’s in New York City – sich häufig auf das Leben ihrer Besucher*innen auswirken, ohne dass diese sofort konkrete Worte dafür finden: Als körperliche und physische Erfahrung können aus den Begegnungen mit solchen Orten neue Weltbezüge und sogar völlig neue Welten entstehen. Sie erweisen sich oft als identitätsstiftend oder auch identitätszersetzend. Menschen können sich dort neu erfinden und Alternativen zu ihrem bisherigen Lebenslauf entwickeln. Hier treten sie mit Subkultur(en) in direkten Kontakt. Im Seminar wollen wir uns mit ebendiesen Orten auseinandersetzen. Wir ergründen ihre Besonderheiten, Bedeutungen und Beschaffenheiten und tauschen uns darüber aus, wo und wie wir selber mit Orten und Räumen in Berührung gekommen sind, die uns kulturell, persönlich, künstlerisch, musikalisch und politisch geprägt haben. Das können neben Clubs, Autonomen Zentren, Bühnen, Tanzflächen, Ateliers, Proberäumen und speziell eingerichteten Treffpunkten auch völlig unscheinbare »Nicht-Orte« wie Bushaltestellen, Bordsteine, Wendehammer, Parkplätze und Garagen sein. Was dabei für viele Menschen unsichtbar und unverständlich bleibt oder sich lediglich als unpersönliches Alltagsszenario darstellt, wird für einige wenige zum zentralen Ort des (sub-) kulturellen Ausdrucks, Austauschs und Agierens. Was geschieht dort genau? Was macht diese Orte aus? Was für Eigenschaften besitzen sie? Wie sehen sie aus? Woran lassen sie sich erkennen? Wie entstehen sie? Wie findet man sie? Wer frequentiert sie? Wie lassen sie sich dokumentieren? Um uns analytisch und ästhetisch der Beantwortung dieser (und weiterführender) Fragen anzunähern, beschäftigen wir uns hauptsächlich mit Perspektiven, die aus der Kulturwissenschaft und der Fotografie auf das Thema entwickelt wurden, ergänzen diese aber auch um Exemplarisches aus Literatur, Film, Musik und anderen Künsten.

The collaborative seminar is combined with a lecture series focusing on long-term artistic research practices and artistic procedures of re-historicization. Every two weeks, artists, art philosophers, media activists and collectives are invited to the KHM library to present their various approaches and to engage in a direct exchange with students and an interested public in a workshop setting. In complementary reading sessions, significant voices from the field of theory production are discussed. It's about the decentralization and de-skilling of hegemonic historiography, such as in Sci-Fi settings. The artistic research that we will be discussing in the seminar operates between/with entanglements, forms intergenerational coalitions and reveals silenced, submerged practices. Archival images are activated, artistic hubs beyond the Eurocentric gaze are sought out, and the experiences of forced migration or of poverty taken into account. Such de-historicizations are queering the structures of normalization and coloniality. Last but not least, the protagonists of artistic research provide vulnerable learning spaces, perhaps for thinking about historical knowledge and its process-based production, which strives to distance itself from the structures of reproduction (Holert). The seminar further includes a field trip to Utrecht, where we will visit the BAK - an art venue that offers an important roof for artistic research, not least with its residency program. Reading matter: Tom Holert, Eva Mayer & Eran Schaerf, Irit Rogoff, Gabi Ngcobo u. a. Books: Tom Holert/ Maria Hjavajova (Eds.): Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists, Utrecht, 2017. Maria Hlavajova/ Jil Winder/ Binna Choi (Eds.): On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Utrecht, 2008. Jochen Volz/ Gabi Ngcobo (Eds.), We Are Many: Art, the Political and Multiple Truths, London, 2019. Yvette Mutumba/ Gabi Ngcobo (Eds.), A Labour of Love, Bielefeld, 2016.

Ecology is the study of relations and dynamic exchanges. In an expanded understanding, ecology overcomes the separation between nature and culture and situates humans in the midst of environments. This in turn influences our understanding of time and ecology: to engage with ecology in this way is to engage less with the future than with the connections between human and other-than-human beings that exist in the present. These relations are often uncomfortable for our thinking, they are troubling and – as we will discuss – should stay with the trouble. In this seminar, we want to get to know different perspectives on an expanded concept of ecology. We want to analyze ecologies less "from the outside", but rather learn to think relationally and thus ecologically. Texts by Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik as well as queer-feminist approaches by Donna Haraway and Anna L. Tsing will help us to do this. Selection of literature: Félix Guattari, Die drei Ökologien, Wien 1994 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Durham 2016 (dt. Unruhig bleiben, Frankfurt/M. New York 2018) Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Princeton 2015 (dt.: Der Pilz am Ende der Welt. Über das Leben in den Ruinen des Kapitalismus, Berlin 2018) Ökologien der Sorge, hrsg. von Tobias Bärtsch u.a., Wien u.a. 2017 Hybride Ökologien, hrsg. von Susanne Witzgall u.a., Zürich 2019

When gay marriage was legalized in the US, one of the arguments justifying the decision was that marriage fulfilled “yearnings for security […] that express our common humanity”. Inadvertently, this decision queerly echoes research from Queer Theory, in which neoliberal precarization is seen as a mechanism that has turned security into a technology of governing and a focal point of current ways of subjectivation. For many queers themselves being considered a security risk, a threat to children, to the family, the nation-state, or the reproductive order was and_or is quite a common experience. In racist discourse, on the other hand, the safety of queers has been mobilized against racialized others. During the last decades, security has turned into a leitmotif of Western societies. Intensified by war on terror discourse, securitization processes portray all kinds of societal issues, such as migration, student protests, poverty, pandemics, houselessness, to name just a few, as security problems, as risks to be managed, and threats to be prevented, most often with the help of technology. In this current technosecurity culture, invocations of threats or dangers justify more and more authoritarian styles of governing. We’re going to read texts on security and securitization from Queer Theory, from feminist Science & Technology Studies, and critical studies of security, and are going to try to figure out what a queer take on (In)Security could look like.

In this tutorial we will discuss and (re-)consider basic aspects of writing a (scholarly) paper or "Hausarbeit". The tutorial will be organized along three sessions respectively dealing with the writing of an introduction, the main part of the paper, and its conclusion. We will face questions such as: − How can I define the topic of my paper? − How do I structure my paper? − What is my main question/thesis? − How can I develop and articulate it? − What are the necessary steps to adequately introduce, process, elaborate, and answer my question/thesis? − How do I present my results? − What problems do I face in the course of working on my paper? − How can I solve these problems?

The seminar focuses on social interactions and multidirectional relationships between ways of life and the environment, in which way alliances and forms of affectivity also find resonance in art. In times of impending ecological collapse, this requires an expanded view of the commons, their relationships of care and the interaction of human and non-human alliances as mental and social ecologies. The extent to which other, situated knowledge is included in an examination of the geopolitical and micropolitical effects of knowledge and their post- and decolonial critique is shown, for example, by the figure of shimmering, as described by Deborah Bird Rose, as relations between species characterized by care and interdependence. As a reaction to extractivist practices and environments made inhospitable by climatic conditions, Aymara activist and sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanquí focuses on relational and spontaneous ways of dealing with and sharing the commons; cultural scientist Suely Rolnik describes affectivity and micropolitical resonance of bodies and organisms as reactions to the capitalist-colonial unconscious. The seminar will include a joint workshop in the Temporary Gallery with the greengrass collective and the artist Alberta Whittle, as well as further excursions. Readings: T. J. Demos/Emily Eliza Scott/Subhankar Banerjee (Hg.), The Routledge Companian to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change, New York 2021. Annika Haas/Maximilian Haas/Hanna Magauer/Dennis Pohl (Hg). How to relate: Wissen, Künste, Praktiken Bielefeld 2021. C Dengler/M Lang, “Commoning Care: Feminist Degrowth Visions for a Socio-Ecological Transformation”, in: Feminist Economics, 28/1 (2022), S. 1-28. Vera Hofmann/Johannes Euler/Linus Zurmühlen/Silke Helfrich (Hg.), Commoning Art. Die transformative Potenziale von Commons in der Kunst, Bielefeld 2022. Pablo Martínez/Emily Pethick (Hg.), Artistic ecologies new compasses and tools, London 2022. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing/Heather Swanson/Elaine Gan/Nils Bubandt (Hg.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis 2017. Susanne Witzgall (Hg.), Hybride Ökologien, Zürich 2019.

The practices and reflections around which the seminar series "Politics of Deviance" revolves in the winter semester are those of the French social psychologist Fernand Deligny (1913-1996). In 1969, against any kind of hospitalisation, a social community emerged from the activist environment of the 1968 movement in the Cévennes, which traced the deviant movements, the traces, above all, of neurodiverse, non-speaking children. Pedagogical-therapeutic modes of perception unfold from cartographic practices, which in turn are inextricably linked to certain cinematic practices that Deligny called camerer . Not only the practices and philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, from the concept of the rhizome to that of the machinic, to the practices at La Borde clinic, are deeply influenced by Deligny's work, but also scientific and artistic practices.

Using documentary film and a series of readings on the history of liberation movements from Cuba, to South Africa, to Palestine, this seminar will explore the common themes of these movements, the unfinished qualities and reversals, and the contemporary and future manifestations of liberation movements. Concentrating on the anti-colonial impulse in liberation movements, the seminar also explores betrayals of the revolutions, and limits of their visions. Finally it re-examines ongoing imperial projects in light of this history and present.

This seminar explores the inter-connections of revolutionary struggles in Asia since 1945. It traces the leaders, both women and men, who circulated in the underground of colonized Asia. It also reveals the legacy of these agents of revolution in Asia's uprisings, many of which are ignored or unknown in the 'West.' The seminar will also examine the theories of anti-colonialism in Asia as distinct from other parts of the colonized world, and as entangled with the history of revolutionary thought.