Prof. Dr. Lilian Haberer

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 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.