The working group investigates the reciprocity of the arts and public spheres. To what extent do the arts constitute or test new, alternative, and oppositional public spheres? What are the material, spatial and temporal registers of artistic infiltrations into the public? In this regard, the group aims at a conceptual and theoretical exploration of the term and to connect the antagonistic “counter” to more fluid relations and terms such as “sub,” “adjacent,” “partial” or “alternative public spheres.” These theoretical investigations develop in close interrelation with the concrete case studies of the respective research projects. Among other questions, we will examine how (counter)public spheres are socially, spatially, praxeologically, discursively, or medially created and what dynamics of hegemony and marginality compose and shape (counter)public spheres.

The contact persons for this working group are Henning Podulski (C01) and Mimmi Woisnitza (A06).

Die Arbeitsgruppe widmet sich künstlerischen Arbeiten und Praktiken, die sich intervenierend mit hegemonialen Machtverhältnissen und Grenzziehungen auseinandersetzen. Wir fragen uns, wie dekoloniale Kunsträume entstehen, die durch Reflexion, Transgression und Transformation gesellschaftliche Normen und Strukturen hinterfragen und verändern. Wir reflektieren dekoloniale und emanzipatorische Wissenspraktiken und zugehörige Diskurse, indem wir gemeinsam Ausstellungen und Aufführungen besuchen, theoretische Texte diskutieren und Gäst:innen zum Austausch in die Arbeitsgruppe einladen.

Entlang der Impulse, Methoden und Gegenstände der beteiligten AG-Teilnehmer*innen arbeiten wir mit Fragestellungen und Ansätzen aus diversen Disziplinen und bewegen uns an deren Schnittstellen (u.a. Kunstgeschichte, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Tanz-, Theater- und Filmwissenschaft, Performance Studies, Sound Studies, Literaturwissenschaft, Ethnographie). Dem eurozentrischen Verständnis des Dekolonisierungsbegriffs setzen wir diskurskritisch Perspektiven aus dem sogenannten Global South entgegen. Dabei verstehen wir Dekolonisierung als kontinuierlichen Prozess, der offen für Kritik und Begegnung ist. Zu den Fragen, die uns beschäftigen, gehören:

Wie können aus einer dekolonialen Forschungsperspektive Kunstverständnisse und Kunstpraktiken reflektiert werden? Wie lässt sich der Interventionsbegriff in diesem Zusammenhang verwenden? Wie interagieren dekolonisierende und feministische Diskurse und Praktiken? Wie können historische Kontexte und analytische Verfahren der Gegenwart ins Verhältnis gesetzt werden?

Ansprechpersonen sind Mariama Diagne (B02), Layla Zami (B05), Birgit Eusterschulte (C06).

This working group explores how digital media practices explicitly and implicitly intervene in social and political processes. In addition to formats such as hacktivism and activism through hashtag, video, and image campaigns, the group examines everyday practical and artistic strategies that test alternative and subliminal forms of sociopolitical intervention with and within digital media systems. The focus is on the wealth of material offered by the disciplines involved (cultural studies, philosophy, film studies, theater studies, sociology, and media studies), while critically examining their entanglements with platform capitalism and institutionalization. A concept of activism will be developed that is not solely focused on actors, but includes aesthetic and discursive dimensions as well as resonance phenomena and their underlying media conditions and dynamics. Related to this are questions about the methods and structures of digital addressing, collectivization, and mobilization, whose effects and repercussions are discussed both online and offline, in the ideological battlefield between progressive and hegemonic-regressive movements.

The contact persons for this working group are Naomi Boyce (A01) and Florian Schlittgen (B04).

This working group examines the ways in which forms and formats prefigure, align, and performatively influence the potential of artistic interventions.  Building on shared discussions of theoretical texts that deal with form/formats and rhythm, the working group will elaborate criteria of Areas B: Moving – Disrupting and C: Drafting – Discarding as well as changes in the definition of terms (such as the shift from “form” to “format”). Historical aspects such as the dynamization and dissolution of concepts of form since the avant-garde, as well as media and institutional factors associated with the shift in frameworks of formats and rhythms in intervening practices, are important for the current and future goals of the working group: they raise questions about the relationship of forms/formats to discourses of diversity and migration.
Artistic and political possibilities will be explored through the work of the research projects and in relation to the main CRC questions, with regard to theory and experimental formats and practices. The effects of these explorations are examined in workshops that accompany the thinking process of the working group.

The contact person for this working group is Kirsten Maar (B02).

Drawing on the diversity of perspectives offered by the disciplines involved (architecture, cultural studies, European ethnology, musicology, philosophy, and sociology), the working group will explore the intervention potential of different improvisational practices for aesthetic, social, and political visions of the future. Using a broad spectrum of examples that encompass both explicit and implicit improvisational phenomena from the spheres of aesthetics and everyday practice, the discussion will focus on how the characteristic tension between necessary planning and regulation on the one hand and the uncertainty and openness on the other, manifests in the structures, methods, and impacts of specific improvisational practices.

The contact persons for this working group are Eva Backhaus (B01) and Simon Teune (B03).

In collaboration with the research projects A06, B03, and C03, the methods workshop explores how past and present practices can be reconstructed in terms of their materiality and processes, as well as the forms of representation and modes of writing that can vividly portray these practices in their performative nature: How can artistic practices be described and reconstructed in their respective historical contexts? How can their potential to intervene in sociocultural phenomena be understood and specified? The workshop explores historiographic and ethnographic methods from the perspective of art history, literary studies, sociology, and social philosophy.

Practices are in part characterized by their ordering function, serving as patterns and habits of everyday social practices or artistic procedures. They only become recognizable as practices through a stable structure of repetition, yet they also possess a certain openness in their variability and susceptibility to disruption. This inherent openness, often accompanied by critical reflexivity, brings into focus social and artistic practices as forms of disruption and resistance.

Contact person: Anna Kipke (A06).