The very concept of nature has been the subject of thorough critique for quite a while. From a Western deconstructive perspective, nature is a signifier standing for naive immediacy or reactionary normativity. Poststructuralist and queer paradigms have shifted from an idea of nature as a being and of the natural as a given to a conception of them as the effects of discursive, performative practices. These critiques marked a turning point in the centuries-long debate on the concept of nature, pluralizing and de-essentializing it — hence, shifting natures.

While these advancements are paramount, such a deconstructive frame has also meant overemphasizing the discursive element at the expense of the materiality of power relations and embodied experiences. As Stacy Alaimo argues, ‘one of the most unfortunate legacies of poststructuralist and postmodern feminism has been the accelerated “flight from nature” fueled by rigid commitments to social constructionism.’ Within the semantic constellation of nature, which terms and concepts facilitate a connection with the material dimension, without replicating essentialist, normative, ultimately reactionary positions? What can be the epistemological, political, and affective investment in retrieving references to nature, after its deconstruction? The symposium Shifting Natures addresses these questions in three interlocked areas: Environment; Artificial Intelligence; and Gender.

The present time is one of general disruption, in which crisis is the normal state of affairs. In a situation characterized by climate catastrophe, pandemic, war, interruptions to supply chains, and contestations of democracy, the modern Western categories of ‘progress’ and ‘History’ implode. Disruption describes contemporary socio-historical experience, in which break, interruption, discontinuity take on a very different sense than in modernity: They become hegemonic and begin to entirely dominate the onto-epistemological condition and socio-historical reality. But does the present attest solely to such immense collapse? Or is this disruptive un-worlding simultaneously a transformation, an opening to a plurality of worlds in the ruins of a formerly hegemonic world? There is, on the one hand, the very real ends of the world and the increasing threat to the possibility of any world; and, on the other hand, there is the undeniable multiplicity of worlds that reveal themselves at present, their coming to presence disrupting the unity of the one World. One is confronted by this difference between the technical homogenization of all into a worldless planet and a proliferation of techniques of world-making. It is at this tension that one encounters the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. At times, he would see only the impossibility of any world due to techno-capitalist disruption and homogenization of sense. At others, he would attest to a transformation of sense, the flipside of techno-economic hegemony, presenting a multiplicity of worlds. Does one presently find oneself at the precipice of such a transformation of the sense of the world? Or is it instead that one is outside any world, in a techno-economic disruption that is no longer existence, but which nevertheless determines it? With Nancy’s companionship, this conference proposes to take up these questions, focusing on the conceptual triad of disruption, technique, and world. Through two days of presentations and discussions, the hope will be to re-think the present, between the techno-economic disruption of world and the techniques of (re)composing worlds.

With Jean-Luc Nancy’s work as the point of departure, the hope of this conference is to re-think the present and the present status of world: between the techno-economic disruption of world and the techniques of (re)composing worlds. The aim is to take up the aforementioned questions through two days of presentations and discussions, focusing especially on the conceptual triad of disruption, technique, and world.

‘They were inhabiting a city radiating with multiple and multilexical and multistratigraphic nostalgias’, the poet Donna Stonecipher writes. This literary reading externalizes these multiplicities and features poets whose forms range from the acutely lyrical to the annotational. Spanning three languages, the disparate syntactic proclivities and thematic preoccupations of these writers unambiguously constellate around matters of place. The poems to be showcased in this event, when read collectively, conjure up a variety of affective states that inform the poetic subject’s entanglement with milieu—private or urban or macrocosmic or speculative—and their articulations of embeddedness, relocation, and dislocation. Joining Stonecipher are Johannes Heldén and Jaya Jacobo: the three will offer succinct reflections about how their respective notions of space and habitation are crystallized in their literary production, and they will read a selection of their poetry.

Johannes Heldén is a writer, visual artist, and musician. His interdisciplinary works deals with poetry, ecology, algorithms, sentience, and narrative structures. Recent projects include Astroecology which was published simultaneously in three languages, made into an interdisciplinary performance at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and a digital artwork published by Bonniers Konsthall. He has published seventeen books, four music albums, and seven digital online works of poetry and visual art.

Jaya Jacobo is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at Coventry University, where she currently does work on trans feminist pedagogies in literature, art and performance. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, academics and community workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as with trans, queer and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and its diaspora. Jacobo was a former Board Member of the Society of Trans Women of the Philippines (STRAP), a former President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle (YCC) of the Philippines, a Founding Co-Editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Transgressive Journal of Literary Art and Co-Editor of BKL: Bikol/Bakla, Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing. Jaya has also just released Arasahas, her debut volume of poetry in Filipino from Savage Mind Publishing House.

Donna Stonecipher grew up in Seattle and Tehran. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia (2023), which was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, and Transaction Histories (2018), which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. Her poems have been translated into seven languages. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books. She lives in Berlin.

A model can be an object of admiration, a miniature or prototype, an abstracted phenomenon or applied theory, a literary text — practically anything from a human body on a catwalk to a mathematical description of a system. It can elicit desire, provide understanding, guide action or thought. Despite the polysemy of the term, models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality. A model is always a model of or for something else, and the relation is reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model. The literary examples of maps made to the scale of a territory described by Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges humorously point to the absurdity of thinking that models keep improving by becoming less reductive until they eventually coincide with their target.

Improvisatorische Praktiken bewegen sich spielerisch zwischen Normativität und Freiheit, setzen Impulse und bieten sie anderen Akteur*innen zur Weiterarbeit an. Eigensinn als künstlerische Haltung schafft sich innerhalb festgefügter Machtverhältnisse kreative Räume der Unterbrechung, um sich den vorgegebenen Rhythmen zu entziehen. Schließlich beziehen manche Praktiken der bildenden oder performativen Künste ihre Wirkung aus einem objektlosen Vollzug.

Auch wenn diese Interventionen nicht auf ein Ziel gerichtet sind, irritieren, stören, unterbrechen sie. Ihre Verfahren sind die der Wiederholung, der Brechung und der Verschiebung. Es sind Praktiken im Vollzug, deren Beginn und Ende sich oft erst retrospektiv zeigt, die prekär bleiben und immer wieder ‘ins Rutschen‘ geraten können. Sie halten sich offen für andere und anderes – ihre intervenierende Kraft gewinnen sie aus ihrer (Dis)Kontinuität mit dem Alltäglichen und Etablierten.

Die Jahrestagung eröffnet den Dialog zwischen Kunstschaffenden, Wissenschaftler*innen und der Öffentlichkeit, durch Performances, Vorträge und Diskussionen und in geteilten Erfahrungsräumen.

10:00 – 11:15
Judith Siegmund: Intervenieren versus Herstellen?
Alte und neue Konzepte künstlerischer Praxis
Moderation: Susanne Hauser

11:15 – 11:45 Kaffeepause

11:45 – 13:00
Bertram Lomfeld: Intransitive Institutionalisierung: Rechte der Natur Moderation: Matthias Warstat

13:00 – 14:00
Mittagessen im ICI Berlin

14:00 – 16:00
fem_arc: F_WALKS – emanzipatorische Stadtspaziergänge und Diskussion
Vorstellung: Eva-Maria Ciesla

Für die Stadtspaziergänge mit fem_arc stehen schon vormittags Audioguides zum Download auf das eigene Smartphone in den Versionen Deutsch/Englisch und Englisch zur Verfügung. Bitte eigene Kopfhörer mitbringen.

16:00 – 16:30
Kaffeepause

16:30 – 17:45
Sue Spaid: The Wilfull Artist: Getting it Built (EN)
Moderation: Eva Backhaus

17:45 – 19:00
Empfang im ICI Berlin

In this sense, Michel Serres (1980) once defined the sun as our energetic horizon and the ‘ultimate capital’ in the history of modern religion, culture, ecology, and economy. Georges Bataille (1931) also discussed the sun as a constructive and destructive force shifting between order and disorder. One of the foundations of solar politics is its relationship to energy, which in the last centuries has shaped some ideologies related to work, capitalism, progress, imperialism, and productivism; and energy was also the founding basis for certain ethical and epistemological concepts in ecology (Simon-Stickley, 2021).

Solar energy constitutes one of the most important subjects in the current context of international politics: the circulation of power between those who control energy production and those who depend on it. Given this context, it’s crucial to transform solar energy into a possible mechanism of contestation against forms of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, autocratic systems, and climate crisis. Can this critical context be reassessed through concepts such as the ecosocialism of David Schwartzman (1996) or the solar communism of Michael Löwy (2011), which have their origins in the ecological movement as well as in the Marxist critique of political economy? These concepts, which are based in non-monetary and extra-economic criteria, take into account the preservation of ecological balance by opposing it to capitalist production systems. This might imply rescuing the Marxist idea of social justice and articulating it in a new relationship with nature.

Engagements with climate change and the planetary in the social sciences and humanities have challenged conventional analytical distinctions between global and local as well as human and nonhuman spaces. Tim Morton’s (2013) influential conceptualization of global warming as a hyperobject emphasizes how it transcends human scales of time-space experience and action, thus becoming a viscous, non-local process. At the same time, authors like Bruno Latour (2017) point out the inadequacy of the modern figure of globalization and of understanding the Earth as a globe. In times of climate crisis, he argues, the Earth emerges as Gaia: not a super-organism or system, but rather a rhizome of organism-environment relationships. As these two interventions exemplify, the multiple environmental and planetary crises associated with the Anthropocene fundamentally challenge the scalar logic and figures of modern understandings of space.

Facilitating an interdisciplinary conversation about these transformations seems crucial because of the pervasiveness of spatial categories and imaginaries. The symposium thus brings together leading scholars from anthropology, sociology, architectural theory, science and technology studies, urban studies, and human geography to collectively meet these challenges while reaching a heterogeneous public audience of researchers and practitioners.

There is no shortage of critiques of utopian imaginaries for being coded in colonial, Western, masculine, Christian, and extractive ideologies. Utopia has been, and continues to be, an often violent gesture that chooses the future of select groups and certain forms of life at the expense of others. Is utopia, then, still worth keeping in a world that has been so damaged through its violent deployments? Is it possible not to treat utopia merely as a model of abstract futurity based on escapist projections of a harmonious ideal? What happens when utopia is conceived not only as a way of imagining a better future but also as a way of intervening in the present by addressing the past? Can utopia welcome ambivalence, disquietude, paradox, opacity, and uncertainty?

This symposium draws on the notion of coding, which is deployed in multiple areas ranging from genetic coding and cybernetics to politics and art, and understands it as a mode of languaging that aims at engineering futures. This notion helps to reveal the difficulty of engaging with the transmissions and effects of utopian projects and the encoded logics they impose on social and environmental possibilities. It also allows for thinking about the possibility of de-coding the codes of extractive utopias by attuning to the anti- and decolonial cracks in colonial histories, practices, and discourses where new and unforeseen models of utopia might emerge. To this end, the event seeks to gather scholars, theorists, and practitioners working on the possibility of alternative models of the future and the present that account for and attempt to repair historical and contemporary colonial ecologies.

The symposium aims to develop critical approaches to the concept and project of utopia from literary studies, post- and decolonial studies, science and technology studies, comparative literature, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology, sexuality and gender studies, and beyond. The ensuing discussion will emphasize the implicit biases and disparities of power built into, and often obscured by, utopian and dystopian world-making.

In the late 1980s and beginning of 1990s, her falatório was recorded, first by the artist Carla Guagliardi and later by Mônica Ribeiro de Souza, a trainee in psychology. These materials provided the basis for a book of poems published in 2001.

After the staged reading of Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório with Yvonne Sembene there will be a presentation by Carla Guagliardi, followed by conversation with Delfina Cabrera, Marlon Miguel, and Elena Vogman

Yvonne Sembene is a French-Senegalese dancer and artist, raised in Luxembourg and based in Berlin. She has taken part in several projects as a performer and developed her own collaborative work exploring multidisciplinary formats and social de/reconstruction through movement and sound. She has also established a dramaturgy practice focussing on identity and cultural accessibility.

First came the world of the living, then life and death, after the dead, after the bichos and the animals, you make yourself comfortable as a bichos and as an animal.

Stella do Patrocínio

From the late 1960s onwards, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) developed a series of unstable and manipulable sculptures that she named bichos — ‘beast’, ‘animal’, or ‘critter’. These unconventional objects constituted a turning point in Clark’s artistic trajectory as she progressively moved away from the Neo-Concrete Movement, shifting her focus towards the frontier between artistic and clinical practice. Already with the bichos, Clark thought about how spectators could transform and de-subjectivate themselves, perhaps becoming more than human by interacting with these abstract but nevertheless organic objects. Later, convinced that she could revitalize the field of art through psychotherapeutic techniques, Clark claimed that her work was ‘a state of art, without art’, where both art and the clinic could retrieve their critical potential vis-à-vis dominant modes of subjectivation.

A few years later, and in a radically different context, Black Brazilian poet Stella do Patrocínio (1941–1992) created bichos as some of the main and disruptive figures of her unclassifiable falatório, a sort of poetic, violent, performative, prophetic, and delirious speech. Do Patrocínio produced her incessant chatter or even diatribe in the psychiatric asylum Colônia Juliano Moreira in Rio de Janeiro, where she spent most of her life. In the midst of a racist, patriarchal, and extremely unequal society, where psychiatry functioned as a powerful social regulation tool, do Patrocínio’s poetic metamorphosing into a bichos could be read as an act of invention and resistance.

The recent ‘global turn’ in art history and curatorial practice has prompted the question of how to reflect this through pedagogy. The workshop Worlding Art History through Syllabi takes up the notion of ‘worlding’ to explore how art history is taught in different places and institutions around the world. What would a ‘worlded’ syllabus look like, and how can we collaboratively ‘world’ global art history?

A ‘worlded’ art history rejects the idea of a single global world framed, ordered and represented according to Eurocentric premises or as universally constituted by global capitalism. Instead, it conceives of the global as constituted from multiple and entangled geo-cultural perspectives. It is not centered on assumed commonalities of ‘global’ art. Rather, it seeks to shed light on differences and relations. What are histories, epistemologies, and ontologies that constitute ‘global’ art? What are infrastructural or institutional incommensurabilities which define the many intersecting art histories of the present?

This workshop invites scholars from the fields of art history, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, media studies, museum studies and other related disciplines to participate in an peer-to-peer exchange of experiences and practices. It focuses on how scholars may, or already have, designed teaching syllabi to complicate dominant frameworks of ‘global’ art history. It is particularly interested in how syllabi have the capacity to restructure pedagogical approaches to teaching topics such as global capitalism in the art world, the so-called Global North-South division, transnational and transcultural entanglements, and differences between teaching regional art histories.

In his well-known essay, Die Zeit des Weltbildes, Heidegger describes modernity as the age in which the world has been reduced to a picture. The conceptualization of the world as picture is the fundamental basis of globalization and the geopolitical relations of power, inequality and exploitation that characterize the world-system created by late capitalism. The world as picture is also the basis of various conceptual approaches for understanding worldliness informing various disciplines in the humanities and the narrative social sciences: world history, globality (global exchange and intercourse) and environmental kinship. But what is implied by the world as picture is the excess that is excluded or obscured by the picture frame because the idea of a frame intimates at something that lies beyond the picture that is its ontological condition of possibility. This talk examines two philosophical accounts of what is beyond the world as picture: Heidegger’s idea of worlding and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming the whole world as it is connected to their account of minor literature. It highlights the fundamental differences between these philosophies of world and the above approaches. Time permitting, I will then explore how postcolonial world literature, when read as part of the temporal process of worlding and world-creation, disrupts and shatters the world picture by participating in struggles within specific fields of forces in contemporary globalization.  Such literature unsettles their readers’ sense of territorial boundaries and makes them aware of how they are constitutively implicated in the hierarchies of the contemporary world even as it resists being arrested in a geographically bounded and determinable subject-object such as a nation, a continent or a region.

Pheng Cheah is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research interests include late 18th-20th century continental philosophy and contemporary critical theory, postcolonial theory and anglophone postcolonial literatures, theories of nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, philosophy and literature, legal philosophy, social and political thought, and feminist theory. He is the author of What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006), and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003).

Followed by a discussion with Pheng Cheah (UC Berkeley), Carmen Moersch (Kunsthochschule Mainz) and Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University)

Moderated by Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University)

In Joyce, Europe is treated as a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia, a combination of other spaces both disturbing and reassuring, which compel the reader to an ongoing process of reassessment of the very notion of national culture and cultural belonging. It is an idea of Europe that continues to change and transform against the author’s tumultuous cultural-political context. Joyce’s peculiar polyglossia points to a European cultural dimension and a linguistic code beyond national boundaries, while strongly acknowledging those different cultures and the intricate relationships on which they are based.

The event will delve into the works of contemporary Irish authors Nuala O’Connor and Adrian Duncan, the relationship between Irish and European literature, and the relationship between Irish literature and Europe as a cultural, transnational, and plurilinguistic site. O’Connor and Duncan will read passages from their most recent publications and debate the significance of Joyce’s legacy for contemporary Irish literature.

This discussion is accompanied by the two-day conference Joyce and the Idea of Europe at Bard College Berlin, focusing on the notion of Europe as a complex cultural and geopolitical space of exchange, which emerged in James Joyce’s works.

Nuala O’Connor’s fifth novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times and is the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022. Nuala has curated the current exhibition at MoLI – Love, Says Bloom. She is editor at flash fiction e-journal Splonk.

The Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media juxtaposes thought figures from the history of philosophy with concrete media-technical ensembles under the rubric ‘Artificial Experience’. More specifically, it studies the artificiality of human and non-human experience as media. The hypothesis is that historical philosophical figures offer different perspectives on traditional as well as current media-technical objects. Following Gilbert Simondon’s theory, the group also hopes to uncover specific modes of experience embedded in certain media-technical ensembles, modes which have remained hidden because the better thought figure has not yet been tested.

This workshop will juxtapose Leibniz’s ‘monad’ — understood as an atomistic and highly perspectival account of experience — with current media technologies (for example, social media).

The workshop is divided into two sessions.

1. The first is a collaborative, in-depth reading of the Monadology and related texts and letters, asking questions such as: what forms of human and non-human experience can be observed there? Can this be understood as a mode of media or artificial experience? What roles do historical media play in Leibniz, the window, the mirror, the city, etc.?
2. The second session will connect the figure of the monad with concrete media technologies proposed by participants themselves. What dimension of experience can be brought to light in the chosen media technology, if it is linked with Leibniz’s monadic thinking?

Two further workshops organized by Martin Doll and Paul North on thought figures from Kant and Husserl will follow in 2023.

In contrast, Counter-Futuring invests in forms and networks of praxis that invert the contemporary enframing of technological systems and their underlying colonial, racial, and patriarchal regimes of space, time, and visuality. Counter-Futuring aims at demystifying and contesting the material conditions of hegemonic forms and narratives of futurity integral to the extractive mechanisms and imperial violence of capitalist operations. It reconfigures the aesthetic and political potentials of a given technology by shifting the registers of the archive, information, and futurity. Counter-Futuring attends to the ongoing decolonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer, and migrant struggles taking place within and beyond socio-technical interventions while highlighting the verb form in the present tense of futuring.

This one-day symposium will gather artists and scholars whose works generate critical yet creative responses to the imperial aspirations of computational capital as manifested within and beyond Western settings. Indeed, Counter-Futuring is part of a larger project Counter-N, which is a web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection curated by Shintaro Miyazaki and Özgün Eylül İşcen, and is supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.The title is inspired by Jussi Parikka, who in his contribution to the collection coined the term mainly in reference to Kodwo Eshun’s writings on Afrofuturism. Ultimately, this symposium seeks to initiate a series of conversations to collectively reclaim the acts, techniques, and infrastructures of speculating and commoning otherwise.