Ghosts are first and foremost figurations of power. By giving intersubjective communication a form that can challenge anthropocentrism and Western conceptualizations of Nature, ghosts have the ability to generate alternative histories. This renegotiation of past events is particularly important in the context of colonialism. Yet, while this characteristic can certainly be instrumentalized for recuperative purposes, it can also be a narrative tool that supports forms of othering and exclusion. In fact, in literature, film, and culture ghosts can and have been mobilised to perpetuate unjust social structures. Particularly the haunted forest has often served as the matrix through which racial subordination has been put in the service of subject formation. A ghost is a reminder that history is not the past, or as William Faulkner famously put it: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. But who is reconfiguring the past in the present? This discussion is led by the often-neglected question, who is hosting the ghost? Ghosts may have the ability to expose the narrativity of history, but they do not necessarily function as a corrective. Based on Sladja Blažan’s recent book Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonisation of the Invisible World, the discussion will focus on ways in which settler colonial imaginaries are reproduced and sustained through cultural and personal narratives that centre on spectral land. Particularly forests will be at the centre of our attention.

Sladja Blažan is a writer and lecturer at Bard College Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in North American Literature and Culture from Humboldt University Berlin and her ‘habilitation’ in American Studies from University Würzburg. She has taught as a professor for Literature and Media Cultures at PhilippsUniversity Marburg, Bard College, New York University, Free University Berlin, Dutch Art Institute, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and University College Dublin. Research areas include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, environmental humanities, and critical refugee studies. Her book  Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World was published in 2025 with University of Virginia Press. Other publications include the edited collection Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, the manuscript American Fictionary: Postsozialistische Migration in der U.S. Amerikanischen Literatur and numerous articles on the intersection of race, gender, and class issues.

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. Her writing explores how people navigate the complex states of health—especially subjects that discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Berliner Zeitung, Esquire, Frieze, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and other publications. A graduate of Princeton University’s Ph.D. program in History of Science, she held awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Camargo Foundation, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Edna Bonhomme is the co-editor (with Alice Spawls) of After Sex (2023), an anthology about reproductive justice, and the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues, which was published in 2025.

Alison Sperling is assistant professor of Literature, Media, and Culture at Florida State University. She has previously held positions as a Junior Faculty Fellow at Technische Universität Dresden (2023), an International Postdoctoral Initiative Fellow (IPODI Fellow) at the Technische Universität Berlin (2020-2022), and a fellow at the ICI Berlin (2018-2020). She works on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, ecocriticism/the Anthropocene, science fiction and the Weird, queer and feminist theory, Black studies, and contemporary art. She has published and has work forthcoming at the intersection of these fields in Cultural Politics, Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature and the Environment, Symplokē, Paradoxa, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Studies in the Fantastic, Girlhood Studies, and in over a dozen edited collections and artist monographs. She is the editor of the journal issue ‘Climate Fictions’ (Paradoxa) and the co-editor of issues on ‘Anthropocene Sublimes’ (Ecozon@) and ‘Weird Geographies’ (Cultural Politics, forthcoming). She is currently serving as co-editor of Science Fiction Film and Television (Liverpool University Press).

The first comprehensive avant-garde of the twentieth-century, Italian Futurism sought to integrate modern life into every imaginable medium and format, from painting to politics, photography to dance, architecture to music. In particular, sculpture’s theory and practice offered a singular proving ground for the drive to merge art and existence. Sculpture offers a distillation of Futurism’s larger aims and frustrations: a will to mechanize haunted by the tradition of craft; the liberation of flight burdened by mass and gravity; the lyrical mutiny of form chastened by the exigencies of design; and a dream of totality splintered by the contingency of the fragment.

A phenomenon as widespread and enduring as Futurism – outlasting Dada, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and nearly every other ‘historical’ avant-garde it influenced in one way or another – is bound to be shot through with all manner of incongruities. Art historian Ara H. Merjian presents new publications on the Futurism movement and its relationship to twentieth century avant-garde aesthetics and modern politics. The talk will focus on the many paradoxes of Futurism and its afterlives: the tensions between technology and transcendentalism, matter and metaphysics, nationalism and internationalism. Notwithstanding the vast ideological chasm between F.T. Marinetti’s racist and imperialist imperatives and the phenomenon of Afrofuturism, what progressive elements might be salvaged from the movement?

Despite a rhetorical wish for cultural oblivion, Futurism persists as the paradigm – and the unconscious – of twentieth-century avant-gardism at large: an ideological crusade as much as an artistic project; a relentless assault upon the boundaries separating art from life; a drive for some invigorating futurity greater than the sum of its aesthetic and ideological parts.

Over the course of the intervening century, formats as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatre came to be referred to as séances (the word might literally be translated as ‘sittings’). Now — in a comparably traumatic period, characterized by the same disorientation, anxiety, and insecurity — it is not surprising that many artists are looking to make connections with other worlds. In doing so, they seek emancipation from the structures — capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism — that shape lived realities. Their practices are not obscurantist or reactionary; they do not dismiss scientific inquiry out of hand so much as trouble the marriage of technology and anti-rationalism. If they are united by anything, it is their rejection of the exploitative logics of industrial capitalism, in favour of a technology of the spirit.

Along these lines, biennale artistic directors Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis will discuss their ongoing research for The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Elena Vogman will introduce the media experiments practiced by the reform and resistance movement of institutional psychotherapy. Angela Melitopoulos will present a cine-somatic excursus with excerpts from her Cine(so)matrix exhibition related to animism.Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis are the biennale artistic directors of The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2025). In 2023, they co-curated the 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema at the Power Station of Art.

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She is principal investigator of the research project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at Bauhaus University Weimar and a visiting fellow at ICI Berlin.

Angela Melitopoulos is an artist and researcher in the time-based arts, including experimental single-channel tapes, video installations, video essays, documentaries, and sound pieces. In her practice she explores the production of subjectivity and collective memory in the context of mobility, migration, and geography.

Jane Jin Kaisen
Wreckage (2024, 12 min)

Wreckage is about war, its memory, and its afterlife. Underwater footage shows the ravenous sea superimposed with a propaganda film produced by the US Army. Filmed in Jeju in October 1945, it depicts soldiers loading massive piles of weapons and artillery left by the Japanese onto a large ship and dumping them into the sea. A few years later, the Jeju 4.3 Massacre unraveled under the authority of the United States Army Military Government in Korea. During the massacre, unknown numbers of civilians were killed and thrown into the sea, while others tried to flee the island by boat. Such a fate is recalled in a lament by late shaman Koh Sunahn, a survivor of the massacre whose shamanic practice Kaisen documented for a decade until her passing. The lament takes the form of a chant where Koh Sunahn interchangeably assumes the voice of a mother and her deceased son, whose body was never recovered from the sea.

Yin-Ju Chen
‘Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, there is a Garden. I Will Meet You There’ (2023, 16 min)

Drawing on a poem by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, this film is an account of a healing process and a meditation on human suffering, reflecting on the passing of the artist’s mother. Combining found footage, documentation from the artist’s own travels, and animations of the mythological centaur Chiron (renowned as a healer and prophet), Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong… asks how spiritual practice can help us to move beyond individual subjectivity to perceive life and death from a cosmic perspective.

Shana Moulton
Whispering Pines 9 (2009, 10 min)