Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

23 January 2020

Affluence and Scarcity

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual und Alon Schwabe), Jeremy Till

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe)

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the world through food. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Since 2015 they are working on multiple iterations of the long-term site-specific Climavore project exploring how to eat as humans change climates. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop, a platform to critically speculate on implications of selling the remains of Empire today. Their first book was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City about this project (2018). Their work has been exhibited at Manifesta12, Palermo; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; 13th Sharjah Biennial; Serpentine Galleries, London; Atlas Arts, Skye; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale; US Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; and they have been residents in The Politics of Food programme at Delfina Foundation, London. They currently lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London. They have recently been awarded the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and are nominated for the Visible Award.

Jeremy Till

Jeremy Till is an architect, educator and writer. As an architect, he worked with Sarah Wigglesworth Architects on their pioneering building, 9 Stock Orchard Street, winner of many awards including the RIBA Sustainability Prize. As an educator, Till is Head of Central Saint Martins and Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Arts London. As a writer, Till’s extensive work includes the books Flexible Housing, Architecture Depends and Spatial Agency, all three of which won the RIBA President’s Award for Research. He curated the UK Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale and also at the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. In his research, he has explored the theme of scarcity widely, analysing how scarcity is designed and suggesting that conditions of scarcity may become the inspiration and context for transformation.

Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

8 January 2020

Excess and Ecstasy

Gisèle Vienne, Jules Evans

Jules Evans

Jules Evans is an author, broadcaster and philosopher. He is a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, where he explores the history and philosophy of ecstatic experiences. Besides he works as presenter for Radio 4 and Audible, and organizes the London Philosophy Club, the largest philosophy club in the world. His commitment to widening public engagement with scholarship was reflected in his being named a BBC New Generation Thinker. He has authored several books, among which Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (Rider, 2012); The Art of Losing Control (Canongate, 2017); and Holiday From the Self: An Accidental Ayahuasca Adventure (2019). He blogs at www.philosophyforlife.org.

Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian director, artist and choreographer. After graduating in Philosophy, she studied at the puppeteering school Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette. She works regularly with, among others, the writers Dennis Cooper, the musicians Peter Rehberg and Stephen O'Malley, and the light designer Patrick Riou. Since her company was founded in 1999, 14 shows have been created. She has choreographed and directed, in collaboration with the writer Dennis Cooper, I Apologize (2004) and Une belle enfant blonde / A young, beautiful blond girl (2005), Kindertotenlieder (2007) and Jerk, a radioplay in the framework of the “Atelier de Création Radiophonique” of France Culture (June 2007), the play Jerk (2008), Eternelle Idole (2009), This is how you will disappear (2010), Last Spring: A Prequel (2011), Showroomdummies #3, a rewriting of the piece created in 2001 with Etienne Bideau-Rey that is now part of the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine repertoire, The Pyre (2013), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015) in collaboration with Puppentheater Halle, and Crowd (2017). Since 2005, she has been frequently exhibiting her photographs and installations. Together with Dennis Cooper, Peter Rehberg and Jonathan Capdevielle she published the audio book Jerk / Through Their Tears (DIS VOIR, 2011, in French and English), and in collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Pierre Dourthe, the book 40 Portraits: 2003–2008 (P.O.L, 2012). Currently Vienne is working on a show based on Robert Walser’s short story “Der Teich”.

Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

10 December 2019

Excess, Gender, Racialization

Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Amber Jamilla Musser

Luiza Prado de O. Martins

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher born in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, four hundred and eighty-five years after the Portuguese first invaded the land currently known as Brazil. She holds an MA from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen and a PhD from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. In her doctoral dissertation she examined technologies and practices of birth control and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled A Topography of Excesses, examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal birth control as decolonising practices of radical care. She is a founding member of the Decolonising Design collective and the research duo A Parede.

Amber Jamilla Musser (featuring artwork by Maureen Catbagan)

Amber Jamilla Musser is an associate professor of American studies at George Washington University. Her research is at the intersection of aesthetics, race, gender, and sexuality studies. Musser has also published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of colour critique. She is the author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York University Press, 2018), which received a 2018 Arts Writer’s Grant from the Warhol Foundation, and Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York University Press, 2014). Musser also coedited, along with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez, Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social, a special issue of asap/Journal (May 2017). Currently, she is beginning a project on noise, ethics, and aesthetics and writes art reviews for Brooklyn Rail.

Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

3 December 2019

Too much stuff?

Sharon Macdonald

Sharon Macdonald is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Anthropology in the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she founded and directs CARMAH – the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage. A principal investigator on the Excellence cluster Matters of Activity, she also directs the project Making Differences – a multi-researcher ethnography of museum developments in Berlin. Her fascination with questions of excess can be seen in her book Memorylands (Routledge, 2014), which explores the implications of the turn to such extensive cultural remembering in Europe, as well as the simultaneous forgetting that this memory phenomenon may hide or even encourage. How both museums and people in their homes decide what to keep from the excessive number of things that might be retained for the future is the focus of the Profusion theme that Macdonald directed in the recently completed Heritage Futures project, from which a book is forthcoming.

Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

26 November 2019

(Im)Materials of Excess

Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block

Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block develop crossmedial narrative formats under the name of Laokoon. The legend of Laocoon – who was the first to recognize the peril emanating from the Trojan Horse – served them as inspiration. Their first film The Cleaners, which premiered in 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival, has since been shown all over the world at 70 international festivals, cinemas and on TV. It was nominated for an Emmy Award and the Deutscher Fernsehpreis and has been awarded numerous international prices, among them the Prix Europa for best European TV documentary in 2018 and the Grimme-Publikumspreis in 2019. The theatre, radio play and film director Hans Block who is also a musician studied percussion at the Universität der Künste Berlin and theatre direction at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. He has developed own productions (among others at Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Münchner Volkstheater et al.) which earned him invitations to the festival „Radikal Jung“ (Radically Young) and to the directing studio at Schauspiel Frankfurt. His radio play Don Don Don Quijote – Attackéee was awarded the Prix Marulić at the International Radio Play Festival. The author, theatre and film director Moritz Riesewieck came to study theatre direction at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin following a period as assistant director at the Schaubühne Berlin, Thalia Theater Hamburg and Volksbühne Berlin as well as several semesters of studying economics. Among other places, his theatre productions were shown at Schauspiel Dortmund, at the International Forum of the Berliner Theatertreffen, in Mexico City. Due to his diploma work Voiceck for which he also received the Elsa-Neumann-Scholarship of the Federal State of Berlin, he was invited to participate at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt in 2015. In 2017, his book “Digitale Drecksarbeit – Wie uns Facebook & Co. von dem Bösen erlösen” (Digital Dirty Work – How Facebook & Co delivered us from evil) was published by dtv.

Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

20 November 2019

Excess as Capitalist Principle

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva is a physicist, environmental activist, and author. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, is author of over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals; she has also published more than 20 books, including Making Peace With The Earth (Pluto Press, 2013) and Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature & Knowledge (South End Press, 1999). Shiva participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement during the 1970s. The movement, whose main participants were women, adopted the tactic of hugging trees to prevent their felling. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, et al.), and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime, 2002) that draws upon India’s Vedic heritage. In 1993, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize.

Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

29 October 2019

Consumption as Obsession

Gerda Reith, Ashkan Sepahvand

Gerda Reith is a Professor of Social Science at the University of Glasgow. She conducts research and writes on issues relating to addiction, risk and excess, and their relation to wider issues of behaviour and governance in global consumer societies. She is particularly interested in the social and commercial determinants of gambling, as well as the relation of gambling harms with social inequalities and public health. Gerda’s research has been funded by a variety of academic, governmental and charitable organisations, including the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). Her book, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (Taylor & Francis, 1999), won the Philip Abrams Prize for the best book in sociology in 2000. In her latest book, Addictive Consumption: Capitalism, Modernity and Excess (Routledge, 2018), she draws on ideas about both consumption and addiction to explore issues around identity and desire, excess and control, and reason and disorder within the wider context of capitalist modernity.

Ashkan Sepahvand

Ashkan Sepahvand is a Tehran-born writer and artistic researcher based between Berlin and Oxford, UK. Previously, he has worked as Adjunct Lecturer at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (2018–19), as Research Fellow at the Schwules Museum* (2016–17), where he curated the exhibition Odarodle – an imaginary their_story of naturepeoples, 1535–2017, and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2012–14), where he co-edited the publication Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor, Ray (The MIT Press, 2015). In 2010, he co-founded the institute for incongruous translation with Natascha Sadr Haghighian as a framework for their collective study, including the projects seeing studies (2010–12) and Carbon Theater (2016–ongoing). His work and writings have been presented at the 58th Venice Biennale, dOCUMENTA (13), Sharjah Biennials X & 13, Gwangju Biennale 11, Ashkal Alwan, Sursock Museum, and ICA London, amongst others. Currently, he is pursuing a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and St. John’s College, University of Oxford, where he is a Clarendon-AHRC Scholar.

Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

23 October 2019

Excess and Devaluation

Silvia Federici (via Skype), Amy Franceschini, Jason W. Moore

Silvia Federici (via Skype)

Silvia Federici is a long-time feminist activist, teacher and writer. In 1991 she was one of the founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and has been active in the anti-globalization movement and the anti-death penalty movement. Federici is the author of many essays on political philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, and education. Her published works include: Revolution at Point Zero (2012); Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004); A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (2000, co-editor), and Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of Western Civilization and its 'Others' (1994 editor). Her newest book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018) provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. She is Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York).

Amy Franceschini (Sound and Power-Point Presentation)

Amy Franceschini is the founder of Futurefarmers, a group of artists, activists, farmers and architects with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. Their work uses various media to enact situations that disassemble habitual apparatus; public policy, urban planning, educational curricula and public transportation plans. Futurefarmers produce relational sculptures and tools for people to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry – not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live. Amy’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Biennial in New York, MOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the 2014 Venice Architectural Biennale and she is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow in Design. She received her MFA in New Genres from Stanford University in 2002 and her BFA in Photography from San Francisco State University in 1992.

Jason W. Moore

Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.

Annual Theme “Human After Man”
Summer term 2019

Dates
Work phase 1:  1–5 July 2019
Work phase 2:  14–20 October 2019
Work phase 3: 28 Oktober – 6 November 2019
Teaching language: English

keyon gaskin is this year’s cx guest professor and heads the project class of the annual theme “Human After Man”. The project class starts in summer semester 2019 with a first work phase in July, to be followed by two further work phases in October and November 2019.

The work of the American performance artist revolves, among other things, around the question, which effect power and hierarchies have on the human body and in which ways this power may be influenced by means of confrontation, negation, manipulating and play. Racist and gender-related power structures in the contemporary art system also enter into the analysis.

Some links to his work:
https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/first-look-keyon-gaskin/
https://www.artandeducation.net/classroom/video/66041/keyon-gaskin-its-not-a-thing
http://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/disrupting-expectations/?platform=hootsuite

The number of places is limited.

After registration deadline has closed, successful applicants will receive confirmation of participation.

Room

A.Ug_24
Projectroom guest professor CX till 6. November 2019

Annual theme “Human after Man“


Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2018/19)

8 January 2019, 7:00 pm

Animistic Notions of the Human

Istvan Praet

Istvan Praet is a reader in anthropology at the University of Roehampton, London. His academic area of interest lies in the ethnographic and comparative study of notions of humanity and life, both in Western and non-Western settings. He was trained in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate in 2006. Since then he has taken up a number of research fellowships, both in the UK and abroad (Wenner-Gren Hunt Fellowship at Cambridge, several research fellowships at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale in Paris, and a Rachel Carson Fellowship at the LMU in Munich). Praet has conducted long-term fieldwork with Chachi people in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, and has published widely on indigenous conceptions of humanity in South America and elsewhere. He is the author of Animism and the Question of Life (Routledge, 2014), in which he examines notions of humanity and life cross-culturally. In recent years Praet has been working at the interface of science and technology studies (STS) and the anthropology of science. He has developed an interest in modern scientific notions of humanity and life and how they are redefined in the context of outer space exploration (see Praet and Salazar 2017, special issue of Environmental Humanities). He is currently finalising a new book based on ethnographic research with astrobiologists, planetary scientists and artistic researchers.