2024–
This archival and conversation-based research project/recherche engages with radical pedagogies since the 1970s in Southern California, and with contemporary artistic pedagogies and self-organised group critiques in Los Angeles and beyond. I'm interested in a wide range of polyvocal practices: artists' teaching methods, (group) crit formats, feedback methods, conversation prompts, spatial setups, co-creative publishing projects, and para-institutional study/critique groups. The scope of this project is not only to contribute to the documentation of particular practices and temporary collaborative contexts, but also to deconstruct SoCal conceptualist and feminist legacies and hopes against the backdrop of the current shortcomings of art institutions. Polyvocal discourse practices were and are necessary counterpoints to institutional/individual authorship and the respective (power) systems of knowledge production.
2023–2028
Working at the intersection of media studies and affect theory, my postdoc project focuses on contemporary artistic practices and how they relate to irreparable damages and radical socio-economic upheavals in times of permacrisis, i.e. an extended period of catastrophic events, precarity, and instabilities.
The research focus is on artists and their practices that do not respond to damage and rupture with repairs, and thus implicitly with the restoration and reproduction of problematic, inequitable and dysfunctional structures. Of particular interest are artistic approaches that go beyond prevailing (techno-capitalist) solutionism. Instead, they deal with the manifestations and dimensions of 'brokenness' (Lauren Berlant) and develop practices out of the recognition of irrevocable upheavals and damages that make action and (continued) life beyond repair conceivable in the first place. Do these practices constitute their own form of critique?
The hypothesis is that artistic practices beyond repair develop non-sovereign responses to permacrisis. In doing so, they extend the spectrum of emancipatory critiques through precarious and largely indeterminate infrastructures and modes of thinking that have the potential to bring about radical changes in the long term. The basis of this approach are Lauren Berlant's writings in Affect and Cultural Theory, in particular their concept of infrastructure and thinking of non-sovereign relationality. Berlant's theory of non-sovereign relationality is also reflected in the methodology of this research project. At its core is the development of polyvocal conversational formats, co-creative modes of writing and publishing to be used to form discourse around and with contemporary artists' approaches and practices.
Funded by the German Research Council (DFG)
Postdoc project in the DFG-research group Aesthetic Practice at University of Hildesheim, Germany
2017–2022
The dissertation is dealing with the writing / ways of writing / script (écriture) of essays by the writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous, and the particular role of the body (corps) in this writing. The thesis addresses this relation between body and writing as écriture du corps. The focus is on techniques and forms of reading and writing in Cixous’s essays as well as on the epistemic critique that these texts formulate in a practical way vis-à-vis modes and practices of doing theory in the humanities and cultural studies. The positioning of Cixous's ways of writing is grasped against this background as 'avant-theory.' The latter is characterised by a fluid, poetic use of vocabulary from the field of theory, the subversion of (the mostly unwritten) rules of knowledge discourses, and the inclusion of non-discursive forms of embodied knowledge. Particular attention is given to the many-voiced and corresponding character of this way of theorising, its reading-writing, writing-reading and the its ways of responding to other voices and texts respectively. 'Avant-theory' thus draws attention to the moments before the establishment of a theory, or a finished theoretical text. What becomes apparent here is that the supposed before (avant) never solidifies into a completed thereafter, insofar as theory is consistently understood as a circulating reading and writing with others or in response to others.
Funded by the German Research Council (DFG) and the DAAD.
PhD project in the DFG-research group Knowledge in the Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts Berlin, Germany
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