Deutsches Museum, Monday Colloquium: Global Envirotech Histories - Knowledge and Artifacts in Motion
All lectures start at 16:30 and take place in room 1402, library building, Deutsches Museum, Museumsinsel 1, 80538 Munich
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Workshop at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg, organised by Martin Knoll (Salzburg), Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Düsseldorf) and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Munich)
Please register here by 12 June .
Please click HERE to download the programme and HERE for the conference report by Argyrios Sakorafas.
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Developing Theatre in the Global SouthStart: 17:00 at Käte Hamburger Research Centre global:disconnect, LMU Munich, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich
followed by a reception Continue Reading
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the complexities of globalisation more clearly than war. The international reverberations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have painfully exposed the interconnected nature of modern economies and our vulnerability to forces beyond our control, prompting anxious speculations about deglobalisation. Yet, experts agree that the more likely outcome is not isolation, but instead, changing geographies of connection. Similarly, recent historical scholarship has complicated conventional understandings of war as a dividing force, instead emphasizing both the connections and disconnections that it brings in its wake. In wartime, enemies are dehumanised in government propaganda, travel is disrupted, and trade blockades are enforced.
Wartime is associated with absences, interruptions, and detours, as lives are lost, scientific exchanges are cut off, and mobilized populations find themselves transported far from home. Yet, war can also create new spaces of interaction and encounter, sometimes across enemy lines. Some of these exchanges are illicit, such as smugglers who evade military blockades, or spies who penetrate enemy territory. Others are more overt, between prisoners of war and their captors, or surgeons who treat enemy combatants. War can provide the impetus for new connections and the widening of geographical horizons in the pursuit of resources, sometimes with lasting consequences. War, in other words, is the optimal lens through which to trace global connections and disconnections.
Place & date: Munich, 24-25 April 2024
Organisers: Callie Wilkinson and Tom Menger (LMU Munich)
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Straße 21, 81675 Munich
Please click here to download the programme.
Burcu Dogramaci and Marta Smolińska. Grenze|Granica. Art on the German-Polish Border after 1990. Cologne: Böhlau, 2024.
This book analyses for the very first time a selection of works by international contemporary artists that reference the German–Polish border and draws attention to artworks created between 1990 and the early 2020s. The projects explored reference narratives of expulsion and the fluid, spectral and aesthetic nature of borders through sensory and somaesthetic perception. They examine the historical shifts of that border from the angle of changing political and societal contexts, lost homelands, expulsion of people and new political orders. The volume is the product of research in the field at the German–Polish border, interviews with artists, visits to their studios and archival work. It employs a transdisciplinary toolbox, combining methods from art history, border (art) studies, migration studies, memory studies, geopoetics, limotrophy and more. The book questions the double figure of dividing and sharing that finds expression in the German expression ‘eine (Grenze) teilen’, which means both to divide or to share a border: separation by a shared border and shared historical experience, regarded from two, often dissimilar perspectives. The study focuses on artistic projects ranging from photography to installation art and artistic methods from mapping to re-enacting, which address the issue of the borderland as a dynamic transition space. Continue Reading
It's no wonder that our gd:c videos always look so beautiful and cinematic. Aydin Alinejad, our friend and colleague who produces our videos and manages our IT, co-wrote a screenplay that has just won two prizes at the 74th Berlinale Film Festival! The film by Narges Kalhor, entitled Shahid, tells the fictional story of an Iranian migrant in Germany on a quest to change her name and dispel with some historical family baggage in the process. Her family and the German bureaucratic apparatus get in her way, as relatives and bureaucrats love to do.
In particular, Shahid won the Caligari Prize for experimental, boundary-breaking films and the CICAE Art Cinema Award. Bravo Aydin! Continue Reading
Workshop by Nic Leonhardt (global dis:connect) and Anna Heller (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
With the introduction of European drama in the mid-19th century, a new model of theatre emerged in Iran, which in the 20th century developed from a previously amateur activity into an established cultural institution of modern society. In contrast to the processes of social change in Pahlavi Iran (1925–1979), the cultural-historical relevance of the performing arts has not yet been fully explored.
For a holistic approach, this workshop will look at different forms of stage art, including dance, theatre, musical theatre and festivals. The neglect or separate consideration of the musicological aspects of the performing arts reinforces the importance of these forms.
In the context of global theatre histories, understood as the historiography of connections, interweaving, exchanges and dis:connections, the workshop covers a wide range of subtopics. Contributions range from the development of dramatic art and literature in the early Pahlavi era, social criticism and state ideology in the dramatic arts, to opera and stage dance in the late Pahlavi era. The aesthetics of unconventional stages, the theatre of the absurd and the Shiraz Arts Festival are addressed along with biographical approaches to the history of women in theatre.
During the two days of the workshop, we will engage in intensive dialogue on these topics. We will also discuss the increasing methodological obstacles to fieldwork and archival work in the region.
Workshop at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, LMU Munich
4-5 April 2024
The importance of agriculture and extractive industries to the making of the Global South in the 20th century has been obfuscated by the resonance of modernisation theory, dependency theory and development economics since the Second World War. With this workshop, themed Agriculture and the production of the Global South, 1900s-1960s, we seek to move beyond the rigid dualism of postwar models of growth and development by excavating processes and trajectories in the Global South and Global North that reveal the importance of agriculture and extractive production to the making of our contemporary world.
Organisers: Judd Kinzley and Paula Vedoveli
Please click here to download the programme.
Please register here by 28 March.
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Travelling Back presents a critical perspective on the narratives and collections Bavarian scientists Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826) and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868) brought from Brazil to Munich in the 19th century. The exhibition follows their extensive three-year journey across the Brazilian hinterland, including the Amazonian region.
Spanning 14 000 km, this expedition took place from 1817 to 1820 and was later chronicled in the multi-volume publication Reise in Brasilien (Travels in Brazil – 1823), providing a personal account of the scientists' encounters and perceptions of the country's varied landscapes, cultures and wildlife.
During their travels, Spix and Martius interacted with various indigenous groups and gathered numerous ethnographic, botanical and zoological specimens. These materials became foundational for several Bavarian institutions, like the Bavarian State Collections of Zoology and Botany, as well as the Königlich Ethnographische Sammlung, now the Museum Fünf Kontinente, established in 1862. Beyond tangible artifacts, these collections also treat the history of Isabella Miranha and Johann Juri, two indigenous children brought to Munich in 1820, who died tragically soon after their arrival. Unlike the scientists' evident presence in the city's landscape, the history of these children is marked by silences and absences in public memorial spaces.
The exhibition raises crucial questions about the coloniality underpinning the scientific pursuits of the natural-history project between Munich and Brazil in the 19th century. It examines the various displays and interpretations of Spix and Martius's collections from their arrival in Germany to the present, and it sheds light on the dis:connectivities of knowledge production behind these scientific endeavours. The idea is not only to inquire into the public reception of these experiences through a history of the gaze, but also to draw a critical examination through the lenses of present-day dialogues and initiatives. This includes new scientific practices of knowledge restitution, literary interpretations and contemporary perspectives from artists like Micheliny Verunschk (Brazil), Frauke Zabel (Germany), Yolanda Gutiérrez (Germany/ Mexico), Igor Vidor (Brazil), Elaine Pessoa (Brazil) and Gê Viana (Brazil).
Curator: Sabrina Moura, fellow at Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect Continue Reading
We live in a time when concern about human effects on the environment and climate are greater than ever. For much of human history, however, the opposite was true, and environments’ and climates’ effects on people were often the more pressing concern. Environmental or climatic determinism – the idea that people are shaped physically, culturally and even morally – by their environments has a long and often insidious history.
Determinist thinking had particular utility in the age of European and global empires in the 19th and 20th centuries, taking on new forms amidst attempts to expand and justify imperial dominance. Everything from ‘energy’ to racial characteristics and from ‘civilisational success’ to the limits of habitability were seen as environmentally and climatically determined. Today, these ideas are once again being reconfigured in new and troubling ways, such as in the deterministic language sometimes employed around climate and migration, which risks echoing racist, early 20th-century visions of ‘nomadic hordes’. With the Anthropocene concept placing human and planetary histories and futures on the same scale, tracing the language of environmental determinism has become imperative.
This two-day workshop, hosted by the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect at the LMU Munich, will thus contextualise environmentally determinist ideas historically and examine their imperial legacies in the face of today’s climate crisis.Place & date: Munich, 18-19 March2024
Organiser: Lachlan Fleetwood (LMU Munich)
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Straße 21, 81675 Munich
Please click here to download the programme.