In
Events
22-23 May, Decolonising architectural education: emerging global debates and the historical experience of African schools of architecture
Recent years have seen calls for the decolonisation of architectural education in architecture schools around the world. Students and faculty alike have argued for a more critical approach to the lingering effects of colonialism by reflecting on the history, material and ecological resources, labour conditions and social contexts of architecture as a practice and discipline. This is illustrated by a growing number of conferences, networks, research projects and political activities on the subject. The concerns expressed in these discussions parallel the situation in African architecture schools in the 1950s-1980s. In their programmes, curricula, student research projects and internal discussions, the schools that were founded in the course of political decolonisation (e.g. the KNUST in Kumasi, the Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology in Addis Ababa, the École Africaine et Mauricienne de l`Architecture et de l`Urbanisme in Lomé, and the Faculdade de Arquitectura e Planeamento Físico in Maputo) often strived for a ‘decolonial’ perspective on architecture and urban planning, sought to promote economic independence and attempted to achieve cultural diversity in the design studio. In many countries, these schools had a decisive influence on the design of the built environment and the development of postcolonial socialisation. However, in contrast to the history of architecture schools like the Bauhaus, the Architectural Association in London and the Venice School of Architecture, the history of African schools of architecture has so far been insufficiently researched. The aim of this workshop is to explore the little-known history of African schools of architecture and their political function during decolonisation. In addition to exploring their historical influence on post-colonial nation building in the region, the discussions will address possible historical lessons for a multicultural and anti-discriminatory approach in architectural education today. Dates: 22-23 May, 2025 Venue: Pavillon 333, Türkenstraße 15, 80333 Munich. Organiser: Nikolai Brandes Please register here by 13 May. Continue Reading
13 March 2025
Infrastructure is commonly defined as the essential support that enables a system to function. This workshop, however, shifts the focus to consider what happens when infrastructure collapses, becomes obsolete or is destroyed. How might closer attention to infrastructural decline deepen our understanding of infrastructure not simply as something to celebrate or uphold, but as something marked by absence and interruption? Central to our conversations will be the role of memory in shaping and giving form to infrastructure.
In the humanities, memory has come to be understood mainly as interhuman communication, taking such forms as testimonies or oral history reports. How can the concept of memory be expanded to encompass infrastructural support? Can (derelict) infrastructure itself become a site of memory? If landscapes are sites of memory where history has already happened, what do landscapes and their shaping by infrastructure by human and more-than-human interactions remember? How does infrastructure serve the purpose of multidirectional remembering? In an era of climate catastrophe, how should we remember the extractive infrastructures that have shaped our present crisis? How do colonial logics of racialised dispossession endure into the present, either encoded in infrastructure or enabled by its absence? How do infrastructures exist as palimpsests, layered with conflicting memories and aspirations? Finally, as infrastructures decay, how can they be redeemed, repurposed or invested with new meanings?
This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to examine infrastructures as sites of absence and interruption, framing these discussions through the lens of memory. Drawing on the ‘infrastructural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (Johnson and Nemser 2022), participants are invited to engage with any of the many temporalities of infrastructure, moving beyond its conventional association with space. Of particular interest here are contributions that reflect on ‘the aesthetic life of infrastructure’ (Rich et al. 2023), exploring how infrastructure performs, is represented in culture or can be analysed in terms of affect, symbolism and embodiment.
Dates: 15-16 May, 2025
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich
Convened by Shane Boyle (Queen Mary University of London) and Gerald Siegmund (Justus-Liebig University Giessen)
Please register 
Archives are global sources of information, cultural transmission and identity formation that preserve cultural heritage. They constitute one of the most valuable national assets and, according to Canadian archivist Arthur Doughty, are gifts of one generation to another. Despite their value, many archives and collections, especially in the Global South, are facing destruction by natural or man-made disasters. Many others are poorly stored and need to be conserved, restored or converted into new formats to remain accessible. Even more fragile are what Lowry (2023) refers to as disputed and displaced archives — a term that could broadly encompass contested or disconnected histories and cultural heritage, including indigenous knowledge systems, traditional practices and performative heritage of marginalised cultures, such as those of the Black/African cultural renaissance.
The history of the Black/African cultural renaissance consists largely of pan-African ideas, movements, actors and transnational events related to the struggles of the continent and its diaspora against empire. Cultural festivals such as FESMAN 1966, PANAF 1969, Zaire 1974 and FESTAC 1977 functioned as global arenas for the celebration of African unity, the exhibition of Black/African cultural heritage and collaboration between Black/African artists, scholars, cultural administrators and governments. In addition, they served as sites of protest for geopolitical exclusions, socio-cultural hegemony, politically motivated absence and silencing dissidents, including artists and scholars, and highlighted different paths of development on the continent.
Given the global framing of Black/African heritage in these events and the transnational aims of their conceptualisation, organisation, promotion, participants and remembrance, the workshop aims to explore the often-overlooked tensions, absences and dis:connections in the conceptual, organisational and participatory frameworks of pan-African postcolonial festivals from a broad perspective. It will also examine how these festivals and the collections and narratives they produced both represented and obscured aspects of Africa’s cultural heritage. Most importantly, it will look at the challenges associated with archiving, preserving and digitising the material remains of these festivals and the wider implications for understanding postcolonial African identity, cultural heritage and historiography. The workshop aims to synthesise different perspectives on how dis:connected cultural heritage – fragmented by colonial histories, geopolitical tensions and institutional constraints – are remembered, archived or lost.
Dates: 24-25 April,2025
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich
Organisers: Gideon Morison and Andrea Kifyasi
Please register 
The 20th century was characterized by high mobility and circulation of artists. Art history is increasingly paying attention to dis:connectivities of transnational artistic trajectories and their roles in shaping multiple modernities. This workshop interrogates which historiographic narratives artists on the move get inscribed into, juxtaposing these narratives with the artists’ own perceptions of professional belonging and recognition. By artists on the move, we understand (visual) artists who have left their places of origin and ended up elsewhere, intentionally or unintentionally.
We examine whether such a move constitutes a detour in the artists’ life and career, in that it diverts a (personal or professional) trajectory, and how the move and new place of creation affects the artist’s career and inscription into institutional, art historical and hegemonic narratives. We are especially interested in artists who went to places outside well-established centres of modernity. How were they received in these places, what were their own expectations regarding their professional and personal development, and how were these matched? The question of dis:connectivity is pertinent in that it highlights the possibility of being at once connected and disconnected to different narratives of belonging and recognition and potential tensions between subjective perceptions and formal histories.
Dates: 3-4 April
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich
Organisers: Claudia Cendales Paredes and Nadia von Maltzahn
The program can be found 
How do artists and practitioners who work in collaborative settings navigate between co-creation and conflict?
In today’s contemporary art practices, many artists take on several parallel roles, such as teachers, organisers, community leaders and facilitators. While terms such as participation, collaboration and co-creation have gained extreme popularity, they are hardly easy roads to take, and they hold great potential for conflict and dis:connectivity among the participating sides.
Unlike the practical or historical knowledge imparted in art education on community art practices, skills in conflict resolution and facilitation are often absent, leaving many practitioners to confront challenges unprepared. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic struggle, which instead of calling for consensus opens a discursive arena, as well as Donna Haraway’s idea staying-with, which recognises our complicity in the current planetary crisis while also working to change it, participants of this workshop will search for a productive and dynamic space in the current socio-political-ethical circumstances.
Through reflecting on personal experiences and broader artistic practices, this symposium poses critical questions. How do artists and cultural workers deal with conflict and dis:connectivity? How can they manage conflict without the need for consensus? What alternative methods of communication can be employed in collaborative settings? By addressing experiences and potential questions as well as knowledge focusing on practice and experience, the participants will seek to reimagine artistic collaboration as a space where tensions become opportunities for recognition and growth.
Dates: 27-28 March
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich
Organiser: Işıl Eğrikavuk
You can find the programme 
In Bertolt Brecht's work, “The Great Method” was usually read as a cipher for Marxist dialectics. However, viewed from the present day, his thinking is more reminiscent of innovators such as Antonio Gramsci or Stuart Hall than Hegel.
For Brecht, “The Great Method” is not a Marxist law of nature or philosophy of progress, but a “practical doctrine”: a tool for achieving the ability to act under constantly changing conditions. Brecht's program thus appears as “without guarantees” or “without warranties” and as a methodological challenge: curatorial, artistic, scientific, practical, political. For the Brecht Festival under Julian Warner's artistic direction, this meant from day one: when society changes, festival visitors and their traditional histories and customs become more diverse, technological means develop and material conditions change, the understanding of theater inevitably changes. The festival and audience took this realization into account when a parade carried the Brecht carpet from the Golden Hall across the Ulrichsbrücke to Lechhausen, local politics were turned into a wrestling match in the wedding hall of the Alevi community and the Lederle was transformed into a power club. What does it mean curatorially, culturally and politically to act according to the motto “Brecht without guarantees”?
The conference is part of the