Artist Talk: Roma-non-Roma: in:visibilities and dis:connections

To explore the role of ruptures in archives, the workshop highlights processes of radical change and dis:continuity in archives and private collections. Understanding ruptures as ‘a moment at which value emerges through a break’ (Holbraad, Kapferer and Sauma 2019), the title Archived ruptures – Ruptured archives indicates not only the sensitive nature of collective and private archives, their histories, objects, sites and infrastructures of memory and knowledge production of conflictual pasts, but also the sensitive engagement and scholarship (Stoller 2009) in, with and about archives.
Artists, activists and scholars from various disciplines will present their work with archived objects, materials (e.g. sound files, documents, films, photographs, textiles, etc.), institutions and museums to show a variety of ruptures and their impacts on alternative histories, memory production, community building and resistance. With hands-on presentations, theoretical and object-based discussions, the workshop as well as the open exhibition lab are productive spaces to explore questions such as ‘how do ruptures in/with archives look?’, ‘can ruptures become a turning point of memory, resistance and empowerment for those whose voices have been silenced in such archives?’, ‘what does sensitive scholarship and practice-based research in archives mean?’, ‘can collaboration with as well as intervention and resistance in archival collections support alternative understandings of conflicted pasts and memories?’, ‘to what extent are archive ruptures related to socio-cultural changes or changing relationships between societies (e.g. de/colonisation, conflicts or crises)?’
Concept and organisation: Cathrine Bublatzky Venues: 28 November: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Museum 5 Kontinente 29 November: Gallery Karin Sachs, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (LMU Munich) Please register here by 20 November. The workshop programme can be downloaded here. For the flyer of the open exhibition lab, please click here. Continue ReadingPlace & date: tim Augsburg, 14 June - 17 November 2024
Organisers: Kevin Ostoyich (LMU Munich) and tim Augsburg
Venue: tim - State Textil and Industry Museum Augsburg, Provinostraße 46, 86153 Augsburg
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, from 9am to 6pm Free entryPlease click here to download the programme and here for further information.
Continue ReadingConference of the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect (LMU Munich) in cooperation with the Literaturhaus Wien / Österreichische Exilbibliothek, organised by Burcu Dogramaci and Günther Sandner in collaboration with Veronika Zwerger
Date: 14–15 November 2024
Location: Österreichische Exilbibliothek im Literaturhaus Wien
Our conference and the edited volume we plan to publish are dedicated to the writer and political publicist Lili Körber (1897–1982). The accomplished literary scholar and writer, Muscovite by birth and later resident of Vienna, was a member of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP), the Vereinigung sozialistischer Schrifsteller and the Bund der Proletarisch-Revolutionären Schrifsteller Österreichs. She also expressed her political commitment in her journalism. Körber wrote for left- wing political periodicals such as the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung, Bildungsarbeit, the Rote Fahne and the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ). Together with Anna Seghers and Johannes R. Becher, she accepted an invitation from the Soviet state publishing house to travel to Moscow in 1930. She sought to learn about workers’ living and labour conditions by serving for several months as a drill operator at the Putilov tractor factory in Leningrad, a company with a “well-known history of revolutionary resistance during the Tsarist era”. (Hertling 1982)
She wrote about her experiences in the autobiographical novel Eine Frau erlebt den roten Alltag, which was published by Rowohlt Berlin in 1932 and whose cover was designed by artist John Hearjield. Körber created historical novels by reproducing documents such as pay slips and pages from her employment record book alongside her diary entries, which convey authentic and personal experiences.
Lili Körber’s 1934 novel Eine Jüdin erlebt das neue Deutschland is one of the first anti-fascist books to treat the transitional period between the end of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of the
Nazi state. It succinctly describes the ideological permeation of society. By October 1935, all of Körber’s writings were on the list of banned literature. Eine Frau erlebt den roten Alltag was one of the books burnt in 1933.
In her travelogue Begegnungen im Fernen Osten (Biblios Verlag, Budapest 1936) and Sato-San, ein japanischer Held. Ein satyrischer Zeitroman (Wiener Lesegilde, 1936), a satirical observation of Japanese fascism that can also be read as a parody of Hitler, she covered her 1934 journey to Japan and China. Not even the burning and banning of her books under National Socialism could prevent Körber from writing politically.
Shortly after the “Anschluss”, Körber fled Vienna, stopping over in Zurich before reaching Paris, where she wrote for Swiss newspapers and the Pariser Tageblatt. From April 1938, the social democratic newspaper Volksrecht in Zurich published Eine Österreicherin erlebt den Anschluß, in which Körber, under the pseudonym Agnes Muth, again processed her observations in a diary novel. She finally emigrated in June 1941 with the support of the Emergency Rescue Committee via Lisbon to New York, where she worked in a factory and as a nurse. Beyond a few newspaper articles in, for example, the Buenos Aires emigrant newspaper Das andere Deutschland, she published the novel Ein Amerikaner in Russland, in 1942/43 in the German-language New York ‘anti-Nazi newspaper’ Neue Volks-Zeitung. This text published in 1942-43 could be read as a criticism of Stalinism. In 1949, she wrote her unpublished English-language novel Farewell to Yesterday.
In Germany and Austria, Körber fell into oblivion as a result of political persecution, the confiscation and destruction of her books and her emigration. Today, her literary estate can be found in the Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933–1945 in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt/Main. Lili Körber has only occasionally been exhumed in recent decades. New editions of some of her books appeared in the 1980s, and published research on Lili Körber dates to the 1990s.
At the conference, we will discuss Lili Körber’s oeuvre for the first time from an interdisciplinary perspective and consider it as a corpus exemplifying dis:connectivities. The author will be situated in the contexts of politics, literature, art and gender at a time of political upheaval. We hope that examining Körber as a political activist and writer will also reflect back on the present, which is increasingly characterised by extremism, racism and anti-Semitism.
The programme can be downloaded here. Please click here for the poster.
Continue ReadingEver since the financial crisis of 2008 and the emergence of the New History of Capitalism, historians have rediscovered economic themes and sought to interrogate them with the conceptual and methodological tools developed by social and cultural historians. This new interest springs from global history — a broad church of scholarly endeavours that have sought to break the hold of national histories and area studies to emphasize broad contextualisation, connectivity and interdependence in historical developments across regions, ecosystems and geo-polities. While global histories are rooted in multiple scholarly traditions — the most influential of which remain environmental history, the new imperial history, postcolonialism and world-systems theories — most practitioners assume that scale matters and that transregional, transnational and global scales open new and important insights about questions previously regarded in local, national or even multinational frames. The New History of Capitalism contributes much to our understanding of global history but reinforces its neglect of some fundamental categories of social history — like the family and property — in favour of other key categories, mainly labour, work, production and a focus on the social context of specifically economic spheres of activity, like trade diasporas.
Many of the key debates in global history have concerned macro-themes related to economy and society, such as the Great Divergence between China and Europe, and the relationship between Atlantic slavery and industrial capitalism. Notwithstanding the important insights and path-breaking arguments that have arisen from macro-level comparisons and connections, the role of micro-historical approaches to global history in these debates has remained less clear, despite the recent emergence of a self-described ‘global social history’.
In focusing on property and kinship in global history, our workshop will integrate microscopic approaches that challenge how we think about scale. We are therefore bringing together historians researching the intimate relationship between family and property understood both in a broad, relational sense as well as micro-historical and anthropological perspectives, yet with more attention to global social and economic history.
Date: 19-20 September Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich Organiser: Roii Ball and Michael GoebelPlease resister here by 12 September.
Please click here for the programme.
Continue ReadingThis workshop focuses on free African American people through art, visual culture and studies of space. It investigates circumstances of freedom and the disconnection from slavery prior to the Civil War, representations of free people of colour and descendants in visual culture and studies of space into the 21st century, and 17th and 18th-century White European immigration into Black America.
Presentations may focus on artworks made by free people of colour, such as sculptor Edmonia Lewis, portrait photographer J.P. Ball, landscape artist Robert S. Duncanson, and painters Henry Ossawa Turner and Edward Mitchell Bannister. How did their status as free play a role in their artistic careers or impact the content of their artworks? Papers may also focus on mobility and migration into free Black settlements across the United States and Canada. Topics include visual and spatial analyses of Black churches and schools, ownership of property shown in land surveys, rural roads named after free families of colour, or cemeteries.
With our location in Germany for the workshop, we seek to explore European migration into enslaving territories. What are the through lines of White families who become Black in the new world? They may have become enslavers who bore liberated children of colour. Or they may be indentured servants who bore free children of colour. Some free people of colour in the United States descended from German, British, Irish and Scottish forebears. What are the global ramifications of such disrupted, disconnected genealogies?
Overall, the workshop seeks to contribute new scholarship to the underrecognised subject of free African Americans and descendant populations in visual and spatial representation.
Please click here for the programme.
Continue ReadingThe workshop is intended to connect multidisciplinary perspectives on Otto Neurath’s work regarding scientific utopias and visual languages (including Isotype). The event is a cooperation of the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect (LMU Munich) and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU Munich).