In
Past Events 2025 - 1
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 will engage with the many temporalities of infrastructure, moving beyond its conventional association with space. Of particular interest is ‘the aesthetic life of infrastructure’ (Rich et al. 2023), with our speakers 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 here by 7 May. You can find the program here.
Continue Reading
15-16 May, Infrastructural memory: cultures of ecology and collapse
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 will engage with the many temporalities of infrastructure, moving beyond its conventional association with space. Of particular interest is ‘the aesthetic life of infrastructure’ (Rich et al. 2023), with our speakers 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 here by 7 May. You can find the program here.
Continue Reading
11 March 2025
The lunchtime colloquium (“ltc”) of the gd:c continues in the summer term. The first session will take place on 29 April. The colloquium takes place on Tuesdays from 11.30 am to 1 pm at the library of the Research Centre.
You can download the programme of the lunchtime colloquium 
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 
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 
The lunchtime colloquium (“ltc”) of the gd:c continues in the winter term. The first session will take place on 15 October. The colloquium takes place on Tuesdays from 11.30 am to 1 pm at the library of the Research Centre.
You can download the programme of the lunchtime colloquium