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In Blog, Voices Blog

Festac ’77: navigating dis:connections in postcolonial pan-African festivals, legacy, and memory

gideon morison

The year is 1977. Lagos, a bustling postcolonial city and the then-capital of Nigeria, was preparing to host one of the biggest cultural events in the history of the Black world: the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC '77. The streets were colourfully decorated with festival flags and banners bearing the iconic mask of Ancient Benin’s Queen Idia, adopted as the festival’s logo (see fig. 1).[1]

Fig. 1: The festival emblem depicting a mask of Queen Idia (Image: International Festival Committee, CBAAC)

The city and a few other locations — especially Kaduna and Kano — became massive construction sites, hosting dual-purpose development and modernisation projects in General Yakubu Gowon’s post-civil-war infrastructural renaissance plan, the Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (3Rs) Programme. This led to the construction of new motorways to ease Lagos’s notorious traffic congestion, a racecourse in Kaduna, hotels and guest houses, and a festival village. However, a gleaming new National Theatre Complex, equipped with cutting-edge technologies in modern staging, emerged as the hub of the event.[2] The scale of the festival and its venues revealed far greater ambitions that went beyond restoring the nation's reputation in the wake of the kwashiorkor crisis in Southeastern Nigeria during the civil war. The goal was to showcase Nigeria’s international prestige and newfound oil wealth and to project a welcoming atmosphere to the over 17,000 Black and African descendants from about 55 countries attending the festival. Nigeria sought to present itself as the de facto leader of the Black world.[3] FESTAC ’77, FESMAN Dakar 1966, PANAF Algiers 1969 and the Zaire Music Festival Kinshasa 1974 were ‘postcolonial pan-African festivals’ – a series of cultural festivals organised and held across Africa after independence between 1966 and 1977, mostly planned and financed by states, to demonstrate Pan-African unity and envision a renascent Africa.[4] Here I explore the ideational and political transformations that shaped the agenda of FESTAC ‘77, highlighting the dis:connections in its organisational process and the tensions that underpinned these processes.

Dis:connective pathways to pan-African renaissance through festivals

The origins of postcolonial pan-African festivals are often traced to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959). These congresses generated ideas for organising festivals to demonstrate the objectives of a renascent Africa, and they established an organisational model for the inaugural staging in Dakar. Although postcolonial pan-African festivals emerged as a cultural project promoted by a broad coalition of groups loosely connected by the objective of promoting pan-African unity through socio-political, intellectual and cultural contacts between the continent and its diaspora, their organisation and visions of development were often contradictory and disconnected. The seeds of these disputes first became visible at the congresses. Though envisioned as a ‘Cultural Bandung’ for intellectual discourse on postcolonial pan-African culture and political development, the intense intellectual exchange at the congresses pitted the Négritude movement against most other Black/African intellectuals, notably Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Richard Wright.[5] While the Négritude camp, led by Léopold Senghor, championed a Black/African heritage that sought not only to reclaim the elements of Black identity and culture erased by colonialism, but also to recognise Africa’s cultural, social, economic and political contributions that could enrich a future ‘civilisation of the universal’, Fanon and other artist-scholars criticised Senghor’s worldview as politically insufficient, essentialising and elitist.[6] For these ‘radical’ artist-scholars, African heritage and culture had the potential to improve the economic and social experiences of the masses, rather than merely celebrating spiritual connections that served the social elites. Thus, the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, held in April 1966 to demonstrate Négritude as a path for Africa’s postcolonial development, provoked strong reactions in the African Renaissance movement. Beyond ideological disagreements over the theoretical limits of Négritude in postcolonial development, some considered the organisation of FESMAN to be exclusionary, which gave rise to the Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF) in Algiers as a counter-festival.[7] PANAF was one of the most revolutionary and representative pan-African events of the 20th century.[8] The organisers of the festival attracted participants from all member countries of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Black diaspora movements worldwide, national liberation movements in Africa, as well as representatives from the Middle East and Asia.[9] In contrast to FESMAN, PANAF focused on demonstrating the inextricable link between culture and the ideological struggle for the liberation of the continent from the forces of colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism.[10] At PANAF, Négritude was denounced as ‘neocolonial pacifism’ and instead a Pan-African Cultural Manifesto was published as a guiding principle for Africa's radical cultural practices and revolutionary postcolonial future.[11] The next major postcolonial pan-African festival was scheduled to be held in Lagos in 1970 as a continuation of the Dakar event, but due to the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–70) and organisational shortcomings, the event did not take place until 1977. In the meantime, Zaire ‘74 in Kinshasa emerged as a stopgap event between Lagos ‘75 and later FESTAC ‘77. Since Zaire ’74 was mainly focused on music and linked to Mobutu’s power and interpretation of the African cultural renaissance — Mobutuism — it has been largely ignored in the literature on postcolonial pan-African festivals.[12] The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac) Lagos 1977 was the largest and grandest postcolonial pan-African festival of the era. Following ideological rivalry within the pan-African renaissance movement, Festac '77 was organised as a compromise event to reconcile extreme ideological positions and paths towards Black/African renaissance. Its organisers drew inspiration from both the cultural heritage of the continent’s past civilisations and the contemporary radical spirit to propose a developmental pathway towards a technology-driven Black/African cultural modernity. According to Nigeria’s then-military-head-of-state, Olusegun Obasanjo, this pathway led through the adoption of modern technology, industrialisation and technological advancement.[13] However, Senegal’s campaign for the exclusion of the North African Zone (especially Algeria) from parts of the festival not only led to a diplomatic dispute between Senegal, Nigeria and Guinea on one side and the North African countries on the other, but also to organisational crises in the International Festival Committee (IFC). This crisis led to Senegal’s withdrawal from the festival and the quiet resignation of Senghor as one of the festival’s patrons, as well as the dismissal of Alioune Diop as secretary of the IFC.[14] Although Senegal was readmitted to the festival a year later in a ‘spirit of solidarity and unity’ after mediation from a panel of prominent artists led by Wole Soyinka, the negative media coverage the crisis triggered, along with other organisational crises such as the ‘squandermania’ affair, ‘dos Nascimento’ affair and the ‘Fela’ affair, dampened interest in the events and played a central role in tarnishing the legacy and memory of the event at the national level.[15]

Archiving Festac ‘77 and its contradictory memory

Following the example of FESMAN in 1966, Festac ’77 was hosted with a focus on preserving its memories through archiving.[16] Given that colonial archives were instrumental in propagating negative narratives and perceptions of the continent, it is not surprising that organisers of postcolonial pan-African festivals sought to preserve both the spirit and memories of these festivities by archiving and building institutions. Thus, Festac ’77 led to the establishment of various cultural institutions that served as the physical and institutional legacies of the event in Nigeria. Of these, the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC) stands out for its archiving mandate. CBAAC was founded as a pan-African institution based in Nigeria to function as a research centre to preserve the collective memory of the festival and promote African arts and civilisation in a globalised, yet fragmented cultural space (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2: the CBAAC Office in Broad Street, Lagos (Photo: Gideon Morison)

The archive holds all the materials used at the festival in trust for the 59 Black and African countries and communities that participated. This includes key materials, documents and minutes of the International Festival Committee (IFC) as well as artistic collections and artefacts. It also seeks, acquires and holds rare cultural objects of Black/African heritage through donation or repatriation from public and private institutions worldwide. Envisioned as a multidimensional agency with a strategic pan-African mandate to preserve, promote and propagate Black/African cultural and creative heritage, the centre’s collection currently comprises approximately 1300 audio-visual materials from Festac ’77, 13,579 books and publications, and over 1200 artworks and artefacts, distributed across four archival departments: museum, archives, audio-visual collection and the library (see fig. 3). Considering the ‘collective and collaborative’ nature of its collections, the pan-African vision of its mandate and the contested legacy of its commemorative event, CBAAC has attempted to navigate the disconnections of Festac ’77 by projecting a more positive and inclusive narrative of the event through programmes, events and initiatives. However, this narrative of the festival offers an overtly national perspective, placing disproportionate emphasis on Nigeria as the host nation at the expense of a pan-African vision, despite the broad range of contributions that made it a unique pan-African experience.[17] The implication is that, just as ‘host-nation omnipotence’ became an institutional practice, generating tensions and discontinuities in postcolonial pan-African festivals, it also accounts for dis:connective archiving and a certain operational dynamic in CBAAC. Central to this dis:connective dynamic is the fact that the archive operates in the administrative and operational structures of the Nigerian government in terms of funding and personnel, and it is almost completely disconnected from the operational agendas of Pan-African institutions like the African Union, apart from occasional contacts for event promotion and commemorative festivities. Apart from this, the memory of the festival in the country is contested. This contestation is shaped by a combination of negative press about the corruption and waste that characterised the event’s organisation, the derelict physical condition of its legacy projects – Festac Town and the National Theatre – due to ineffective maintenance, negative religious reinterpretation of the festival’s spiritual dimensions in Nigeria’s burgeoning Pentecostal Christian circles, and, until recently, the decline of historical studies in educational curricula. Taken together, these factors weave a unique web of dis:connective narratives around the legacy and memory of Festac ’77, both nationally and transnationally.

Fig. 3: the CBAAC archives (Photo: Gideon Morison)

Epilogue

I’ve examined dis:connections in the organisational and archival processes of postcolonial pan-African festivals, focussing particularly on the legacy and memory of Festac ’77 in Lagos, Nigeria. Festac ’77 embodied Nigeria’s global ambitions and visions of postcolonial development, driven largely by its newfound oil wealth in the 1970s. However, its organisational and archival processes were characterised by major operational deficiencies, conceptual discontinuities, political tensions and logistical limitations that made the event the last hallmark festival of the era until the 1990s. While the archiving of this event has sought to navigate these disconnections through collective and collaborative pan-African initiatives, its embeddedness in the administrative and operational structures of the Nigerian government has produced a dis:connective dynamic that seems to perpetuate a ‘host-nation omnipotence’ that generated tension in the organisation of postcolonial pan-African festivals. Given the global nature of Black/African heritage and cultures, and the transnational aims of their promotion and remembrance, Festac ’77 and the CBAAC collection allow a critical reappraisal of the collaborative and disruptive processes that enabled the conception and organisation of postcolonial pan-African festivals, highlighting the inherent complexity and duality of their organisational and archival framework. [1] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, (Lagos: Modern Publication Co. Ltd., n.d.). [2] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, 13. [3] Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). [4] Gideon Morison, 'From Renaissance to festivalisation: Festival networks and institutional legacies of selected pan-African cultural productions, 1977-2019' (PhD LMU, 2022). [5] Guirdex Masse, 'A Diasporic Encounter: The Politics of Race and Culture at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists' (PhD Emory University, 2016), 13-14. [6] Samuel Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead": Performing the African Revolution at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969)', in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). [7] Anthony Ratcliff, 'When Négritude Was in Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966', The Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 7 (2014). [8] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"'. [9] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"'. [10] Ratcliff, 'When Négritude Was in Vogue', 87. [11] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"', 134. [12] For an in-depth exploration of Zaire ’74 as a postcolonial pan-African festival, see Dominique Malaquais, 'Rumble in the Jungle: boxe, festival et politique', Africultures 2, no. 73 (2008). [13] Dayo Duyide, 'Obasanjo Opens FESTAC ‘77: Africans have come of age', in Festac ’77 – A Daily Sketch Souvenir (Lagos: Sketch Publishing Company, 1977). [14] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, 9. [15] Morison, 'From Renaissance to festivalisation', 170-76. [16] David Murphy, 'The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Art', in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). [17] Étienne Lock, 'Identité africaine et Catholicisme: problématique de la rencontre de deux notions à travers l'itinéraire d'Alioune Diop (1956-1995)' (Docteur Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2014).

Fig. 4: The Center for Performing Arts in Iganmu, Nigeria (Photo: dotun55)

Bibliography

Anderson, Samuel. '"Negritude is Dead": Performing the African Revolution at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969)'. In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, edited by David Murphy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Apter, Andrew. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Duyide, Dayo. 'Obasanjo Opens FESTAC ‘77: Africans have come of age'. In Festac ’77 – A Daily Sketch Souvenir, Lagos: Sketch Publishing Company, 1977. International Festival Committee. Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts. Lagos: Modern Publication Co. Ltd., n.d. Lock, Étienne. 'Identité africaine et Catholicisme: problématique de la rencontre de deux notions à travers l'itinéraire d'Alioune Diop (1956-1995)'. Docteur, Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2014. Malaquais, Dominique. 'Rumble in the Jungle: boxe, festival et politique'. Africultures 2, no. 73 (2008): 43-59. Masse, Guirdex. 'A Diasporic Encounter: The Politics of Race and Culture at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists'. PhD, Emory University, 2016. Morison, Gideon. 'From Renaissance to festivalisation: Festival networks and institutional legacies of selected pan-African cultural productions, 1977-2019'. PhD, LMU, 2022. Murphy, David. 'The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Art'. In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, edited by David Murphy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Ratcliff, Anthony. 'When Négritude Was in Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966'. The Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 7 (2014): 167-86. Continue Reading

9 June 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

Chronometric dynamite. Bones and fossils between temporal disruption and epistemological dis:connection

sina steglich

[Summary: Learn how the discovery of fossils and ancient bones shattered Christian chronology in the 19th century, forcing geologists, theologians and historians to forge new narratives of time, extinction and the origins of humanity.]
No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race, —whether or no we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or ‘diluvium’, to prove former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia.[1]

With these words, British geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) began his book The Antiquity of Man in 1863. Looking for the antiquity of man, Lyell was interested in the origins of human life on Earth. The problem had become increasingly urgent for him and his contemporaries since the discovery of human and non-human remains in caves and rock strata. Scientific discoveries and attempts to date and interpret them were coming into competition and conflict with the answers that Christian cosmology had long taken for granted. New origin stories had to respond to these findings.

Origin stories…

Origin stories are human coping mechanisms. Not only dating origins but also narrating them and thereby imbuing them with meaning are effective remedies against the overwhelming implacability of contingency. Those who sought to tame chance could always fall back on meaning through origin. In Judeo-Christian cosmology, this origin story is Genesis. Elaborated in the Old Testament with kinship relations, the age of the world and of humanity could be traced back genealogically to the progenitors Adam and Eve. According to the calculations of the Irish archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656), Creation could be dated to 23 October 4004 B.C. This ‘Ussher chronology’ relied solely on biblical passages, substantiating their validity with regard to Genesis as the record of Creation. But this cosmology began crack when one considered the world beyond scripture and the evidence of observation. What if the world itself were to object to the narrative of its own origins?

… as Thanatos stories

This is precisely what happened to the early geologists of the 18th century, who interpreted rock layers as chronologically stratified sedimentary deposits and, through their calculations, not only pushed back the age of the Earth but also applied entirely different time scales from those suggested by the Bible. As a result, the roughly 6000 years of the Christian narrative were no longer sufficient, so this cosmology required correction. The discovery of older fossils and bones was no less than a temporal disruption of the Christian chronological order.[2] Beyond the question of origins, the more important issue, however, was that these rock layers contained evidence pointing to prior life. Prior life, that is, not pertaining to individuals but to the entire species. And that, in turn, was the real challenge for anyone raised in the Christian faith: death could not be conceived of solely in individual terms, but had to be applied to entire species in the form of extinction. Fossils pointed to a history of death and told not stories of life, but stories of death.[3] The problem cut far deeper than merely dating: how could the extinction of species be reconciled with the Christian conception of Creation, in which everything was already in place and which, at most, was perpetually approaching perfection.

Expanding scales, shifting grounds

This problem bore twin children. First, this challenge intensified the more precisely geologists and palaeontologists defined Earth’s geological and biological history through their dating of rocks, fossils and bones. The constant correction and extension of the scales not only pushed back the assumed origin ever further back into the past but also required an ever finer division of time into geological periods and epochs.

Earth strata according to Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences, 7.

Such a provisionally defined origin, once set in motion and continuously adjusted, could hardly provide any relief. It was not a reliable foundation, but a shifting ground. Second, an abundance of empirical evidence, including relics of prior life that no longer had any surviving counterpart, constituted proof of the unthinkable: God gave life to creatures only to let them die out. This increasingly challenged the idea of perfectibility and thereby undermined a cosmology derived from the Bible or intended to be reconciled with it. But once discovered, the fossils and bones of extinct species remained in the world. They could not be denied as material evidence.[4] Consequently, it was not enough to merely extend the age of the world and adjust the geological time scale. Rather, Christian cosmology needed a narrative that took these findings into account.

Various forms of mechanism to strengthen ammonites, according to Buckland, The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in Creation. Treatise VI, Vol. II: Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology, (London: William Pickering), plate 37.

(Missing) evidence: marginalisation strategies

One strategy was offered by the Scottish Catholic theologian Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) who explained in the preface to his Bible translation in a manner that was as pragmatic as it was explosive: ‘The writer does not amuse or tire his reader with long metaphysical discussions, about the nature of the universe, the generation of matter, cause and effect, time and eternity, and other such subtile and insolvable questions’, only to state, without further ado, that the ‘planet, called Earth, [may] have rolled in its little orbit for millions and millions of years; and have undergone […] millions of revolutions; before it was made the habitation of man’.[5] First, he refused to engage with the discussion of the origin of the world by framing it as an unsolvable problem, only to go on to admit that, in any case, one must assume it was several million years old and that humans had arrived and settled there only later. This theory did not quite fit with Genesis, a translation of which followed on the subsequent pages. Although this was an inconsistent and provocative twist, Geddes had taken a stance on the contemporary debates and responded to them. He attempted to integrate the issue while simultaneously marginalising it. Some years later, the German naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860) stumbled across the same problem and came up with his own marginalisation. In his work Views from the Dark Side of Science (Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 1808), he tried to reconcile the fossils with the parallel existence of human life: ‘But even if there were […] no human remains to be found at all, that would still not be sufficient to prove that there were none at all at that time’.[6] His explanation for the lack of physical remains of humans was simple, yet difficult to refute: ‘In addition to this, the greater fragility of the human body — a quality that distinguishes humans from all larger animals — may also have prevented the remains of those ancient peoples from being discovered by later explorers’.[7] He considered them as more ephemeral and reversed the burden of proof: not missing testimonies were proof of the non-existence of man, rather their existence had to be assumed because the opposite could not be verified. Seen this way, the narrative of the Bible could hold true, because fossils and other creatures’ bones simply did not reveal the entire past.[8] Fossils and bones required that Creation be redated, but man could have been there from the very beginning. For the time being, Genesis was rescued.

From new narratives to new epistemologies: separating history from its ‘pre-'

But these strategies never solved the conundrum because they only concealed the underlying questions and were unable to resolve the epistemological core of the problem: the contradiction between Christian concepts of time and material evidence provided. Eyewitness accounts remained in conflict with faith. And faith was thus shaken. New narratives based on a different interpretation of the findings were therefore necessary cope. One such a strategy was separating human history from the history of the Earth. In the course of ‘inventing’ prehistory, sources from the past were strictly divided into those of human origin, namely, written records and ‘natural’ ones.[9] Thus, the understanding of the general historicity (of man) became disconnected from that of the Earth and all things natural.

August Ludwig von Schlözer limiting history to planet Earth and ‘recorded events’ by excluding the ‘archives of Saturn and Sirius’. von Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie, (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dietrich).

This separation was further solidified as a disciplinary distinction in the course of professionalisation and scientification during the 19th century. From then on, there was the history without a prefix, exclusively referring to humans who left written traces, and many siblings with prefixes, such as ‘natural-‘, ‘pre-‘ and ‘early-‘.[10] The latter was the province of research into bones, fossils, cave paintings and archaeological finds, which were not to be read but excavated. This disciplinary distinction based on source types mitigated the temporal disruption. In this interpretation, humans were no longer de-centred as latecomers by the fossils; rather, the exact opposite occurred: the fossils were excluded as prehistory from ‘proper’ history and relegated to a preliminary phase. However, effacing the temporal disruption gave rise to an epistemological disconnection, producing immense path dependencies.[11] For by restricting history to written history, it diachronically excluded everything that came before, for which there was no written record, and synchronically everything beyond the world of the written word, especially in regions beyond Europe and its expanding colonial spheres of influence. Our current effort to break up and diversify the monolith of history and to incorporate sources other than written records, such as oral history and material culture, into our understanding of the past is also a consequence of the disciplinary specialisation that necessarily resulted from the confrontation with fossils and bones around 1800 and the expanded timescales they required. Fossils and bones are chronometric dynamite first because they disrupted the Christian temporal order, which was bleeding plausibility. In a more fundamental sense, their evidence lit the fuse that eventually blasted the fissure between written history and its marginalised preliminary stages. As a result, anything that did not conform to this exclusive understanding of history was excluded from historical time. Africa as the continent without history is the most prominent stereotype of this epistemological closure. Engaging with these early geologists’, palaeontologists’, theologians’ and historians’ attempts to make sense of excavated traces of past lives, therefore, is not only of interest to historians of science. Every historian would do well to reflect on the fundamentals of the discipline and see its epistemological constraints not only as a Eurocentristic pitfall to be criticised and rejected, but as a coping mechanism of our disciplinary predecessors around 1800. Historicising this mechanism as a breach in modern historiography could initiate a deeper discussion of the discipline’s own stories of origin.[12]

[Published 26.5.2026
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.

Find the introduction here and the previous post here.]

[1] Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation (London: John Murray, 1863), 1. [2] See Peter J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976); Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology (New York: Science History Publications, 1976). [3] On Thanatos (hi)stories, see Peter Schnyder, 'Paläopoetologie. Zur Emergenz der Urgeschichte des Lebens', in Die biologische Vorgeschichte des Menschen. Zu einem Schnittpunkt von Erzählordnung und Wissensformation, ed. Johannes Lehmann, Roland Borgards, and Maximilian Bergengruen (Freiburg: Rombach, 2012), 119. [4] See David Schulz, Die Natur der Geschichte: Die Entdeckung der geologischen Tiefenzeit und die Geschichtskonzeptionen zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 58. [5] Alexander Geddes, The Holy Bible, or the Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians; otherwise Called the Books oft he Old and New Convenants: Faithfully Translated from Corrected Texts oft he Originals. With Various Readings, Explanatory Notes and Critical Remarks. Vol. I. (London: J. Davis, 1792), ii. Emphasis in original. [6] Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden: Arnold, 1808), 214. Author’s translation. [7] Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite. [8] See Lena Kugler, 'Staub und Steine. Organische Überreste und die Tiefenzeit moderner Flüchtig- und Vergänglichkeit', in Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Bies, Sean Franzel, and Dirk Oschmann (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017). [9] See Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (New York: Liveright, 2024). [10] See Sina Steglich, 'Vom Ausgang der Erde aus der Welt des Menschen. Oder: Wie das "Prä-" vor die Geschichte kam', Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift Sonderheft 5 (2022) https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003. https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003; Martin Deuerlein, Johannes Großmann and Mira Shah, 'Unsichere Urgeschichte. Fragiles Wissen und die Hervorbringung der 'Tiefenzeit'', Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 1-2 (2025). [11] See David Černin, 'Epistemic and ontological divide between human history and prehistory', in The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History, ed. Aviezer Tucker and David Černin (London: Bloomsbury, 2025). [12] See Marianne Sommer, 'Experimenting with Bones', in Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, ed. Stefan Herbrechter and Elisabeth Friis (Boston: Brill, 2016).

bibliography

Bowler, Peter J. Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Buckland, William. The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in Creation. Treatise VI, Vol. II: Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology. London: William Pickering, 1837. Černin, David. 'Epistemic and ontological divide between human history and prehistory'. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History, edited by Aviezer Tucker and David Černin, London: Bloomsbury, 2025. Deuerlein, Martin, Johannes Großmann and Mira Shah. 'Unsichere Urgeschichte. Fragiles Wissen und die Hervorbringung der 'Tiefenzeit''. Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 1-2 (2025): 5-10. Geddes, Alexander. The Holy Bible, or the Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians; otherwise Called the Books oft he Old and New Convenants: Faithfully Translated from Corrected Texts oft he Originals. With Various Readings, Explanatory Notes and Critical Remarks. Vol. I. London: J. Davis, 1792. Geroulanos, Stefanos. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. New York: Liveright, 2024. Kugler, Lena. 'Staub und Steine. Organische Überreste und die Tiefenzeit moderner Flüchtig- und Vergänglichkeit'. In Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Bies, Sean Franzel and Dirk Oschmann, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017. Lyell, Charles. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. London: John Murray, 1863. Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Schnyder, Peter. 'Paläopoetologie. Zur Emergenz der Urgeschichte des Lebens'. In Die biologische Vorgeschichte des Menschen. Zu einem Schnittpunkt von Erzählordnung und Wissensformation, edited by Johannes Lehmann, Roland Borgards and Maximilian Bergengruen, Freiburg: Rombach, 2012. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft. Dresden: Arnold, 1808. Schulz, David. Die Natur der Geschichte: Die Entdeckung der geologischen Tiefenzeit und die Geschichtskonzeptionen zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. Sommer, Marianne. 'Experimenting with Bones'. In Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Elisabeth Friis, Boston: Brill, 2016. Steglich, Sina. 'Vom Ausgang der Erde aus der Welt des Menschen. Oder: Wie das "Prä-" vor die Geschichte kam'. Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift Sonderheft 5 (2022): 26-38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003. von Schlözer, August Ludwig. Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie. Göttingen: Johann Christian Dietrich, 1772. Continue Reading

26 May 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Everything moves, or does it? Empires and im:mobility

claire louise blaser

In 1937, British India issued a series of postage stamps featuring the newly crowned King George VI. In them, the monarch shares the frame with an unlikely cast: a postman on foot, an ox cart, a horse-drawn carriage, a camel, a train, a steamer, a motorcar and an airplane (fig. 1). As David Arnold (Warwick) noted in his keynote for the workshop Empire and (im-)mobility in South and Southeast Asia, 19th and 20th centuries, this series depicts an ‘imperial ordering of mobilities’ in miniature: a visual narrative of progress from human- to animal- to machine-powered mobility that also reminds us, however, that these varied modes of transportation and communication were all connected.

Fig. 1: British India postage stamps, King George VI Transport Series, 1937. (Public domain)

Held in New Delhi on 6–7 February 2026 and co-organised by Siddharth Pandey (Munich/New Delhi) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Munich/Zurich), both fellows at gd:c, the workshop invited participants to consider how mobility and immobility have been historically shaped, enabled and enforced in relation to one another. Over two days, scholars traced the movement of bicycles, planes, machines, seamen, writers and criminals across borderlands, oceans and empires. Relating the (post)colonial contexts of South and Southeast Asia to the British and Dutch Empires, the event also sought to open transimperial perspectives on the history of im:mobility. As Arnold observed in his keynote, historians of these regions have long studied movement through migration, trade, epidemics and the circulation of ideas. The workshop’s contribution therefore lay less in demonstrating that movement has a history than in exploring the analytical utility of im:mobility for historians in terms of what it can reveal about how empires were governed and infrastructures built, how people imagined space, and how bodies experienced the world.

Fig. 2: The organisers Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Siddharth Pandey)

Fig. 3: Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Abhimanyu Pandey).

Power: regimes of im:mobility

A central theme that emerged throughout was that im:mobility makes power visible. Several contributions tackled questions like who gets to move, who gets stopped, why and how; they focused on regulation and governance, revealing colonial rule as a project that relied on controlling motion. Yet, as several papers showed, that control was always incomplete. Colonial and postcolonial regimes alike had to contend with the fact that their visions of absolute regulation of their constituents’ im:mobility were often at odds with the practicalities of implementation. Michaela Dimmers (New Delhi) demonstrated this tension in her account of British Indian prisons. Convicts, she showed, were simultaneously highly mobile through no will of their own and intensely immobile through their confinement. The penal regime aspired to total control, but the everyday realities of prison show that im:mobility was constantly negotiated and compromised in practice. Abhimanyu Pandey’s (Ahmedabad) paper focused on how im:mobility is tied up with the notion of remoteness, viewing the latter as a governmental category. In Spiti, on the Indo-Tibetan border, colonial and postcolonial regimes alternately restricted and expanded access through mobility infrastructures in the interest of state sovereignty. Focusing on a different border, Vaibhav Bhardwaj (Delhi) traced how criminal mobility became a test case for fragile state sovereignty after the partition of British India. The movement of criminals between India and Pakistan challenged newly drawn borders, turning criminal mobility into a territorial dispute and a performance of sovereignty. Similarly invoking the instability and malleability of mobility regimes after partition, Naina Manjrekar (Bombay) showed how the recruitment and movement of seamen between India and Pakistan can be read as a clash between established colonial and newly forming postcolonial regimes of im:mobility. Shivangi Jaiswal (Venice) also reflected on links between labour and mobility through a case study of Indian workers who were sent to wartime Britain for technical training in the 1940s. Her contribution demonstrated how even a colonial-era regime that explicitly sought to enable both physical and social mobility was tightly controlled and socially stratified.

Knowledge: techno-mobility, infrastructures and im:mobile ideas

A second cross-cutting theme at the workshop concerned the relationship between mobility and knowledge. In the 19th and 20th centuries, mobility and its meanings were bound to new technologies that transformed how people moved in space. Several papers explored the emergence of this modern ‘techno-mobility’: im:mobility mediated by machines, infrastructures and technical expertise. Philipp Krauer (Zurich) told the story of the ‘Java bogie’, a locomotive component that travelled from Switzerland to the Dutch East Indies and eventually to colonial India. This case study unsettles narratives of direct technological diffusion from colonial metropoles to their peripheries by including lateral transcolonial conncections and European countries without colonial possessions. Andreas Greiner (Washington, DC) traced how interwar imperial aviation forced a renegotiation of airspace sovereignty. Here, inter-imperial technological rivalry ran up against the practicalities of planning intercontinental aerial routes, forcing empires such as the Dutch, British and French into ‘involuntary interdependence’, each reliant on access to the colonial skies of others. Oishi Dhar (Mānoa) zoomed in on Bengal, where over the 19th and early 20th centuries, Indian entrepreneurs adapted steam navigation technologies and ‘vernacularized’ them, transforming the steamship into a tool of swadeshi economic self-reliance and shipping ideas of anti-colonial assertion to new shores. Arnab Dutta (Groningen) examined the Greater India Society, whose intellectuals responded to imperial restrictions on Asian mobility by imagining alternative international migration regimes; the resulting visions of, for example, an ‘Asiatic Lebensraum’ reframed im:mobility in the anti-liberal logics of biologised civilisational units and population ecology. Teuku Reza Fadeli (Jakarta) and Harald Fischer-Tiné's papers both focused on an everyday technology of mobility, the bicycle, and considered how this technology was rendered governable in colonial Indonesia and India, respectively, by restricting and policing its use. At the same time, both contributions also showed how those restrictions, which in Fischer-Tiné’s framing constituted a form of ‘mobility inequality’, gradually eroded, leading to appropriations of cycling that challenged imperial and class hierarchies.

Fig. 4: gd:c goes mobile, discussing im:mobility 6000 km from headquarters (Photo: IIC Dehli).

Experience: embodied, imagined and symbolic im:mobilities

Throughout the workshop, participants repeatedly discussed who moved, how that movement (or its absence) felt and what symbolic value it carried. Several papers attended to mobility as a bodily experience, or how walking, cycling and even standing still leaves traces in muscle and memory. Fadeli and Fischer-Tiné also focused on such aspects in their papers. In urban colonial Indonesia, for example, police manuals prescribed posture and speed for cyclists: colonial governance there was enforced by regulating the behaviour of bodies in motion. In colonial India, European observers questioned whether ‘oriental’ bodies could master the ‘steel horse’. Both contributions made clear that im:mobility was not only a question of technology and governance, but also fundamentally of cultural and social symbolism. Siddharth Pandey explored this symbolism of movement, and how it could transform over time by shining light on a unique mode of mobility: ‘malling’, as residents of Shimla describe the act of walking on the town’s Mall Road. He explained how an activity that, in the colonial era, was a symbol of racial and social segregation, could become a more democratised leisurely practice in the postcolonial period, though it continued to be seen as a performance of social and political status. Mihir Jha (Delhi) showed how railway connectivity transformed the imagination of Chhotanagpur in colonial East India. New mobility infrastructure, he argued, brought upper-class travellers from Calcutta to the region, which opened a new way of reading the landscape — one that romanticised its pastoral and picturesque character, all while obscuring the industrialisation that made it accessible. Gregory Goulding (Philadelphia) traced mobility's symbolic life through the travelogues of Rahul Sankrityayan. The writer once styled himself a free-spirited wanderer challenging imperial restrictions on movement but later deployed the tropes of travel writing to incorporate the Himalayan region of Kinnaur into the imagined space of the new nation.

What else can im:mobility do for historians?

This workshop demonstrated that the mobilities paradigm, while certainly not novel, remains what Arnold called a ‘productive provocation’ for historians of South and Southeast Asia. Bringing together these diverse papers reinforced the value of thinking about the interconnections between different forms of im:mobility, as opposed to considering each mode or machine as an isolated case study. This perspective recentres marginalised aspects of mobility history. Arnold’s call to attend to animal mobility was a particularly salient example, laying out a convincing case for a multispecies history of im:mobility. Arnold also pointed to a central methodological challenge many papers grappled with implicitly: it is difficult for historians to capture the experience of im:mobility, as they mostly encounter it through mediated forms, like photographs, travelogues or stamps, each of which carries its own conventions and agendas. Several presenters illustrated their papers with striking photographs, making evident that visual technologies have long shaped how mobility is imagined and valued. Such images did not merely document im:mobility, but actively shaped its meanings, infusing it with symbolic values like modernity, authenticity and social status. The discussions also highlighted questions for future research. Participants pointed to the need to explore the relationship between mobility and immobility more explicitly and to attend to im:mobility’s historical stratification in terms of how journeys repeat or reinvent themselves with reference to previously charted paths. Finally, one form of im:mobility remained curiously underexplored: social im:mobility. In the concluding discussion, the concept of ‘motility’ – the potential for movement as a type of social capital – was suggested as a helpful approach to consider how the (in)ability to move shaped hierarchy, aspiration and identity in colonial and postcolonial societies. Continue Reading

12 May 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

Nonlinear and counterintuitive: the timeline of fashion(s)

aliena guggenberger

[Summary: Explore how fashion's nonlinear relationship with time — from fast-fashion's daily drops to the cyclical revival of historical styles — reveals the shifting temporalities of our modern era.]

Fig 1: A springlike interpretation of autumn/winter 2026 at Dior / Dior © Giovanni Giannoni/WWD, Dior Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Collection [PHOTO]

As temperatures rise, social life shifts toward the promise of summer. Yet, from spring onwards, autumn/winter collections with coats and knitwear are already on display in department stores and online shops. During Paris Fashion Week (autumn/winter 2026) at the beginning of March, Jonathan Anderson showcased a surprisingly summery vision of winter fashion with flowers on short dresses for Dior, presented en plein air in the Tuileries Garden. What feels like a seasonal mismatch is in fact a symptom of changing temporalities in the fashion industry and its counterintuitive logic. The traditional two-season model has expanded into a near-continuous cycle of drops and micro-collections. Many department stores refresh core assortments every six to eight weeks, while fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M introduce new items weekly. At the extreme end of this spectrum, ultra-fast fashion platforms like Shein update their inventories daily, adding hundreds to thousands of new items every single day.

Fig 2: Ultra-fast fashion brands drop thousands of new items daily / screenshot AG

Fashion, in this sense, no longer mirrors the present season; its mission is to anticipate the next, operating on a timeline increasingly disconnected from (climatic) reality and structuring consumer desire around a future that has not yet arrived. But how is that pace even possible?

Reuse, rearticulate and recycle

The acceleration of the fashion system and the maintenance of a fully packed fashion calendar, with pre-collections and interim drops, are possible as business models only because they rely structurally on reuse. Here, ‘reuse’ does not refer to the eco-friendly repurposing of existing items, but to the continual reactivation of existing designs, silhouettes and aesthetic codes in newly produced clothes. In some cases, contemporary designers deliberately draw on historical references and the established house codes of brands like Balenciaga, Chanel or Dior, creating collections that both acknowledge the past and meet the audience’s expectation for continuity and recognisable brand identity. Building on growing consumer fascination with fashion archives as connecting tools between past and present, brands are starting to unlock their heritage to deepen the narratives behind the clothes. In February, Maison Margiela launched Folders, a project consisting of a publicly accessible cloud drive as an evolving archive that shares an exploration of both physical and digital materials from the house’s history, dating back to its founding in 1988.

Fig 3: In the exhibition ‘Fashion and Time’ (Metropolitan Museum), garments from different periods conversed across time / both: © Metropolitan Museum, Nicholas Alan Cope (Selected Images | The Metropolitan Museum of Art); (Left) Gabrielle Chanel Suit, spring/summer 1963 haute couture. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009, Gift of Jane Holzer, 1977 (2009.300.525a–c) / Karl Lagerfeld for House of Chanel, spring/summer 1994. Courtesy of CHANEL Patrimoine Collection, Paris // (Right) Mrs. Arnold, Dinner dress, ca. 1895, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Sally Ingalls, 1932 (2009.300.643a, b) / Comme des Garçons, ensemble, fall/winter 2004–5. Gift of Comme des Garçons, 2020.

Fashion does not merely produce novelty; it reorganises what already exists, which is clearly visible in the current resurgence of Y2K fashion, where key pieces of the early-2000s such as the crop top and low-rise jeans have re-entered contemporary wardrobes. As the example of the corset illustrates, even seemingly obsolete garments and styles are experiencing comebacks. Once dismissed as a relic of the Victorian era and nearly abandoned by the 1920s, the corset was revived in the 18th-century-inspired creations of Vivienne Westwood and more recently through the fascination with costume aesthetics fuelled by historical films and series. What was formerly underwear, once criticised for deforming the female body, has been transformed into outerwear embedded in red-carpet styles and everyday youth fashion, recoding its affective meaning from constraint to empowerment.

Fig. 4: Corset, 1876, Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia (Costume Institute)

Walter Benjamin and the tiger’s leap

Walter Benjamin had already observed in the 1930s, when Paris couturiers returned to the styles of la belle époque, that fashion proceeds nonlinearly: ‘The stream gradient of every fashion current… originates from what is forgotten (Jede Strömung der Mode … hat ihr Gefälle vom Vergessen her)’.[1] As Philipp Ekardt points out in his book Benjamin on Fashion, the most focused treatment of the subject can be found in Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), where he draws partly on the theoretical reflections of the sociologist Georg Simmel and fashion critic Helen Grund (1886–1982).[2] Ekardt shows that, for Benjamin, fashion is not merely a symptom of modern capitalism but a cultural ‘chronotechnology’ that structures historical time by repeatedly reactivating elements of the past within the present. The concept of the tiger’s leap in Walter Benjamin’s thought originally served to describe a sudden, dialectical moment in history in which the past is violently seized and made present. In the context of fashion, this metaphor helps to understand the rearticulation of what has gone out of style. Extending the idea of the leap as an almost violent seizure of the past can be read not only in terms of time but also in relation to space and globalisation. Innovation in fashion often emerges through acts of appropriation that draw not just on earlier moments in history but on forms from other cultures, allowing something new to appear under the guise of what already exists.

Historical reflections and timeless dresses

Looking at fashion history reveals recurring patterns that are often mistakenly seen as uniquely modern, such as the slow-fashion movement as a reaction to fast fashion. Over a hundred years ago, contemporaries were already criticising the rapid pace of the ready-to-wear industry and the perceived ‘haste’ of fashion change. In the years preceding the First World War, several designers and artists associated with the reform dress movement endeavoured to establish timelessness as a guiding principle in women’s fashion. This ideal found expression in loose, simple silhouettes and a deliberate reference to classical antiquity, as seen in designs of Hedwig Buschmann, Madeleine Vionnet and the Delphi Dress of Henriette and Mariano Fortuny. The aim was to create more practical garments that contrasted with the restrictive and expensive, ever-changing couture wardrobe.

Fig 5:(left) Hedwig Buschmann’s Neue Frauentracht, 1910; (right) Clarisse Coudert wearing a Delphi Dress, 1917 // AG / Public Domain Conde nast fortuny - Delphos gown - Wikipedia

The logics of fashion — the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake and the cyclical recurrence of stylistic forms — were seen as symptomatic of a fast-moving modernity then as now. However, the very perception of speed must be assessed differently in a pre-digital age. In this context, Georg Simmel argued in 1905 that the faster fashions change, the more it reflects the nervousness of the era: ‘Changes in fashion reveal how nerves can be dulled to stimuli. As an age becomes more nervous, the more quickly its fashions change’.[3] This inevitably raises the question: how nervous is our own era?

Changing catwalks

After the collapse of the European and North American financial markets in 1929, the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture reduced the size of its members’ collections from approximately 400 to 100 designs. This enforced rarefaction of haute couture consolidated what has since become a defining marketing paradigm: the production of extraordinarily costly, highly exclusive garments accessible only to a narrow elite. It thus stands in stark contrast to the fast-fashion industry above, whose logic is predicated on mass production, accelerated turnover and broad consumer accessibility. While the expansion in the fast-fashion product lines and compression of their product cycles has led to a much broader range of items to be presented, the fashion shows themselves are growing ever shorter and more condensed, lasting barely 10 minutes. It is not the mass of garments, but the pace of the industry that has been transferred to the shows. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this accelerated rhythm was briefly interrupted: lockdowns and travel restrictions forced the industry into a moment of deceleration, as shows were postponed, cancelled or shifted to remote formats. Yet this disruption remained temporary and the fashion calendar soon returned to its familiar fast-paced rhythm after the pandemic.

‘The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer in a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archaeological dig’. Hussein Chalayan in the show notes to Medea (Spring/Summer 2002)

One of the designers that invoked time most intensively in his early collections is Hussein Chalayan, framing them in themes of memory and future archaeology (e.g. 1993: the tangent flows). In his show One Hundred and Eleven (2007), garments mechanically transform on the runway before the audience’s eyes, successively revealing silhouettes from different decades. The fluidity of time was represented by an enormous clock in the background which, like a time machine, functions as a double image in fashion, signifying both compulsory change and the fluid, relentless time of its own history.[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjnuHmxRbxI&t=642s The nonlinearity — or even anti-linearity — of fashion is also reflected in spatiality. The traditionally linear catwalk has increasingly been dissolved and deconstructed in 21st-century scenography. A striking example is OMA/AMO’s Cube Field set design for Prada Menswear (spring/summer 2012) at the Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas, where the audience was arranged in a grid, abolishing the primacy of the front row.

Conclusion: continuities

If fashion history appears fragmented, it is only because we tend to read it linearly. Seen through the lens of nonlinear temporality, the reappearance of silhouettes, materials and stylistic gestures is not an anomaly but an enduring principle. The exhibition Fashion and Time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020) captured this dynamic by drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée. Supported by a dynamic exhibition design by visual artist Es Devlin, who shaped the galleries into vast clock faces, each marking 60 ‘minutes’ of fashion, the exhibition stages a series of curatorial flashbacks that allow garments from different periods to converse across time (see the images above). The pace of fashion makes it virtually impossible to be keep up and be fashionable. But as Elena Esposito puts it, the constant turnover produces a paradoxical stability.[5] Precisely because trends are known to be short-lived, they function as reliable temporal markers. Fashion thus structures social time through cycles of anticipation, novelty and obsolescence, revealing how modern societies organise themselves around shifting yet patterned timelines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7B-xr346JU&t=18s

[Published 23.6.2026 

temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.

This is the first post in the blog series on temporalities that Susanne Quitmann introduced yesterday.]

[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999). [2] Philipp Ekart, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), AP 393, lines 496-97. [3] Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode, ed. Hans Landsberg, Moderne Zeitfragen, (Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905), 11. Author’s translation. [4] Allessandra Vaccari, 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy', ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009). [5] Elena Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004).

bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ekart, Philipp. Benjamin on Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Esposito, Elena. Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode. Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004. Simmel, Georg. Philosophie der Mode. Moderne Zeitfragen. Edited by Hans Landsberg. Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905. Vaccari, Allessandra. 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy'. ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009): 12-19. Continue Reading

28 April 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

temporal dis:connectivity: a new blog series

susanne quitmann

This series of blog posts explores how time – both as an idea and as a lived experience – has shaped our global world. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, it examines what happens when global connections are delayed or rushed, and how societies have understood and organised time in a modern, increasingly interconnected world. By focusing on these shifting rhythms and perceptions, we’re exploring what they reveal about the nature of both globalisation and about time itself. Globalisation is often described in simple terms: either the world is becoming more connected, or it is pulling apart. The concept of global dis:connectivity, developed at gd:c, challenges this binary view. It argues that connection and disconnection are not opposites but exist side by side and constantly shape one another. Interruptions, resistances, absences and detours are not exceptions to globalisation; they are a central part of globalisation. We often become most aware of our interconnectedness when it falters: wars, economic crises, pandemics and supply chain disruptions remind us how deeply entangled our lives are. Even nationalist or isolationist movements, which appear to reject globalisation, operate through international networks, revealing the paradoxes at the heart of our global age. Temporalities is one of three research focusses at gd:c. Much research on globalisation has focused on space. As a case in point, the three previous research focusses at gd:c were disruptions, absences and detours. However, those are not only spatial phenomena; they are temporal too. They involve pauses, delays and acceleration. Historians and scholars from other fields have increasingly turned their attention to how societies understand and experience time. Particularly over the past two decades, research has shown that time is not simply a neutral backdrop to events. It is shaped by culture, politics, technology and power. As early as the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers such as Reinhart Koselleck argued that modern societies developed a new sense of historical time, one in which the future was no longer seen as predetermined but open and fundamentally different from the past. Stephen Jay Gould, in his reflections on geological time, explored how cultural narratives shape our understanding time and history. His work continues to influence debates about the Anthropocene and Big History, which stretch our sense of both time and space.

Jess-Hans Martens, Ship’s clock (Schiffsuhr), Freiburg im Breisgau, c.1865, Deutsches Uhrenmuseum, Furtwangen (2006-131). CC BY-SA.

In the modern era, experiences of and ideas about time were closely tied to globalisation. Steamships, railways and the telegraph seemed to shrink space and time, bridging geographical distances and accelerating life. Migrants and traders experienced both rapid movement and prolonged waiting. The introduction of Greenwich Mean Time as an international standard in 1884 created a shared global reference point for communication and commerce, even as it divided the world into time zones and met significant resistance.

The World Time Zone Chart, 1921, from the Ministry of Transport, Maritime Transport Division’s Search and Rescue charts of New Zealand and the Pacific, Archives New Zealand (ABPV W3111 Box 4/ 63),. CC BY 2.0.

Global time zones necessitated precise technology to quantify time objectively. Such technology spread around the world, but Sebastian Conrad has shown that they could also be adapted to fit local customs of timekeeping.^[1] Time was a political tool as well. European powers used temporal terms to justify colonial domination, casting non-Western societies into what Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably calls the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’.^[2] This blog series invites readers to rethink globalisation and global history through the lens of time. By focusing on interruptions, accelerations, time keeping and competing temporalities, we explore how attention to time can transform our understanding of global processes, past and present, and our understanding of history itself.

[Editor's note: Published 27.4.2026. Click here for the next post in the series]

[1] Sebastian Conrad, '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century', Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821n doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391. [2] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.

bibliography

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Conrad, Sebastian. '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century'. Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821-48. https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391. Continue Reading

27 April 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

gdc voices part iii: research. in. action.

[Editor’s note: this post continues the series of interviews with our postdocs. For previous entries, see here and here.]

What collaborations, events and publications in the past, present or future show how the three research focuses are driving research at gd:c and beyond?

AG: If you want to see the three focusses in motion, the gd:c bridging conference 2025 is the obvious starting point. Bridging the initial era of gd:c (2021-2025) with the second (2025-2029), the bridging conference brought together the team, the directors, the advisory board as well as current and former fellows. This shows where cultural infrastructures stop being scenery and become methods of inquiry: the venues, platforms, institutions and networks that sustain cultural production while subtly shaping who is granted access, visibility and voice. SQ: And at the bridging conference, time became impossible to ignore. The panel on temporalities made that very clear. Elizabeth DeLoughrey took us into deep time and the deep sea. Siddharth Pandey followed movement, memory and transformation in Shimla in the Indian Himalayas. Ulinka Rublack unpacked the layered temporalities embedded in the global ecologies of early modern dress commodities. Different archives and different scales with a shared insight: globalisation is not only about space. It is also about pace, delay, repetition and uneven timing.

The temporalities panel at the gd:c bridging conference (left to right: Siddarth Pandey, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Ulinka Rublack, Susanne Quitmann; photo: gd:c)

CF: That again is where laboratories come in. The lab is not just a room with equipment; it is a way of making worlds comparable (and potentially improveable). Laboratories extract, isolate and translate environments into models and data. That makes connections travel. But it can also sever abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them. In that sense, labs connect infrastructures and temporalities: they organise access and authority, and they structure time through protocols, calibration, waiting and projection. SQ: Precisely such connections are why the gd:c summer school matters. Out of our diverse research environment, this particular format is where early career researchers and practitioners workshop methods together. It is one of gd:c’s most direct ways of building a shared language across disciplines and engaging with works in progress. AG: The 2024 summer school, Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives, made that tangible. Organised by Christopher Balme, Nikolai Brandes, Hanni Geiger, Nic Leonhardt and Tom Menger, it brought grad students, postgrads and creative practitioners together in a week of lectures, master classes and hands-on formats, plus excursions that connect theory to real sites and their politics. Shannon Jackson’s lecture, Delivery systems: ecological infrastructures across the arts, set the tone. Infrastructures are the delivery systems for culture, power and possibility. Master classes by Eve Olney, Ursula Ströbele and Shannon Jackson deepened the conversation, while Dasha Sotnikova’s zine-making workshop translated analysis into practice. Excursions to Munich’s Architecture Museum and the Gasteig HP8 cultural complex grounded the discussion in the city’s institutional landscapes.

2024 summer school Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives (Photos: gd:c)

CF: Looking ahead, the 2026 summer school, Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity, continues that momentum by focussing on laboratories as built, protocol-driven environments. They are spaces that stage rehearsals, isolate variables and project futures. They promise preparedness and resilience, but they also raise hard questions about uneven labour, risk and exposure. Who gets included in the future worlds and scenarios that are being rehearsed, and who bears their costs? The programme foregrounds experimental pedagogical formats ranging from conceptual studios and hands-on exercises to field excursions in order to explore the lab itself as a method participants can actively stress test.

Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity. gd:c summer school 2026.

SQ: And the 2027 summer school deals explicitly with temporalities. We want early career researchers to help shape the gd:c research focus on temporal dis:connectivity by tracing its conceptual and material tensions across fields and by co-developing a shared analytical framework for bringing diverse disciplinary projects into dialogue. AG: Beyond recurring formats, the focusses also generate projects and publications. Sometimes the most immediate case is the institute itself. I am currently researching the chain of ownership of the building that houses gd:c, which was a house of haute couture until 1963. Its transformation into a research institute shows how cultural infrastructure is continuously reinterpreted and reactivated. The building is not a neutral container. It carries histories, spatial habits and reputations while being repurposed for new forms of research and community. SQ: On the publication side, we’re developing a gd:c blog series that makes temporalities visible in a quick, accessible format. Short contributions from scholars from gd:c and beyond explore temporal dis:connectivity, referring to how divergent temporal frameworks shape global connections and disconnections, and how global connections, in turn, produce new temporal regimes. The topics range widely – fossils, dance, stars and more – but the throughline stays sharp: in a global perspective, we cannot think about time in the singular. CF: I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but once you tune in to laboratory logics, you start seeing them everywhere: in field stations, observatories, simulation facilities, archives, exhibition spaces, and art and design studios. Labs make complexity workable. They translate environments into standards, models, datasets and test beds, so ideas, methods and future imaginaries can travel. But they also make dis:connectivity uncomfortably visible: what gets extracted, what gets excluded, what becomes legible, and what remains opaque. That’s why our research focusses don’t stop at gd:c. They permeate scholarly and artistic collaborations as well as the events where our research moves into the public conversation. To name a few ventures into the broader debate, the gd:c Voices blog, our bi-annual journal static, and our ongoing film Q&A series, which brings global filmmakers and films into dialogue with wider audiences about globalisation’s many affects and effects.

gd:c magazine static

AG: And if you’re curious what else we have brewing, consider this your gentle nudge to stay in touch. Drop by our website and various social channels to keep your finger on the pulse of gd:c. We look forward to seeing you around to come dis:connect with us. Continue Reading

14 April 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Let’s talk contraception: two accounts of a single workshop

Ophelia Wach (the convener)

Contraception is neatly structured along the lines of gender. The meteoric rise of the pill in the 1960s has reinforced hormonal methods for those born as women as the heteronormative default for contraception worldwide. Feminist movements question not only the well-known side effects, but also the unequal distribution of contraceptive work. Bridging between autonomy and control, the workshop on contraceptive equity in practice at gd:c asked doctors, counsellors and users how they navigate the deeply gendered practice that is contraception. Our two authors paint two pictures of the discussions, one from the perspective of a research student (Samara Relkovic) and the other a curious journalist (Romy Hölzel). The dis:connectivity lies in the divergence between the equal roles of the two people involved in conception and the social norms that apply to them as gendered subjects when it comes to contraception.

Negotiating reproductive responsibility

samara relkovic

Photo by Christoffer Voigt

Contraception is considered a private matter. It is decided between two people, organised as discreetly as possible, and is thus negotiated in seeming silence. Yet it is precisely this apparent privacy that conceals a central tension: while decisions about contraception are made in intimate contexts, their prerequisites, risks and consequences are anything but private. They are unequally distributed, politically framed and shaped by institutional conditions. In feminist theory, this shift is nothing new: ‘the personal is political’,[1] especially where questions of bodies, sexuality and reproduction are negotiated. Because contraception often appears as an individual issue related to self-determination, it is simultaneously outsourced to the private sphere, while its societal facets slip out of view. Who bears the risks? Who has access to knowledge? Who has access to methods, counselling, resources, and who does not? These questions concern not only individual bodies, but also interpersonal relationships and political structures, and thus the question of justice and equality. These very questions were addressed at the workshop on equitable contraception in practise, which took place in November 2025 at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect. It became clear that contraception magnifies gender roles, attributions of responsibility, economic logics and political priorities. Contraception was not discussed as a purely technical issue, but as interwoven processes of negotiation between individuals within societal structures, within political-regulatory institutions and within discourses.

Still no pill for men? Questioning the contraception gap

A central question of the workshop concerned the so-called ‘pill for men’. While the pill for women*[2] has been established as a contraceptive method since the 1960s and has become a standard method alongside the condom, the ‘pill for men’ has remained largely a utopia despite decades of research. At the same time, contraceptive methods such as the IUD and sterilisation for women* are becoming increasingly popular,[3] indicating growing demand for expanded contraceptive options – a trend that scholars associate with falling acceptance of the contraceptive pill. Meanwhile, the contraception gap between genders remains persists, with research and medical options for men*[4] remaining limited. This gap refers to the structural inequality in contraceptive options, the distribution of responsibility and the medical assessment of risk. While a wide range of medically recognised hormonal and mechanical contraceptive methods exist for women* – from the pill to IUDs to implants and sterilisation – men* are left with only condoms or vasectomies.[5] This structural inequality is due not merely to technical feasibility; it’s a symptom of the interplay of ethical, institutional and economic factors.

The politics of contraceptive risk evaluation or why responsibility remains gendered

One example of contraception for men is thermal contraception, in which the testicles are heated by external sources or daily elevation into the inguinal canal, significantly reducing sperm production. Smaller studies in France and Switzerland, alongside widespread self-experiments conducted outside official testing modalities, report effective contraception with comparatively minor side effects.[6] We lack large-scale clinical trials, reliable Pearl Index data and systematic long-term studies. Theoretical risks, such as a potential association between undescended testicles and cancer, are frequently cited as reasons against systematic research, despite the absence of solid evidence. In France, thousands of men* already use thermal contraception, sometimes under medical supervision, without regulatory approval. The discrepancy between actual practice and regulators’ caution reveals how the evaluation of contraceptive methods is strongly shaped by institutional priorities and risk perceptions and delimited to what is deemed investigable. Moreover, by prioritising pregnancy as the central metric of contraceptive risk, biomedical and regulatory systems reinforce structural gender biases, marginalising men’s* reproductive role and framing contraception as a predominantly female responsibility. A single-organism risk model prevails in pharmaceutical regulation. Benefits and side effects are assessed solely in relation to the body being treated. For male contraception, this means that hormonal and other body-altering methods are measured against a healthy male body; any deviation from this presumed ‘normal state’ is automatically regarded as problematic. By contrast, women’s* risks are evaluated primarily in light of potential pregnancy: side effects of hormonal methods, for instance, are deemed acceptable when weighed against the medical risks of pregnancy, thereby legitimising their market approval. A shared-risk model would instead assess benefits and harms relationally, relating male side effects to the health and social risks borne by a partner who could otherwise become pregnant, thus accounting for both individuals’ risks. If contraception were holistically understood as a shared responsibility in (hetero)sexual partnerships, men*, too, would be recognised as risk-bearing participants. Scholars advocate this relational model because it exposes how current standards obscure the distribution of risk between partners and thereby reproduce structural inequality.[7] Since regulators tend to neglect this relational model, health risks continue to be assessed differently depending on whose body is impacted. The result is a biomedical double-standard in which physically invasive interventions for men* appear ethically more problematic than comparable methods for women*.

Photo by Samara Relkovic

The contraception gap under the lens of invisible labour, heteronormativity and sexual health

The contraception gap is therefore not merely a technological deficit, but a product of divergent standards in biomedicine and ethics that materialise in everyday negotiations between sexual partners. It involves continuous planning, information management and risk assessment, much of which remains invisible. Coordinating appointments, researching potential side-effects, calculating costs and monitoring adherence all constitute a cognitive and emotional load. While contraception is formally framed as a shared responsibility, in practice this labour is often carried disproportionately by the woman*, reinforcing the contraception gap. Moreover, when reproductive health is normatively framed around pregnancy prevention, medical risk assessment and public discourse reduce contraception to a heterosexually defined practice. Other dimensions of sexual health are systematically neglected: prevention and testing strategies for sexually transmitted infections are treated as secondary, despite being relevant irrespective of gender, relationship structure and reproductive capacity. Queer lives and sexualities are marginalised, as dominant contraceptive discourses remain organised around heteronormative assumptions of pregnancy risk. This narrow focus matters. While reproductive risks continue to be framed predominantly as pregnancy risks, European public health authorities have reported sustained increases in bacterial STIs such as syphilis and gonorrhoea in recent years.[8] The shift in attention towards hormonal pregnancy prevention, coupled with the relative neglect of barrier-based protective strategies, therefore constitutes not just a discursive imbalance but an epidemiological concern. A contraceptive policy oriented towards the management of reproduction fails to address central aspects of collective sexual health and simultaneously reproduces a heteronormative constriction of sexual responsibility. Taken together, these dynamics reveal the contraception gap as a structural phenomenon rather than a mere technological absence. It is sustained by regulatory standards, research priorities and entrenched assumptions about whose body is expected to bear reproductive risk. As long as biomedical evaluation remains individualised, pregnancy prevention dominates sexual-health discourse, and the mental load of contraception is unevenly distributed, responsibility will fall asymmetrically. Closing the contraception gap therefore requires not only new methods, but a shift towards a genuinely relational understanding of reproductive risk and shared responsibility. [1] The slogan is attributed to second-wave radical-feminist Carol Hanisch. [2] This term refers to women and people who can become pregnant, and the associated contraceptives for ovulation suppression. [3] See the recent survey by the Federal Institute for Public Health (BIÖG) on sexual education, contraception and family planning: Faktenblatt: Sexualaufklärung, Verhütung und Familienplanung, Bundesinstitut für Öffentliche Aufklärung, 7, https://shop.bioeg.de/pdf/DL-20251027-1600.pdf. [4] The term men* refers to men and sperm-producing people. [5] Although the condom is the most widely used contraceptive method in Germany and often reflects shared responsibility in practice, its comparatively limited efficacy under typical use means that an additional method is required anyway. [6] See Samuel Joubert et al., 'Thermal male contraception: A study of users’ motivation, experience, and satisfaction', Andrology 10, no. 8 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1111/andr.13264; Jean-Claude Soufir, 'Hormonal, chemical and thermal inhibition of spermatogenesis: contribution of French teams to international data with the aim of developing male contraception in France', Basic and Clinical Andrology 27, no. 3 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1186/s12610-016-0047-2. [7] Christopher ChoGlueck, 'Still no pill for men? Double standards & demarcating values in biomedical research', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 91 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.11.010. [8] 'STI cases continue to rise across Europe', European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2025, accessed 19 February 2026, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/sti-cases-continue-rise-across-europe.

bibliography

ChoGlueck, Christopher. 'Still no pill for men? Double standards & demarcating values in biomedical research'. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 91 (2022): 66-76. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.11.010. Faktenblatt: Sexualaufklärung, Verhütung und Familienplanung. Bundesinstitut für Öffentliche Aufklärung. https://shop.bioeg.de/pdf/DL-20251027-1600.pdf. Joubert, Samuel, Jessica Tcherdukian, Roger Mieusset and Jeanne Perrin. 'Thermal male contraception: A study of users’ motivation, experience, and satisfaction'. Andrology 10, no. 8 (2022): 1500-10. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/andr.13264. Soufir, Jean-Claude. 'Hormonal, chemical and thermal inhibition of spermatogenesis: contribution of French teams to international data with the aim of developing male contraception in France'. Basic and Clinical Andrology 27, no. 3 (2017). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1186/s12610-016-0047-2. 'STI cases continue to rise across Europe'. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2025, accessed 19 February 2026, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/sti-cases-continue-rise-across-europe.

Responsibility, trust, contraception

romy hölzel

‘Contraception is about far more than just means and methods — it's about decision-making, responsibility and justice,’ says Samara Relkovic.[1] Murmurs of agreement ripple through the rows. The participants, a diverse mix of experts, students and people from other fields, are busily taking notes, nodding in recognition or simply watching attentively as the two workshop leaders, Samara Relkovic and Ophelia Wach, deliver their opening speech for the workshop Equal Contraception in Practice. The workshop, which took place at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, focussed on a topic that is often swept under the rug, taboo or dismissed as a ‘women's issue’: contraception. Over the course of eight hours, participants gained concrete knowledge from experts in various fields from sociology and gynaecology to activist organisations. With these diverse and interdisciplinary insights, participants engaged in discussion rounds on various aspects of contraception, developing both expertise and a better sense for the subject matter — a matter that most people will face sooner or later.

Photo by Christoffer Voigt

Fabian Hennig provided the first intervention, considering developments and research in contraception, such as hormonal and thermal methods, as part of his dissertation. The mood became more relaxed, and smiles spread across the participants' faces as Hennig presented his first slide showing current common contraceptive methods for men, which turns out to be rather short: ‘Condom, vasectomy,’ it read. Fortunately, the list of contraceptive methods for men currently in testing is somewhat longer. Hennig explains various methods to the audience, from sperm flow blockage to vasectomy to hormonal and thermal approaches. A ‘pill for men,’ as Hennig put it (though without much enthusiasm for the term), seems to have stagnated in research. ‘Historically speaking, men weren't really trusted to take the pill daily’ — followed by amused giggling that ran through the rows of participants. But then the atmosphere became more tense, with almost a hint of anger and frustration in the air, as Hennig explained that the side effects that might occur for men, which were identified while testing this pill, were considered ‘unreasonable’. The mood swings, depression and loss of libido were deemed too great a risk. ‘With male contraception, there are unrealistically high expectations — namely zero risk’, Hennig said. Further, the pressure in Germany to advance research in this direction is unfortunately not yet insistent enough. The almost palpable frustration of those present is interrupted — it's time for the first breakout session. In the first breakout session, participants with overlapping areas of interest came together. One or two experts also joined the discussion rounds to provide input, though even participants without particular expertise engaged enthusiastically in the exchange. Under the topic of Where is the progress?, one of the small groups exchanged opinions and thoughts relating to education: ‘What's missing is the impetus to question the status quo and the entire system in such a way that you think: “What can we do differently?”‘ said Louis Happel, a student and workshop participant. Gynaecologist Cornelia Höß also noted regarding education: ‘The topic of contraception should be part of young people's upbringing and should be discussed equally’. In schools and at home, contraception should not be taboo but actively addressed. The goal of the group work — getting to know other workshop participants and consciously engaging with the topic of contraception while simultaneously gaining new knowledge — seemed to have been fully achieved in the first session. The second presentation came from Louisa Lorenz, an education coordinator for sexuality and society. Her short presentation focussed on the topic of responsibility in contraception, which is famously one-sided: ‘Women are the main bearers of responsibility for pregnancy prevention’, Lorenz explained. The audience nodded in agreement. When Lorenz discussed one of her slides showing that men apparently massively overestimate their own engagement and responsibility regarding contraception, the listeners broke into brief, rather irritated laughter, as if the entire room were soberly shaking its head. The weight of responsibility for contraception that women usually shoulder became particularly clear when Lorenz listed the various steps necessary for the contraceptive method one by one or the preferred approach to be used. From going to the gynaecologist to constantly remembering to have the pill, condom or other means along when needed, the list is long. ‘Then you really notice why the burden is so high,’ said Lorenz, and the participants nodded in agreement. The third breakout session also revolved around the theme of responsibility. In the context of gender-specific differences in contraception, a lively discussion took place in one of the groups, with the focus not only on responsibility, but also on trust: ‘Contraception is very much about trust. Regarding contraceptive methods for men, women are confronted with the question: “Can I trust my partner, even when the most serious consequences rest with me?”‘ said Christoffer Voigt from the European Network for Shared Contraception. The group found that trust, along with a certain level of knowledge, education and, as banal as it may sound, money, are the most crucial prerequisites for contraception to proceed as fairly and equitably as possible between genders. But something else is needed too: communicating with each other, as the groups agreed. The negotiation of contraception is also based on compromises. As diligently as the workshop participants discussed, took notes and though, their concentration inevitably began to wane after eight hours. And yet everyone gathered for a final breakout session, this time on the topic of research and development. Even after almost eight hours of active participation, the energy was high, which is thanks to what Hennig reported in the ‘Research and Development’ group about ongoing research. Hennig talked about the barriers that are sometimes put in the way of developing male contraceptives. From lacking funds to lacking demand: research faces numerous restrictions. The conversation became particularly charged when it returned to side effects. ‘For other medical developments and research, the standard regarding side effects is not as high as for contraceptives for men’, Hennig explained. A statement that revived everyone again. After a day full of new knowledge, exchange, discussions and — as is to be expected with such a topic — anger and frustration, the workshop Equal Contraception in Practice came to an end. Despite visible exhaustion, it was obvious that all the education had stirred something in the participants’ minds. And even though the issues surrounding contraception can certainly drive one to despair, there remains hope. As workshop leader Ophelia Wach put it, ‘There is movement, even if there are always setbacks’. [1] The text was originally published in German, and all quotations have been translated. Continue Reading

31 March 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

A workshop on an unwritten history: decolonising architectural education in Africa

Peter Seeland

As a discipline, architecture is just starting to face critical postcolonial discourses in its treatment of its own history as well as in current challenges of material, ecological and social practices on global and local scales. These challenges pervaded African schools of architecture in the 1950s to 1980s, as they were often founded for the sake of political decolonisation, and they continue to influence built environments, architectural knowledge and schooling. With their goals of decolonising architecture and urban planning through economic independence, cultural diversity and local, unsuppressed knowledge, these schools are ripe for research. The Munich workshop, hosted by the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis: connect (gd:c) and the Architekturmuseum of the Technical University of Munich, sought to catalyse such research, focussing on the decolonial effects of the schools from their inceptions to the present. The workshop took place in the Pavillon 333 — an exhibition space in the centre of Munich built by students to showcase art and design.[1] The structure itself challenges established manners of architectural knowledge production and classical hierarchies in universities, and its designers sought to develop architecture as a tool for dealing with (de)colonisation.[2] Therefore, the location and the workshop were in dialogue with each other.

Excerpt from the thesis of K.H. Tissou, the first female architecture student at EAMAU Lomé, 1984. Image: EAMAU.

After being welcomed by Christopher Balme and Andres Lepik, the participants heard Nikolai Brandes's opening address, where he emphasised the crucial role of African faculty in architectural history and the ethical need to overcome marginalisation in the canon. The workshop was deliberately conceived to counter such marginalisation through discourse and learning. The first paper by Abdé Batchati from the Technical University of Berlin treated Power, Pedagogy, and the Myth of Neutrality in Architectural Education. A Decolonising Critique and Imagining Futures for Architectural and Spatial Education. Batchati showed how the Western canon predominates in global architecture education and how this affects hierarchies of knowledge in a (post)colonial context. Consistent with the overarching theme of how to learn and teach about space fairly beyond the university, Batchati was attempting to reinvent a less hierarchical pedagogy, invoking the research of Sara Ahmed, Grada Kilomba and the Matri-Architecture Project.[3] Further, Batchati shared her experiences with these issues in her own curation and research in the context of Matri-Architecture. Nikolai Brandes followed Batchati with a talk on Schools of Architecture in Africa. Mapping a Field of Research. Brandes outlined the history African schools of architecture and the emergence of independent national schools with reference to the schools in Lomé, Togo, and Maputo, Mozambique, founded in the 1970s and 1980s. They engage in several of the same topics, such as training local students, ambivalence towards the rediscovery of African traditions, searching for African identities and decolonising the urban to take a more central position. Nikolai discussed these issues vividly, especially the role of the rural in localising African architecture. Elio Trusiani from the University of Camerino closed the initial panel with a paper on The Historical Experience of the Faculty of Architecture in Maputo. Trusiani traced the history of Italian engagement in Maputo using the example of the Faculdade de Arquitectura e Planeamento Físico, which was founded in 1986. Since Trusiani spent several years there, he reported from first-hand experience how Italian and Mozambican students and teachers developed new forms of architectural education together. Nancy Demerdash from Detroit's College for Creative Studies opened the second panel with her thoughts on La Formation de L’Architecte. American Interventionism, Interdisciplinary, and Development in Postcolonial Tunisian Architecture Curricula. She described the tension between traditional indigenous approaches and modern-Western teaching methods in 1950s French Tunisia and how architecture served as an instrument of French socialisation and politicisation, especially in the early years of the American Architecture Schools in Tunisia. Further, she traced the growing recognition of indigenous knowledge and a more social and technical focus, which led to a more inclusive idea of architecture during the American intervention. Lund University's Erik Sigge presented a paper on Negotiating Epistemological Grounds for Architecture Education. The Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology in Addis Ababa, 1954-1973. Sigge understands the history of architectural education in the institute, which grew into the School of Addis Abba, in the broader frame of Swedish intervention in Ethiopia. Here Western knowledge is transferred to Ethiopia, and local knowledge is reframed in Western categories. But in the case of the institute, he also diagnosed a special method of synthesising traditional local techniques and Western-modern ideas through an ethos of open expertise. Contemporary bamboo architecture is but one example. In this case, architectural education serves as a foundation for greater self-sufficiency. Mark Olweny of Auburn University and the Uganda Martyrs University discussed Africanisation of Architectural Education. Postcolonial Opportunities, Trajectories, and Missteps in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. Starting with the Mulungushi Club as decolonisation thinktank, he described how the club's manifestos led to massive changes in architectural knowledge production to include female and indigenous architects in Uganda. A focus on engineering and a lack of humanities along with a mainly male faculty and student body diverted attention from social perspectives and underrepresented discourses on postcolonialism and equality. The discussion highlighted the lack of such knowledge in publications and archives. The panel closed with a visit to the Trees, Time, Architecture! exhibition curated by Kristina Pujkilovic in the Architekturmuseum of the Technical University of Munich. The exhibition rendered the entanglement of architecture, globalisation and climate crises in of (post)colonial discourse obvious. That evening, Brian Valente-Quinn of the University of Colorado Boulder and gd:c introduced Nzinga Mboup as the keynote speaker with her talk on Bioclimatic Design in Senegal. Lessons from the École d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme de Dakar and the Work of Worofila. Mboub reflected on her past and how it led her to research, teach and practice architecture in Senegal. Taking Worofila Street in Dakar as an example, she pointed out the importance of traditional architecture and the collective interest in it. The African climate serves as starting point for Senegalese architecture, as it meets local needs with natural materials and passive designs. Unlike Western architectural ideas, such techniques yield effective and sustainable buildings of earth, clay and sand as traditional natural resources. Their cooling properties are ideal for the African heat, and they can help democratise architectural knowledge. But publishing such knowledge remains crucial for its development and propagation. Panel 3 dealt with Transforming Institutions, starting with Kuukuwa Manful from the University of Michigan discussing The Formalisation and Unformalisation of Architectural Training in the Gold Coast and Ghana. He opened with a 1706 print of Elmina Castle, which, as a fortress of the British colonisers, represented political and economic power and repression in Ghana. Further, she described the history of architectural education in Ghana not as linear development but as diverse processes of ‘unformalisation’ in reaction to the Western formalisation focused on a formal engineering approach. ‘Unformalisation’ means returning to traditional knowledge, methods and architectural training. Lisa André, a member the chair of unlearning in Munich, continued the theme with Learning to Unlearn Architecture. The Chair of Unlearning as a Critical Student Practice. First, she pointed out the discriminatory potential of architecture as a built manifestation of society and the urgent need to face this problem. André's main question is: who do we design architecture for? The chair of unlearning searches for answers. As an educational and activist programme, it challenges knowledge, hierarchies, universalised standards and privileges in architecture training. Unlearning colonial suppression and discrimination are how the chair teaches anti-colonial theory. The final discussion reinforced that the history of African architectural education remains to be written. So, the workshop shed light on the African architecture schools’ history and served also as an experiment probing relations between history and the present. The workshop seems therefore like a starting point for further research and engagement digging deeper in the still marginalized subject. [1] 'About 333', Department of Architecture | TUM School of Engineering and Design, accessed 16 May 2025, https://www.pavillon333.de/en/ueber-333/. [2] 'DesignBuild at TUM', Department of Architecture | TUM School of Engineering and Design, accessed May 16 2025, https://www.arc.ed.tum.de/lek/designbuild/concept/. [3] 'matri-archi(tecture)', matri-archi(tecture), accessed 16 May 2026, https://www.matri-archi.ch/.

Bibliography

'About 333'. Department of Architecture | TUM School of Engineering and Design, accessed 16 May 2025, https://www.pavillon333.de/en/ueber-333/. 'DesignBuild at TUM'. Department of Architecture | TUM School of Engineering and Design, accessed May 16 2025, https://www.arc.ed.tum.de/lek/designbuild/concept/. 'matri-archi(tecture)'. matri-archi(tecture), accessed 16 May 2026, https://www.matri-archi.ch/.

citation information:

Seeland, Peter, 'A workshop on an unwritten history: decolonising architectural education in Africa', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 17 March 2026, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/03/17/a-workshop-on-an-unwritten-history-decolonising-architectural-education-in-africa/.

17 March 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

Exploring the uncanny: a zine

[Editor's note: the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was last week. To recall that event and to help prevent it from being forgotten amid the other recent invasions and acts of aggression, we're publishing this zine created by Russian dissidents and participants of the 2024 gd:c summer school. The first text is an introduction of the project by gd:c alumnus Nikolai Brandes, upon which follows an introduction to zines as a dissident medium by Dasha Sotnikova, the zine's creative progenitor, and finally the zine itself. Enjoy. Remember. Fight.]

Zines as cultural infrastructure. A workshop at the 2024 global dis:connect summer school

Nikolai Brandes

Punk, feminism, skateboarding, environmentalism, graffiti, queer culture: anyone who wanted to stay informed about social controversies, events and news from the underground scenes in the 1980s or 1990s could hardly do without zines. In many parts of the world, zines — DIY magazines produced by independent collectives on photocopiers and mimeographs — were a central communications medium in dissident scenes. They enabled dialogue on issues that were rarely covered in the mainstream media, received no public funding or were actively excluded from culture and its infrastructures, such as television, museums and movie theatres. The circulation of zines connected people with similar interests across cities and national borders. Zines helped to overcome political, spatial and social isolation.[1] When Moscow-based Dasha Sotnikova proposed holding a zine workshop at our 2024 global dis:connect summer school, we organisers were instantly intrigued. Our intention was to approach cultural infrastructures broadly and ask that they react to geopolitical disentanglements and exclusions in global flows of capital and cultural trends. We were interested in transformations of existing cultural platforms and the emergence of new infrastructures. Zines immediately appealed to us as an exciting subject.[3] Dasha's point of departure is her own experience in Russia. One might immediately think of the history of samizdat literature; that is, small-scale, grassroots publications used in the Soviet Union to circulate banned and deviant texts, including translations from abroad. Yes, Dasha is indeed interested in these historical references.[4] Still, the current global revival of zines is more than just an aesthetic phenomenon that satisfies a demand for analogue, collective work with genuine, tactile results. Zines continue to break down barriers and give space to subversive, unwanted, surprising voices. In her introductory presentation, Dasha showed what zine-making means for Russia's cultural underground, for communication with imprisoned dissidents and for exchange with nonconformists throughout the country. Our homemade zine was therefore about more than just creating an appealing product, a collective work process or experimenting with free-form text. Rather, the workshop was itself an exercise in building independent infrastructures with the simplest of means. (The shopping list Dasha sent me before the workshop included paper, black pens, needle and thread.) We not only learned about the Russian present, but also prepared ourselves for the not-so-unthinkable changes in our own environment. The directives from Bavarian authorities and universities to use gendered language and avoid more recent, inclusive terms in official publications and correspondence indicate how fragile freedom of speech can be, even in Germany. Here we share excerpts from the zine we compiled on the last day of our summer school under Dasha's guidance. We would like to thank all participants who agreed to publish their contributions and contributed to the process. Special thanks go to Tamara Zhukova, Olya Chermashentseva and Alisa Yamshchikova, who contributed to this zine from Moscow. We would also like to alert readers to the fact that some contributions touch on violence and rape. Please use discretion as to what’s right for you. [1] On zines as explicitly transnational media, see, for example, Babara Dynda, 'Queering Sexual and Gender Citizenship in (Anarcho-)Feminist Zines in Post-Socialist Poland', Journal of History 57, no. 3 (2022). [2] My fellow organisers included Christopher Balme, Hanni Geiger, Nic Leonhardt and Tom Menger. For more on this event, see https://www.globaldisconnect.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CFP_gdc_summer_school_2024.pdf. [3] Some starting points for thinking about zines as infrastructure can be found in Maggie Matich, Elizabeth Parsons and Rachel Ashman, 'Zine Infrastructures as Forms of Organizing within Feminist Social Movements', Gender, Work & Organization 31, no. 3 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12970. [4] For more on the continuity of alternative print media in Russian-speaking countries, see A.S. Metelkov, 'Alternative Book Publishing in Russia: from a Lubok to a Zine', Book. Reading. Media 2, no. 4 (2024) https://doi.org/10.20913/BRM-2-4-1.

Bibliography

Dynda, Babara. 'Queering Sexual and Gender Citizenship in (Anarcho-)Feminist Zines in Post-Socialist Poland'. Journal of History 57, no. 3 (2022): 385-419. Matich, Maggie, Elizabeth Parsons and Rachel Ashman. 'Zine Infrastructures as Forms of Organizing within Feminist Social Movements'. Gender, Work & Organization 31, no. 3 (2022): 1049-71. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12970. Metelkov, A.S. 'Alternative Book Publishing in Russia: from a Lubok to a Zine'. [In Russian]. Book. Reading. Media 2, no. 4 (2024): 255-66. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.20913/BRM-2-4-1.

From alienation to solidarity: communes and zines as new forms underground of cultural infrastructure

Dasha Sotnikova

THE RIGHT TO SPEAK The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was (and remains) a mind-changing tragedy for many in the Russian opposition, including independent publishers and artists. As literature has always been a valuable cultural medium for Russophone culture, it could not help but respond to the invasion with the tools at its disposal. At the time, the literary agenda was fully dedicated to covering the tragedy, and no cultural or symbolic space remained in the underground artistic community for their artworks that tried to reflect on events sensitively. More importantly, after the initial affective artistic expressions and subsequent repression had transpired, the Russophone literary community had to reckon with their right to create their art in Russian — the official language of aggressor state. After continuous silence, we realized that, as artists, we can’t keep silent as long as we’re still alive, so we recalled the experience of dissident artists who managed to preserve underground culture even under past Soviet totalitarianism. (IR)RELEVANT INSPIRATION In the history of uncensored Soviet-era poetry, some underground cultural societies have united creators from very different fields. An outstanding example is the Moscow Conceptualist artistic movement founded by Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov. They experimented with postmodern combinations of pop-art, performance and visual poetry, problematising Soviet realism and the meaning of art itself. Beyond Conceptualist literature, samizdat was a unique cultural medium and alternative mode of expression for underground authors, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Boris Pasternak; Mikhail Aizenberg; Elena Shvarts; Chuvashian poet Gennadii Aigi; the progenitors of barracks poetry, which revealed the horror of Soviet poverty, Yan Satunovsky, Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir and dozens of others. Their texts would never be officially published in the Soviet Union, although their multicultural heritage significantly shaped modern Russophone art. With these impressive forbears in mind, we began to imagine ways of preserving underground culture. However, the current political situation differs much from that in the Soviet Union in two key respects. First is the escalation of Russian fascism, for which we too are responsible. Second, how cultural infrastructure works in Russia has changed greatly.

Anarchist poetry against imperialist narratives

In response to the first challenge, we sought to critically rethink the influence of so-called ‘classical’ Russian literature, its core figures and narratives. Government agencies have carefully curated this canon, gradually amplifying the imperialistic propaganda. The results of our critical reflection needed to be presented in new literary texts and literary critique. We address the second challenge of cultural infrastructure by creating new underground venues and forms of textual representation. Currently, as the right and possibility of preserving Russophone underground culture is seriously imperilled, poetry connected to anarchist currents is a cultural space where independent minds can still continue the tradition of dissident art, reflect on their personal responsibility for the ongoing violence of the Russian government and support its victims. And here, as in the gd:c summer school, I wish to share the ideas and findings of my friends — artists whose bravery I admire and who inspire me to struggle for peace and freedom.

Literary strategies to address xenophobia

One of the main trends of modern uncensored and unconventional Russophone poetry is a desire for intermediality and multilingualism. And it is more than a literary fad. The scariest consequence of the authoritarian regime suffered by ordinary residents is (self-)isolation, which (artificially) feeds xenophobia and exacerbates isolation. The only way to overcome it is to find the Other in oneself and to break the artificial boundary between friend and foe. That is why young poets and artists from Russia and Belarus, despite political persecution, work collectively and combine cinematic, poetic and artistic elements to overcome the isolation of a particular cultural field. In such conditions, the lack of cultural infrastructure is especially acute.

Where do we exist?

Safe spaces for mutually enriching dialogue among professional creators, investigators and people interested in modern culture; problematising governmental policy; and searching cooperatively for ways to express political opinions are vitally important functions of non-governmental cultural infrastructure, especially in authoritarian regimes. Although activism under the oppression of arbitrary state violence seems almost impossible, artistic practice remains one mode of struggle for personal identity and against those for whom any identity seems to be dangerous. After the war began, a few free and safe places remained for creators to maintain dialogue with poets and artists inside and outside Russia and to organise underground anti-war charity events and conferences. The venues were diverse: independent bookshops, theatres, cultural centres, libraries, galleries, pubs, university lecture halls. But now most of them are closed or under governmental control. However, the poetic flow has produced its own forms of free expression.

Artist communes

One format consists of performances followed by conceptual video artworks in the modern communes. They are produced by young people who continue to oppose the regime through art practices. Such performances mostly aim to raise money for political prisoners and refugees. In such structures, poetic and political values are often united, meaning solidarity, cooperation, horizontal connections and overcoming anthropocentrism. K is one such structure.[1] It is an independent cooperative that unites manufacturers, leftist thinkers and artists who refuse to collaborate with the government, and cooperative marketplaces. Their primary aim is to connect autonomous professionals to underground societies. All members take important decisions about the manufacturing process collectively and voluntarily choose their roles in it. Their principal aim is to attract donations to support non-commercial initiatives, such as venues for underground art festivals, activist projects, human rights organisations and crisis centres. Beyond this, they also try to preserve the independent underground initiatives that do still exist in modern Russia. In addition to their active manufacturing process, K’s residents contribute to the development of underground cultural processes, including writing and filmmaking. Apart from providing a free platform for cultural events, including poetry readings, book launches, performances and so on, they have set up a publishing house that prints modern leftist and anarchist zines as well as poetry books and cinema journals. Its founders claim that samizdat as a form of cultural infrastructure is valuable and necessary in authoritarian regimes; it is also the medium with the greatest artistic freedom and independence. It inspires artistic experiments and innovations with its bravery. For example, European black-metal and dungeon-synth fanzines as well as American libertarian science fiction and anarchist samizdat fascinate with their unique designs and unexpected content.

The cheaper, the freer

However, for samizdat production no publishing house is needed, as long as the authors can manage with the simplest materials and publication facilities. Samizdat zines have become one of the most accessible forms of cultural infrastructure, where diverse cultural, social and political narratives come together. Zines are becoming another venue for artistic dialogue and reflection. One example is Burning, a poetry zine by modern poet, videographer and performer M. The zine is based on a poetic cycle directly connected with current political events in Eastern Europe. The latter addresses the issue of breaking with one’s parents because of radically different political views. One of the author’s touchstone books about this problem is Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva.^[2] Its key metaphor, which significantly influenced the zine, refers to the milk foam that children in Soviet pioneer camps had to eat with hot milk, although most found it disgusting. Kristeva compares the act of vomiting this foam to emancipation from parental desire, which means obtaining subjectivity. The zine probes childhood as an uncomfortable and unsafe space, despite the kitsch view of childhood as a carefree paradise. All in all, the zine is about catastrophe, in the face of which all the opposition members are equal. That is why the zine aims to transcend the deification of the author, whose putatively privileged vantage point might let them communicate some special truth to the readers. This idea is expressed through the format of zine and its content. The zine consists of six poems and imitates the design of an official document. This design reflects the feeling of being swallowed by violent governmental machine, where a person’s life and death are determined by a signature on senseless paper, such as a draft card. The images, digitally composed and edited, contain simulated mugshots of the authors' friends. The layout was printed on a risograph, which is how the cheapest issues are produced. This technical decision helped to stylise the zine according to the author’s aim of self-elimination. Apart from the great number of artefacts, such as erased faces and torn paper, left by the risograph, the author used the simplest font available: Times New Roman. Finally, the design communicates the eerie feeling that children in Soviet (and modern) Russian kindergartens and schools experience. Samizdat zines are normally limited print runs of 100 copies and distributed through independent bookshops (that is, those that sell uncensored literature) and social networks. Common sensitive topics, the desire to express one's genuine political views and the cheapest publication process unite modern dissident poetry culture with Soviet samizdat culture. These projects and processes are important to me, although there are other valuable issues and performances beyond such manifestations of modern Russian dissident culture. Obviously, local resistance to the repressive policy of the fascist government may not make much difference on a global scale, but it does affect interpersonal relations. Modern underground culture lets us preserve the solidarity that the state’s authoritarian violence seeks to take from us. However, all these intentions are insufficient without transitional resonance, and I'm eager to maintain connections with artists from different cultural backgrounds who share similar aims. Xenophobia and alienation are not national problems, so we need sincerity and courage to face them all together. We believe that the world shifts each time we choose solidarity instead of fear and open dialog instead of violence. [1] The single-letter pseudonyms in this piece are to protect the organisations and individuals involved from persecution. [2] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

Bibliography

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Exploring the uncanny

3 March 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

A pillow for collective dormancy

işıl eğrikavuk

I arrived at global dis:connect as an artist fellow in the fall of 2025. Being an artist and academic, I often find myself operating between these two worlds: one is more open to process, play and experimentation, and the other is usually more precise and well-planned. While I had already been asked — and had sent off — by mid-summer the title of the presentation I was to give at gd:c in November, I was not sure what exactly I would want to present to my colleagues in Munich. Should I have continued my ongoing garden project, which I had been running with my students at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) for the last four years, or should I have used the limited time available to enter a new domain and work on something else? First, a little background on my practice: I am an artist with a background in performance art and community art practices. My work often involves collaborations with various groups of people — artists and non-artists — as well as my students. I have also been teaching art for almost twenty years, the last eight of which have been in Berlin. As a member of UdK’s teaching faculty, I started a garden project in 2021 together with my students, called the other garden. the other garden resulted from several personal and collective experiences. First, I am the only non-European instructor in my faculty and sometimes find myself on the wrong side of the language barrier. Second, there is a lack of diversity and inclusivity programs for newcomers like me. Finally, our building lacks a café or social space for the students and staff. After battling some bureaucracy, we set up the garden, where my students and I are growing non-native wild plants (weeds), which are othered in the anthropocentric plant hierarchy. It soon became both a garden behind our faculty building located on Mierendorffstraße and a classroom and community space for us. There, we began to hold our classes, organise artist talks, cook, eat, experiment with art and talk about otherness — both within and among humans as well as non-human beings. In only a few years, this little area has become a much larger community than I imagined, with now over a hundred students who have experienced being part of it.

Fig. 1-2: the other garden (image: Işıl Eğrikavuk)

Yet,when I arrived in Munich, I did not know what a green city I would find, nor was I exactly aware of the location of gd:c. Walking in the mornings from the English Garden to my office, looking outside from my desk during the day onto the Maximilian Park, I felt surrounded by a much larger green environment and was able to take more time to notice its changes day by day. One of my initial ideas was to see if I could start another garden, perhaps in the backyard of the gd:c building. But soon after arriving in Munich, I realised that there would neither be enough time nor the right moment during my six-month stay in the city. I also noticed that it was already October, and the turn of the season was obvious in the city’s flora. The weather was starting to get chilly; trees were shedding their leaves, and the colors were turning crimson, then yellow and brown. There was a sense of slowing down and stillness, almost like the preparation we humans do before going to bed: getting rid of heavy clothes, cleaning up and getting ready to quiet down. It was clearly not the right time to start a garden. I began to spend longer moments just observing the park’s edge from my desk, tracing the slow colour changes of the trees. Jenny Odell calls this kind of attentiveness ‘doing nothing’: not idleness, but radical presence. ‘To do nothing is to hold yourself still’, she writes, ‘so that you can perceive what is actually there’.[1] In those moments, I was not inactive. I was practicing a different form of engagement, like the trees, one that did not seek to produce or prove, but simply to be.

Fig. 3: a gd:c autumn (Işıl Eğrikavuk, November 2024)

Wintering

Around the same time, I started reading Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May.[2] It was inspiring to read both May’s personal story of wintering in life as a metaphor for difficult times, as well as her research on strategies and rituals of coping with cold weather in other geographies and of her own experiments with it, especially with the cold sea in winter. May discovered swimming, or cold dipping, as a way of making peace with the harshness of the winter. This ongoing experiment generated its own community of like-minded friends and new acquaintances who celebrated the winter instead of recoiling from it. We were not necessarily in the winter months yet, but we were moving toward them. The trees were clearly preparing for their own wintering cycle, recognising their need for rest and retreat. It was the human-made homes, offices and buildings that separated us from this both by protecting us from the coming cold and by disconnecting us from what was happening around us. The daily rhythm of looking at computer screens, preparing another paper or talk and the self-induced pressure to write was constant. Academia does not have time for wintering. We were used to — and even willing — to continue producing without making time for rest. But what if resting, I thought, just like dormancy in the plant world, is not absence but a different kind of presence: a quiet form of survival, preparation and transformation? As Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests in Braiding Sweetgrass, plants model a wisdom of rest and regeneration, teaching us to honour cycles and recognise the value of dormancy.[3] In the garden, dormancy is never a failure or inactivity. It is a pause that makes growth possible, it is a surrender to the season that honours time, energy and environmental rhythm. Trees do not resist winter; they embrace it, slowing their metabolism, conserving energy, drawing inward. Their apparent stillness holds unseen labor, the storing of sugars, the thickening of bark, the quiet preparation for what’s to come. In contrast, the institutional calendar asks us to bypass these organic pauses, rather to produce in all seasons as if the soil never needed to remain uncultivated. But perhaps, like the trees, we humans too need seasons of dormancy. Not to disappear, but to process, to replenish, to wait with intention. In that sense, wintering is not just metaphor, it’s an ecological imperative.

A common dormancy experience

With those thoughts in mind, I started to imagine a collective experience of dormancy — or rather, an invitation to it. A cultural motif appeared in my thoughts, originating from my country, Turkey, where newlyweds are presented with a two-person pillow upon marriage. There is also a saying that reflects the object: Bir yastıkta kocayın, which means ‘May you age on the same pillow together’. I began sketching what a pillow for my academic community might be like. A tall pillow of several meters, where we could rest our heads together for a moment and doze off in the building where we work. How could we connect to one another while disconnecting from our work? I started toying with the idea. First, I took a German-size pillow from the house where I was staying. German pillows are notorious among foreigners for their size — usually 80x80 cm. I went outside into our garden and began to fill it with fallen leaves from the horse chestnut trees. I wanted to put dried leaves in this pillow to create some form of commonality between our tree-kin and our dormancy experiences. To sleep while being accompanied by living organisms — to be closer to the outside, beyond our walls. After making my first pillow and filling it with leaves, I started photographing myself in the office building, sleeping in different places: at my desk, on the stairs, in the kitchen, under the Einstein painting in our foyer…

Fig. 4-7: an experiment in photography and research (Işıl Eğrikavuk, November 2024)

By mid-November, as my talk was approaching, I decided to really make a giant pillow, which I could fill together with my colleagues as a performance. After some searching, I found a Turkish tailor who agreed to sew my two-meter-long pillow from old bed linens. Together we made the pillow. Below, you can see images from our collective pillow-filling and leaf-picking performance, which we executed at the end of my talk and to which I invited my colleagues and guests. Before we did that, I showed them a video of myself sleeping on my first pillow in the gd:c backyard, for which I also wrote this text:

Dear you,

Good morning. Good night. Good morning. Wake up. Are you awake? How did you sleep last night? Was it a deep sleep, or did you wake up in the middle of the night? Do you dream? What was your last dream? The leaves are falling down. I can see them falling one by one from the window of my office. Sometimes I hear machines collecting the leaves, making the streets all clean and tidy for us humans. When I went foraging a few weeks ago, our guide told us that dropping their leaves is like emptying their guts for the trees. They become lighter and calmer, ready to rest. We have a maple tree here in the garden, and a couple of beech trees. My plant-identifying app tells me we have a Turkish hazelnut, but I don’t believe its 58% accuracy. It stands on its own, and I mostly worry about it being alone. I keep waking up in the middle of the night these days. Between 4–6 a.m. is a half-dormant time for my body. I try to meditate, but can’t fall back asleep. On those days, my eyes close and my head becomes heavy — sometimes hard to carry. What’s a garden when it is dormant? When life simply shifts underground and we, the outsiders, can’t see much happening? What happens when the work of being a plant becomes invisible — its activity slowing down, yet continuing in other forms? What happens when a tree is quietly resting? Is resting a detour, when one is paused, storing for the next day, month, or coming season? Dear you, do you ever feel dormant? When was your last dormancy? Dear you, do you want a rest? What if we rested together — communally, like trees? Dear you, can we connect with one another through being dormant, with our different forms, bodies, and lengths of rest?

Fig. 8-11: a Collective Dormancy Experience, performance by Işıl Eğrikavuk and participants, gd:c, (Işıl Eğrikavuk, November 2024)

Dormancy as resistance

To be dormant is not to disappear. It is to resist the demand to constantly produce, to perform alertness, to stay visible. In a world and an academy that celebrates speed, output and accumulation, choosing to slow down is a quiet act of rebellion. Dormancy is resistance to timelines that don’t fit our bodies, to institutional rhythms that forget we are made of cycles, not straight lines. Like the plants in our garden, like the trees outside the gd:c offices, we too need time to retreat, to shed, to lie fallow. The giant pillow we filled together was not only a resting place; it was a proposition, a shared pause, an embodied refusal. A collective reminder that rest, disconnectivity and absence is presence. It is care. It is preparation. It is political. [1] Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019), 11. [2] Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020). [3] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

bibliography

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. May, Katherine. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019.

how to cite:

Eğrikavuk, Işıl, 'A pillow for collective dormancy', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 3 February 2026, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/02/03/a-pillow-for-collective-dormancy/.

3 February 2026

gideon morison

Dis:connective pathways to pan-African renaissance through festivals

Archiving Festac ‘77 and its contradictory memory

Epilogue

Bibliography

sina steglich

Origin stories…

… as Thanatos stories

Expanding scales, shifting grounds

(Missing) evidence: marginalisation strategies

From new narratives to new epistemologies: separating history from its ‘pre-'

bibliography

claire louise blaser

Power: regimes of im:mobility

Knowledge: techno-mobility, infrastructures and im:mobile ideas

Experience: embodied, imagined and symbolic im:mobilities

What else can im:mobility do for historians?

aliena guggenberger

Reuse, rearticulate and recycle

Walter Benjamin and the tiger’s leap

Historical reflections and timeless dresses

Changing catwalks

Conclusion: continuities

bibliography

susanne quitmann

bibliography

What collaborations, events and publications in the past, present or future show how the three research focuses are driving research at gd:c and beyond?

Ophelia Wach (the convener)

Negotiating reproductive responsibility

samara relkovic

Still no pill for men? Questioning the contraception gap

The politics of contraceptive risk evaluation or why responsibility remains gendered

The contraception gap under the lens of invisible labour, heteronormativity and sexual health

bibliography

Responsibility, trust, contraception

romy hölzel

Peter Seeland

Bibliography

citation information:

Zines as cultural infrastructure. A workshop at the 2024 global dis:connect summer school

Nikolai Brandes

Bibliography

From alienation to solidarity: communes and zines as new forms underground of cultural infrastructure

Dasha Sotnikova

Anarchist poetry against imperialist narratives

Literary strategies to address xenophobia

Where do we exist?

Artist communes

The cheaper, the freer

Bibliography

Exploring the uncanny

işıl eğrikavuk

Wintering

A common dormancy experience

Dear you,

Dormancy as resistance

bibliography

how to cite:

Eğrikavuk, Işıl, 'A pillow for collective dormancy', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 3 February 2026, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/02/03/a-pillow-for-collective-dormancy/.

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