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In 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 Voices Blog

Nonlinear and counterintuitive: the timeline of fashion(s)

aliena guggenberger
[Editor's note: this is the first post in the blog series on temporalities that Susanne Quitmann introduced yesterday]

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   [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 Voices Blog

temporal dis:connectivity: a new blog series

susanne quitmann
[Editor's note: click here for the next post in the series]   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. [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 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 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 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/.
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17 March 2026
In 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

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3 March 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog

gd:c voices part II: virtuous epistemic circles

[Editor's note: this post continues the interview with our postdocs that we began last month.]  

How does your research shape the focus, and how is it shaped by the focus?

SQ: Temporality is not just an aspect of my research; it is the central object of my inquiry. In my current postdoctoral project I use trees to examine how modern societies have understood, measured and imagined time and history. Trees preserve material traces of past climates and human interventions, and they often outlive the people who study, manage and exploit them. Because they embody multiple temporal scales – biological, environmental and historical – trees reveal much about modern ideas of temporality as a constitutive feature of modernity itself.

Tree rings reflect growth and age (Photo: Susanne Quitmann)

My research focuses on the emergence of dendrochronology — the science of analysing tree-rings — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, Germany and Sweden. Rather than writing a disciplinary history of dendrochronology as a scientific field, however, I examine how humans’ interactions with trees shaped thinking about natural, historical and social time. I am especially interested in how scientific practices, environmental knowledge and material encounters with trees cast new temporal frameworks and scales.

Wood samples at the Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Tring Research (LTRR), University of Arizona—the birthplace of dendrochronology (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona)

Engaging with temporalities as a research focus here at gd:c has provided a conceptual framework for approaching this history and linking it to larger questions of globalisation. Time was not a single, shared, homogenous framework; it was produced unevenly through processes of movement, exchange, circulation and rupture. Drawing on both my work on dendrochronology and my earlier research on British child migrants, and in dialogue with my colleagues at gd:c, I am developing the concept of temporal dis:connectivity as a shared analytical framework for the research focus. I hope that this concept will give researchers a shared way of thinking about temporalities along the lines of global dis:connectivity and a lasting, common language to talk about it. At the same time, our research focusses aren’t hermetically sealed. For example, I am interested in laboratories in the history of dendrochronology as sites where temporal knowledge was produced, stabilised and contested. I also welcome the opportunity to further develop the concept of temporal dis:connectivity in relation to cultural infrastructures, where time becomes a resource and where different temporal regimes intersect. AG: As an art and fashion historian, my work reveals how cultural production was structured and sustained through infrastructural frameworks and design strategies. The cultural infrastructure of the fashion system encompasses ateliers and factories for production; magazines, exhibitions, fairs and fashion shows for dissemination; and stores, markets and social media for consumption. In my current research, cultural infrastructure goes beyond spaces and events to include networks of designers and manufacturers. Particularly from the early 20th century, they were organised through various national and international associations, shaped by alliances, dependencies, connections and disconnections.  As Yuniya Kawamura has argued in Fashion-ology, designers are key figures in the production of fashion; they personify fashion, and their designs objectify fashion. I would add that the centralisation of fashion production and its associated politics become evident through the designers’ strategies, which include their own infrastructure: the concept, making and presentation of a collection at a specific venue. In addition to these artistic practices, design strategies also involve entrepreneurial ventures to establish their work globally through cultural infrastructure.

US Vogue, March 15, 1953, Photo: © Vogue Archive, Condé Nast (March 15 1953 | Vogue)

Since the early 2000s, designer councils and fashion shows outside the traditional fashion capitals (Paris, New York, London, Milan) have sought to decentralise the global fashion system and disrupt its hierarchical and Eurocentric structures. Fashion weeks in cities like Jakarta and Dakar provide alternative platforms for local designers and textile traditions.  I am examining the roots of these national fashion policies, which aimed to strengthen regional economies, enhance prestige for local and indigenous craftsmanship, and export cultural heritage worldwide. Which artistic, commercial and industrial infrastructures helped to promote national design in the 20th century? Which transnational parallels run through the strategies and motivations of different fashion institutes? How and why were these institutions and associations supported by the government? https://youtu.be/TC9gGBwISUw In the postwar period, I am especially interested in fashion (re)presentations at international events such as the Olympic Games and world's fairs. They played an important role in framing how cultures, including dress practices, are aestheticised and made legible to global audiences. Designers mobilized dresses as symbols of (national) identity to inspire their designs, without considering the risk of cultural appropriation when elements are extracted, commodified and detached from their original cultural context. I am focusing on these strategies of global visibility and export alongside the institutional promotion of national fashion through institutes, associations and individual designers.

A German fashion magazine promoting what they called 'Mexican' fashion, inspired by the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City (Photo: Aliena Guggenberger)

CF: My research has long focused on experimental spaces at the fault line between the planetary and the global. Working at the intersection of architectural and environmental history, I study how built environments and infrastructures — laboratories, observatories and simulation facilities — mediate planetary processes such as seismic wave propagation, atmospheric circulation, oceanic currents, soil formation and the limits of life in extreme environments, rendering them globally legible. Whether examining geophysical observatories around 1900 (see my Planetary Disequilibrium), or, more recently, planetary analogues, I ask how these processes are translated into architectural form, experimental protocol, and infrastructures of knowledge, and what kinds of dis:connections emerge in that translation.

ESA-DLR LUNA - Moon analogue, Cologne, Germany. (above) Rehearsal - simulated moonwalk at the LUNA facilities as preparation for future lunar surface operations. Photo: © ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler. / (below) Virtual reality (VR) model of LUNA’s main hall containing the regolith test bed area with dust chamber visible. Image: © ESA/DLR-F. Saling.

  This perspective also shapes my approach to the laboratories of dis:connectivity research focus here at gd:c. Rather than treating laboratories as bounded, local sites, I see them as mediating environments where abstract models of our planet assemble global relations. Laboratories extract signals, samples and processes from particular environments and render them comparable across distance and scale. In doing so, they connect the world through shared standards, models and datasets, while simultaneously disconnecting those abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them.

Concordia Station - planetary analogue, Dome C plateau in Antarctica. Operated jointly by the French Polar Institute IPEV and the Italian Antarctic Programme PNRA. Photo: © ESA/IPEV/PNRA-J. Lacrampe/N. Purvis.

These questions are at the centre of my current research project on planetary analogues. The project examines analogue environments — Antarctic research stations, lunar and Martian simulation facilities, underwater habitats and extreme desert sites — where Earth itself is reconfigured to stand in for other planets or future worlds. I approach these sites as laboratories of dis:connectivity: spaces that make planetary conditions actionable within global scientific, political, and technological regimes by selectively isolating variables, staging rehearsals and projecting futures, while unevenly displacing risk, labour and environmental exposure. 
NASA JETT test series, San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona, May 2024. The Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program Test Team develops, integrates, and executes human-in-the-loop tests and analog missions. Drone footage of NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Doublas. Video: jsc2025m000255 © NASA/JSC.
Thinking through the gd:c research focus has sharpened my view of these analogue sites. Approaching laboratories through dis:connectivity unearths the tension between the planetary and the global. The planetary refers to processes that exceed human scale and control, while the global names the infrastructures and institutions through which those processes are stabilised, managed and governed. Planetary analogues, understood as laboratories, sit precisely in between. They translate planetary uncertainty into global regimes of knowledge and governance, often producing new asymmetries while promising preparedness and resilience.

Digital plants laboratory showcasing global dis:connections. Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Run Dry: Digital Infrastructure and Landscape Loss in Mesa, Arizona, 2025, Information Plus Conference at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge. (Images courtesy of the artists.)

  In this reciprocal way, my research shapes the research focus as a shared space of inquiry, always in dialogue with our fellows’ projects, each coming from a different disciplinary and methodological perspective. The research focus likewise continues to sharpen my understanding of laboratories as sites where the planetary and the global rarely align seamlessly, but instead meet through friction, negotiation and experimentation. This is what makes laboratories such fertile ground for research at gd:c. Continue Reading
17 February 2026
In 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/.
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3 February 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

gd:c voices: 3 postdocs – 3 research focusses – 2 questions

Dis:connectivity is at the heart of our work at gd:c. Instead of seeing globalisation as a linear process of increasing integration or fragmentation, dis:connectivity assumes connection and disconnection occur simultaneously through absences, detours and interruptions. Dis:connectivity is not an anomaly of globalisation; it’s what gives globalisation form. After having looked at absences, detours and interruptions across historical periods, regions and disciplines, we’re now turning our attention to cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity. These focusses help us to coordinate our research and to compare our results. They also let all our individual projects speak to one another with a common vocabulary. In this ReFocus mini-series, our three postdocs introduce the three research focusses they coordinate. Aliena Guggenberger, Susanne Quitmann and Clemens Finkelstein each reflect on how their particular focus enriches globalisation research and outline how their own projects and collaborations at gd:c are shaped through cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity.

Aliena, Susanne and Clemens (from left to right)

What does your research focus explore?

AG: Infrastructure is commonly understood as a set of economic facilities, such as transportation and communication networks. A cultural perspective emphasises how infrastructure shapes social relations. For example, while airports facilitate physical exchange and connections around the globe, cultural infrastructure enables social interaction through various activities and spaces, including art. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, conceptualises representational spaces (unlike planned or conceived space) as users live in them, experience them and endow them with meaning through images, narratives and embodied practices. 

Marina Abramovíc: The Artist is Present, MoMA New York 2010 (Image: Andrew Russeth via Wikimedia)

For me, that means cultural infrastructure plays an active role in constituting our shared knowledge. Places like theatres, museums, libraries, archives and cultural heritage sites support the creation and preservation of artifacts and performances. In their digital expansion, these institutions operate as globally accessible platforms, revealing intersections between various collections, like Google Arts and Culture does. Yet such innovation can also concentrate power and restrict/limit access as well, since each institution curates its own content and presents its own narrative. I like exploring how the immediate geographic locations of cultural infrastructures contextualise their history and how they encourage participation and critical thinking beyond their locations.

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

SQ: Research on globalisation and global dis:connectivity has mostly focused on spaces and spatial relationships, like laboratories and cultural infrastructures. But time is just as important. Disruptions, absences and detours are as much about space as they are about time. They involve pauses, delays and haste. Time is a central variable in both the natural sciences and the humanities. In the sciences, time is mostly an objective, measurable value. In the humanities, by contrast, time is something people experience and interpret.

Watching time pass (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

Societies, groups and individuals can have different temporalities. Everyone experiences and lives in time, but research tends to overlook it. This began to change with the temporal turn in the humanities and the social sciences in the early 21st century, when researchers started to examine how time operates in areas ranging from the arts to social and environmental history. While some of this work touches on the issue of globalisation, and some studies of globalisation address temporality, the connection between processes of globalisation and temporality is still not fully understood.

Map of current de facto time zones as of March 2025 (UnaitxuGV, Heitordp and others via Wikimedia)

CF: I understand laboratories in a broad sense. For me, they include not only scientific research sites but also observatories, field stations, archives, exhibition spaces, simulation environments as well as artistic and design studios. Across these diverse settings, laboratories operate in similar ways: they simplify complexity, translate environments into models and data, and they stage the global as something that can be compared, tested and anticipated.

Laboratory settings across time and practice: (top) Art Lab in the Park by Street Lab, Queens Museum, NYC (2020) - a series of socially-distanced open-air art studio sessions, photo: © Street Lab (CC BY-NC 4.0); (left) An alchemist in his laboratory with his family: to the right they are shown calling at the poorhouse, destitute after the husband's failed experiments. Engraving after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c.1558. Wellcome Collection 35278i (Public Domain); (right) Quantum Lab - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) (2020). Two-color pulse sequences are generated for spin lifetime and spin coherence measurements in a dilution refrigerator. Photo: © ORNL (CC BY 2.0).

This is why I see laboratories as a connective hinge between the other research focusses at gd:c. As cultural infrastructures, they organise access, visibility and authority in knowledge production; as temporal devices, they structure anticipation, delay, repetition and projection. Laboratories are often imagined as controlled spaces that are removed from the world they study. Yet from the perspective of globalisation research, I approach them less as enclosed environments than as sites where global relations are assembled, interrupted and reconfigured. This helps me explore them as spaces of dis:connectivity in which elements of the world are temporarily extracted from their contexts, transformed into objects of knowledge and reconnected in new, often asymmetrical ways.

How does your research focus enrich globalisation research and how is the focus related to dis:connectivity?

CF: Seen through the lens of dis:connectivity, I approach laboratories as anything but neutral sites. The experiments they house select and abstract some connections while obscuring others. Knowledge produced in laboratories often circulates globally, while the material, social and ecological consequences of experimentation remain unevenly distributed. This asymmetry is no accident: historically, laboratories have been closely linked to imperial, extractive and modernising projects, while also serving as spaces of critique and alternative world-making.

Planetary laboratories and their dis:connected worlds of science, technology and extraction: (left) the Columbus Laboratory module aboard the International Space Station, where experiments abstract planetary processes under microgravity, photo: © NASA; (right) the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine in Western Australia, an extractive landscape whose materials — gold among them, integral to aerospace electronics—circulate into orbital infrastructures, even as the social and ecological costs of extraction remain unevenly grounded, photo: © Calistemon (CC BY-NC 4.0).

What interests me in particular is how laboratories today increasingly operate as anticipatory sites. In the context of climate change, technological acceleration and planetary transformation, they are where futures are modelled, risks are simulated, and thresholds are crossed. Studying laboratories as sites of dis:connectivity allows me to situate future-oriented debates in historical analyses of globalisation, tracing how experimental spaces and built environments have always shaped the governance of human and more-than-human futures under conditions of polycrisis and existential risk.

Anticipatory laboratories staging speculative futures of dis:connected globalisation beyond Earth. Cylindrical Colonies for a population of over a million (1976). Image: © NASA Ames Research Center / Rick Guidice - AC75-1086.

SQ: Our research at gd:c has only just begun to explore the relationship between temporality and global dis:connectivity. However, rereading existing scholarship through the lens of temporality, we see that the connection was there all along. Adding the two concepts of temporal dis:connectivity and dis:connected temporalities can only enrich our investigations. Temporality is central to how we experience globalisation and deglobalisation as well as to public debates about these phenomena, from fast-moving financial markets and disrupted supply chains to migrants waiting in transit and the idea of uneven historical change in different parts of the world.

Renaissance table clock (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

I am particularly interested in the latter phenomenon: the perception of diverging civilisational temporalities and varying cultural and political references between the present, the past and the future. I would argue that  focussing on temporalities in  the study of globalisation and dis:connectivity helps us better understand how global dis:connections are made, strained and experienced.

Arriving ship on a pocket watch (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

AG: Considering cultural infrastructure as a material framework helps make the highly theorised and complex research on globalisation more tangible to me. Cultural activities and spaces are visible platforms for discussing global narratives, whether they are brought to life on stage, presented loudly in public conversations or, more subtly, documented in books or materialised through exhibits. All these experiences foster critical thinking.  During the COVID-19 pandemic I first truly recognised the importance of cultural infrastructure not only as space for artistic expression, a repository of collective memory, but also as a connector. Debates about whether cultural infrastructure counts as an essential service shook its foundations and challenged its resilience. Ongoing cuts to the budgets of cultural institutions reinforce the injustice in disparate access and participation, forfeiting potential connection and replacing it with greater isolation.

Design exhibition (Salone des Mobile), Milan (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

While these micro-fractures may be hard to see, the vulnerability of cultural infrastructure is unmistakable in its symbolic and public positioning. It is exposed to digital threats such as cyberattacks as well as to analogue forms of violence, including the deliberate targeting and destruction of cultural heritage sites in times of war.

Ruins of a theatre in Mariupol (Image: Lirhan2016 via Wikimedia)

In the current political climate, I think it is more essential than ever to promote and practice intercultural dialogue. It is therefore inspiring to see how the diverse approaches at gd:c – scholarly research as well as artists’ perspectives – uncover striking parallels in the study of global and local cultural infrastructure. This shared knowledge encourages a can-do attitude and collaboration, even beyond our time here. [Editor's note: the interview continues here.] Continue Reading
20 January 2026