-1
archive,tag,tag-research,tag-176,qode-social-login-1.1.3,qode-restaurant-1.1.1,stockholm-core-2.3,select-child-theme-ver-1.1,select-theme-ver-8.9,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,paspartu_enabled,menu-animation-underline,fs-menu-animation-underline,header_top_hide_on_mobile,,qode_grid_1300,qode_menu_center,qode-mobile-logo-set,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-6.6.0,vc_responsive

‘The question is whether there are even two modes of working?’ A conversation about cooperation between the arts and humanities with Ayşe Güngör and Enis Maci

(an interview conducted by Nikolai Brandes and Anna Sophia Nübling of gd:c)
  Encouraging dialogue between the arts and the humanities is one of the principal goals of global dis:connect, so we asked two of our fellows about their experiences and what they would like to see at an institution like gd:c. We wanted to know what they think about this relationship in light of their current projects and to what extent this relationship is relevant to their work. Ayse Güngör is a curator and art historian with a background in art theory, anthropology and curation. She researches the confluence of art and anthropology in the work of contemporary Turkish artists, broadening narratives of global art, cultural exchange and eco-art practices. She investigates theories of artistic representation and institutional frameworks. Enis Maci studied sociology and creative writing. She is the author of an anthology, Eiscafé Europa (Suhrkamp 2018), and a number of plays, including WUNDER (Suhrkamp 2021). She has (co-)edited A Fascinating Plan (Spector 2021) and Filamentous Magic Carpets (März 2022). Most recently, her play LORBEER premiered at Schauspiel Stuttgart.

Enis Maci and Anna Nübling (right) discussing Filamentous Magic Carpets at the Lenbachhaus, August 2022 (Photo: Luzia Huber)

AN: To start, could you both tell us a bit about what you're currently working on? And given the subject of this conversation, we are especially interested in how you, as an author-playwright and curator, approach your topics considering that you both keep one foot in academia. EM: My current project started from a piece of pop culture: the early 90s high-school sci-fi movie Habitat, which is set in a near future where the ozone layer is irreversibly damaged. Earth has become extremely hot, and people mostly go out at night. The teenage protagonist, who has all kinds of teenager problems, is the son of two rogue scientists who have stolen an inexplicable, gnostic, slimy life form from a government lab. It escapes from its container and kind of eats or absorbs the father. However, this artificial life form is then somehow supposed to save the irreversibly doomed Earth. These themes lead to questions about multiplicity, about what life is exactly and what cooperation and interconnectedness could mean. And then, on another level, the teenage protagonist finds out that his parents have genetically engineered him to dampen the high temperatures. He thinks that's terrible and kind of embarrassing, but it turns out to be a superpower. Watching the movie today shows how the near future was imagined not too far in the past, while some of the parameters of this dystopic vision have vanished simply because there is not really a hole in the ozone anymore. The mysterious life form — the gnostic slime — interested me greatly. Something communal, but not collective. One cell with many nuclei, maybe. I explored that in an event at Lenbachhaus[1] and an accompanying anthology under the title Filamentous Magic Carpets (März, 2022). It turned out that the Lenbachhaus was planning an exhibition on Rosemarie Meyer, an American feminist artist of the 1970s who worked mostly in textiles. Rosemary’s work often dealt with unexpected connections between points in space and between materials. Loose threads everywhere. Her sister, Bernadette Meyer, is a poet. I’ve always loved her work. So, l turned to her book Utopia. Here, again, questions of communality, of a better future and the everyday life surrounding it. In Utopia, there is a chapter titled Filamentous Magic Carpets, where everything comes together. And then I invited five writers and two scholars to think about these things and write about them. It was an experiment and, eerily, their different ways of thinking did in fact intertwine into a slimy sort of tapestry. AN: As I was one of the two scholars you invited to think and about those things, I might add that it was fruitful to approach the topic as you suggested. To think with those ‘loose threads’ and to see what they unravelled. But let’s turn to Ayşe: what can you to tell us about your current project?

Ayşe Güngör

AG:  My project is about a series of exhibitions on representations of Istanbul in Germany since 2000. By exploring this as a complex relationship of global interconnectivity, I identify gaps and limitations in the globalisation of contemporary Turkish art by considering art and cultural politics in Europe. These exhibitions featured Turkish artists entangled in representational forms of the international art scene’s global agenda. Exhibitions of ‘Turkish art’ in Germany were often supported by big institutions that supported cultural exchange following Turkey’s application for EU membership. I focus on the ideas of connectedness and disconnectedness that evolved around those exhibitions, considering exhibition strategies and artistic forms of resistance. The goal is to decolonise the globalisation of contemporary Turkish art. I ask how we can represent without reductively constructing, defining, restricting, disintegrating or silencing artists’ autonomy. EM: If this is about being a Turkish artist in a global space, or maybe just outside the country, what is ‘being Turkish’? How can people be Turkish apart from citizenship? AG: I think the designation ‘Turkish’ allows outsiders to starkly limit who counts as ‘Turkish’. Everything was being related to Turkey in very restricted ways that didn’t acknowledge many identities. EM: That’s why I'm asking — people could relate to Turkey because they have lived there or they have citizenship, but still refuse the notion of being Turkish, which is a highly political question. AG: Definitely. But cultural identity is often instrumentalised while cultural diversity is supposedly celebrated. Turkish artists were also stereotyped in Germany. That was part of the cultural strategies that always relate to identity. I would love a term that denoted ‘from Turkey’ without implying ‘Turkish’. But I am also interested in how several exhibitions instrumentalised ‘Turkishness’ as a tool of cultural politics. AN: Returning to the matter at hand, do you consider artistic practice a process of cognition and knowledge production? It might, for example, offer freedoms denied to scholarship. And to what extent is what we learn from art different from what we learn from research? EM: I don’t think writing yields cognition or insight. The poetry of my work has a lot to do with finding something out. It is about having a hunch and trying to get to the bottom of it, or maybe having an itch, but not knowing where to scratch. So writing would be getting to the bottom of the hunch. Or maybe it’s as if I were trying to write directions to my itch. A lot is about finding out, like a detective or a scientist, maybe a mad scientist. And then I also think in terms of method, research, however you frame it, which is often finding the truth in something as much as discovering something useful. In my first book, for example, there's one essay on the identitarian movement. Not until I started compiling my artistic research did a realise that I had this huge database, which led me to write my master's thesis about them. So, the question of knowledge production kind of started with literature and evolved into scholarship.

Nikolai Brandes (Photo by Lamber Strehlke, strehlke@gmail.com)

NB: I like the idea that the starting point is the itch… EM: Isn’t that the case for you too? You go into the office, it's a nice day in Munich, you drink your coffee, you do some paperwork, things that need to be done, but then there’s something else, right? There is this one thing you need to find out about. Or maybe some asshole wrote an article, and he was like 80% correct, but 20% of it was wrong. You are so sure of that, so you need to, you know, understand it, prove it, get the truth out there. NB: Could you expand on switching between working artistically and academically? EM: The question is whether there are even two modes of working? Both methods have their limitations. In academia we are committed to objectifiable truths. But literary writing also seeks truths that need to be protected, truths in the slipstream of objectifiable truth. Both these commitments, in literature and in scholarship, come with certain ethics. But in the end, for my work at least, the distinction boils down to something esoteric, something small that resists enclosure. It’s even more blatant in the visual arts, because they resist the logic of language-based narration. AN: You described the process of digesting material. You leave things out, you add things, you have something in the ‘slipstream’ of the objectifiable … EM: You try to produce conclusions that are kind of necessary. But I don't think they would always meet the criteria of a necessary conclusion in the academic world. But there is a necessity to them somehow. It always depends on the work at hand. It always depends on what you're trying to find out and where the itch is or what the hunch was … NB: Ayse, maybe you could also expand on how you combine your research and curation. Is curating just another form of scholarship? AG: There is a negative impression that science always needs to keep a distance from society to remain objective. And today, artists are becoming more engaged with society as a research topic, which shows how research and art are joining forces. As Enis mentioned, she also digests material in many different ways. From my point of view, working as a curator and as a social scientist, artistic and scholarly approaches complement each other. In curation, research results might appear directly when organising an exhibition, which goes far quicker than research. Research and artistic practices cannot be distinguished from one another anymore. Therefore, I think in terms of ‘knowledge-making’, which we need to integrate into the social sciences. They need to be ‘flatter’ in engaging with arts. NB: Artistic thinking as a means of producing knowledge has become a very popular topic recently. It's a popular topic in art history and in curation too. If your own approach to art and artistic thinking is a means of knowledge production, can you think of any role models? Enis, have any writers inspired your way of learning through creative writing? You said that you sometimes find fine arts more interesting than literature because of what you called the visual arts’ ‘resistance towards language-based narration’. Are there any artists that you find particularly interesting? EM: That’s very difficult to answer. Artistic learning, maybe academic learning and maybe everyday learning (like you shouldn't touch the hot stove and such) don't really seem separate to me. I think the separation happens in methods and in the mutually agreed limitations of speech, maybe. So, I’m interested in finding out where these limitations lie and making that fertile for my work. I’m more interested in finding out how other people find things out and how that relates to me. But that, of course, is a sort writing that is very research based, that is kind of essayistic. Maybe you would find very different answers if you talked to novelists, which also requires research that is similar but not identical to the research my writing is based on. NB: I asked that question because when I began my current research — the architectural history of modernism in Africa — I first looked into the literature on the topic, which was interesting. But then I found a photo book by Guy Tillim, a South African photographer. He took pictures of late-colonial and early post-colonial architecture in southern Africa. Those pictures said so much. I felt there was not much to add academically. I had the feeling that everything was already there in the pictures. EM: That’s so interesting because if I saw that myself, as a writer, I would be like, ‘Okay, there is nothing to add; good luck to you; you did it’. But some things don’t ‘exist’ until you’ve researched them. Academia is oblivious to them. And you as an academic want to change that. I mean, this architecture exists to the people who live there, who see it every day, and to the people who built it, and to the people who know these photographs. But it does not exist to academics. So basically, you bring something that already exists into existence for other people. And that is an undertaking that goes beyond getting to objective truth. So, you were on a different kind of mission, which I find extremely interesting. AN: Ayse, do you feel the same? That you can't really answer whether there are any role models for your curation? AG: Not for curation, but I can think of role models for my research. My work focuses on the confluence of art and anthropology. I'm really influenced by the way Tim Ingold thinks in terms of the integration of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, by the way he thinks of ‘Making’ as transformative knowledge production, and how he advocates practicing inquiry rather than the conventional practice of ethnography, the way he argues that conventional ethnography does not lead anywhere. AN: Maybe you could say what you would expect from global dis:connect in the future? How can global dis:connect provide an environment for interdisciplinary cooperation? AG: You are already. I’d like a bit more collaboration with artists, because, ‘science’ has a bad reputation, it’s loaded with objectivity, which distances academia from other forms of research. So more artistic engagement could expand our understanding of academic research. Artistic research, visual representations and experimental practices could supplement text-based academic research. NB: But how do we avoid including artists as mere ornaments in projects like global dis:connect? You know, scholars doing the ‘serious’ stuff, and then including some artists who kind of illustrate the academics’ findings. EM: I didn’t feel like an ornament. Maybe because I don’t really regard my own research as substantially different from academic research. I expected exchange between fellows, I expected to connect with the city at large. And I am happy to report that both those things happened. So that's nice. I’m curious to see where I stand with this work after my fellowship. Will it feel like a wrap or will it lead to more questions? We will see!     [1] Maci’s event "Filamentous Magic Carpets" took place at the Lenbachhaus on 14 August 2022 and included readings, talks, a concert, a film and the launch of the book of the same title, see: https://www.globaldisconnect.org/10/18/ruminating-on-a-hunch-at-filamentous-magic-carpets/. Continue Reading

global dis:connect summer school 2022 – a connected view

david grillenberger
  From 2 to 5 of August 2022, 20 scholars – PhD students, organisers Anna Nübling & Nikolai Brandes and student assistants – gathered in Munich during a scorching heat wave for global dis:connect’s inaugural summer school. Our engaging discussions and presentations emitted as much energy as the sun itself. Titled Postcolonial interruptions? Decolonisation and global dis:connectivity, our very first summer school at global dis:connect focused on dis:connectivities in processes of decolonisation. The topic was apt, as decolonisation in itself is a very sudden (or sometimes very slow) interruption. It admits literal disconnects between former colonies and the empires that conquered them and simultaneously maintained connections to these empires. The process of decolonisation emphasises the colon in ‘dis:connectivity’ that, in this case, might represent the tension between independence and the continuation of relationships. After a (literally) warm welcome from co-director Prof. Christopher Balme and a get together in our garden on Tuesday (2. August), we gathered in global dis:connect’s library the next morning to hear the first master class by UCLA’s Ayala Levin. In her talk about Continuity vs. discontinuity from colonialism to postcolonialisms, Levin emphasised African actors’ agency, as, for example, when choosing Israel and China as partners for architectural projects. Both nations have framed themselves as former colonial subjects and ‘developing countries’ fit to help African nations’ ‘development’.
Ayala Levin's master class (Image: Annalena Labrenz & David Grillenberger)
Following Ayala’s master class and a short coffee break, Seung Hwan Ryu presented the first PhD project of the day, speaking on the relationship between North Korea and Tanzania. In his talk (Surviving the disconnection. North Korea’s social internationalism in Tanzania during the Cold War for a closer look, check out Seung Hwan’s post summarising the talk on our global dis:connect blog), Seung Hwan posed the question how North Korea was similar but different from other socialist globalisation projects. He emphasised ‘North Korea’s in-between geopolitical position’, between China and the USSR after the great disconnect that was the Sino-Soviet split. For some, Seung Hwan’s talk might have evoked memories of the fantastic Danish documentary The Mole, which features present-day North Korea and its dealings in Africa, which have attracted the UN’s attention in 2020. Next among the presentations was Lucas Rehnman, a Brazilian visual artist and curator, who presented his curatorial project. His project (Unfinished Museum of Peripheral Modernity) on postcolonial modernist architecture in Guinea-Bissau poses an interesting what-if question: what if Bissau-Guineans did not simply follow external influences in the context of ‘foreign aid’ and ‘technical cooperation’ but instead worked actively and creatively as architects, establishing an architectural legacy that deserves attention? After the lunch break, Adekunle Adeyemo presented his project on Israeli architect Arieh Sharon’s Obafemi Awolowo University Campus in Ile-Ife. Adekunle argued that the campus is a good example of modern architecture in Africa. He emphasised dis:connectivity when he argued that it was precisely the decolonial disconnect from the British empire that led Nigeria to look for new connections to Israel, as Ayala Levin also pointed out that morning. Adekunle framed the processes that led to Sharon’s designing the campus as a ‘Fanonian rupture’, as a crack in existing structures, which allows new things to fill the void. The last to present her project on our first full day together was Rahel Losier. Rahel spoke on the topic of ‘Sahrawi educational migration to Cuba from the 1970s to the present’. Chris Balme, one of the discussants, pointed out that the conflict in Western Sahara central to Rahel’s talk was one of our time’s ‘forgotten conflicts’ and that the relationship between Sahrawis and Cuba is a forgotten story. It is absent in history, one might say. And what could be more fitting than absences for the questions of global dis:connect? Rahel approached her research topic artistically as well and created a brilliantly unique comic out of the interviews she conducted for her project. The presentation of her first comic also initiated an interesting discussion on whether and how artistic practice could help to better formulate research questions. After an extended coffee break – much needed after engaging discussions and scholarly debates – Maurits van Bever Donker finished the day with a lecture, unintentionally representing the topic of ‘dis:connectivity’ in that he had to give his lecture remotely from South Africa. At 7:30 p.m., we all met for dinner and reflected on a long day of interesting projects and our new acquaintances. The next day, Thursday, 4 August, started with decolonisation and epistemology. First up was another master class, this time held by Prof. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni of Bayreuth University. He focused on three meta-topics: epistemology, decolonisation and dis:connectivity. Sabelo emphasised especially how knowledge itself could also be colonised and – referring to Dipesh Chakrabaty – suggested provincialising Europe in an institutional sense too, meaning that Western universities must reflect on the relationship between knowledge and power and how non-Western universities can get a more equal footing in global science. The perfect follow-up to Sabelo’s talk was Tibelius Amutuhaire, who spoke on The realities of higher education decolonisation: possibilities and challenges to decolonise university education in East Africa. Tibelius noted that, in most African universities, continuing eurocentrism is apparent in the exclusive use of Western (often foreign) languages to disseminate knowledge. Although, as Tibelius argued, African universities should lead the decolonisation efforts. In his master class, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni also referred to the role of peer-reviewed journals, of which the most prestigious are still located in the West. Tibelius’s takeaway was that one of the main problems today is the continuous re-education of ‘false’ knowledge. It was not only African countries and peoples who were subjected to colonialism, but also Asian countries like Pakistan, which was the focus of Talha Minas’ presentation. By focusing on the case study of Pakistan’s construction of its nationalist project, Talha discussed the theoretical and methodological challenges global history faces. He analysed the ‘master narrative’ of a Muslim claim to their own state in South Asia, especially in opposition to the British Empire. In the following discussion, gd:c co-director and one of this day’s discussants, Roland Wenzlhuemer argued that Talha’s topic could very well be a self-observational project that could tackle global history and its problems. The afternoon started with Hannah Goetze’s presentation. Her talk focused on weaving, whose own literal connectivity makes it all the more interesting from the perspective of disconnections. Hannah analysed two different subjects: Lubaina Himid’s artpiece cotton.com and Amalie Smith’s book Thread Ripper. Weaving, Hannah argued, is closely connected to the internet as well as history and the future of computers in both works. So, in a way, they are stories about networks, be they woven or digital. Up next was Flavia Elena Malusardi, whose research project aims to look at the cultural space Dar el Fan in Beirut and how women’s identities were shaped there between postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism. For example, the anti-establishment movements of the 1960s also resonated in Beirut and intersected with decolonisation and the Cold War. Founded in 1967 by Janine Rubeiz, Dar el Fan also promoted ideas of gender equality and visibility and offered women a space where they could enjoy extensive freedoms in an otherwise often still conservative society. The last of Thursday’s presentations focused on post-apartheid in South Africa. In his project, Brian Fulela analysed the novels of three different South African authors: K. Sello Duiker, Lgebetle Moele and Sifoso Mzobe. He examined the role and place of psychoanalysis in these novels and what psychoanalysis can bring to research on post-apartheid South Africa. Central to his project are feelings of trauma, loss and the subjectivity of post-apartheid, which are very much emotions and feelings of dis:connectivity. The next day, Friday, began at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in the centre of Munich. We were greeted by Stefan Eisenhofer and Karin Guggeis, who are responsible for the museum’s Africa and North America exhibitions. They showed us through the Africa exhibition and spoke on the difficulties of provenience research. Both also accompanied us back to global dis:connect to attend the remaining presentations.
The gd:c summer school takes a field trip to the Museum Fünf Kontinente. (Image: Annalena Labrenz & David Grillenberger)
The first presentation of the day came from Lucía Correa, who is researching the ethnographic collections of French-Swiss Anthropologist Alfred Metraux. Ethnographic museums, Lucía argues, were a new way of thinking about human history with an emphasis on material culture. Meanwhile, Latin America is in the process of deconstruction and working with native communities to decolonise museums and their collections, since the colonialist perspective that motivated the founding of ethnographic museums is no longer viable. Metraux considered his collections a way to ‘remember’ the indigenous populations, which he perceived to be rapidly disappearing as a result of Western expansion in the 1930s. It is easy to see how absences – one of the key concepts informing dis:connectivity – play an important role in Lucía’s research and the future of ethnographic museums in general. Next up was Claudia di Tosto’s talk on Austerity and muddled optimism: the impact of decolonisation on Britain’s participation at the 1948 Venice Biennale. Claudia spoke on the recontextualisation of Britain’s exhibition in the context of decolonisation after World War II. In her presentation, she focused on one case study, namely 1948 and two artists that were prominently featured at the exhibition: J.M.W. Turner – a 19th-century artist – and Henry Moore – a 20th-century artist and contemporary painter at the time of the Biennale. Claudia argued that Britain used its 1948 pavilion to project the image of a nation that was using humanism as a rhetorical tool to both cover the demise of the empire and still lay a claim of superiority over its former colonies. After our lunch break, Johanna Böttiger presented a very eloquently written essay in which she spoke on the topic of black dolls during the years of the Jim Crow laws in the USA. Children, argued Johanna, were an embodiment of coloniality and different stereotypes came with the colour of children’s skins – even in dolls, as black dolls were subjected to violence by white children. Certainly no child’s play, learned behavioural patterns like segregation or racism were also expressed in the form of children and dolls. The last presentation of our time together was testament to the breadth of backgrounds the participants brought with them. Franziska Fennert, a German artist living in Indonesia, presented her project Monumen Anthroposen as a film. The project consists of a ‘temple’, a monument complex, that is built in Indonesia and made from waste that is being transformed into a new product. Franziska’s aim was to redefine the relationship between humans, the planet and each other. In the long run, the ‘Anthropocene Monument’ should act as an infrastructure for upcycling that benefits its surrounding region. Franziska’s presentation concluded our time together in Munich – at least from a scholarly perspective – and heralded the beginning of a convivial get-together with some traditional Bavarian music, beer and Brezen (soft pretzels). The participants agreed that the concept of dis:connectivity informed their research, and their varied backgrounds made for an engaging discussion and a lot of valuable comments. It is almost staggering that a phenomenon such as decolonisation, which is so essentially dis:connective – the simultaneity of severing ties while still maintaining some and sometimes the stress they cause for the people involved – waited so long for the dis:connectivity treatment.
One, yet many (but not too many). (Image: Annalena Labrenz & David Grillenberger - the author in the back left with the snappy Hawaiian shirt)
Continue Reading

Looking back at global dis:connect’s first annual conference, 20-21 october 2022 (by hanni geiger & tom menger)

@Annalena Labrenz & David Grillenberger

The first annual conference of global dis:connect, entitled Dis:connectivity in processes of globalisation: theories, methodologies and explorations, took place in Munich on 20-21 October. As the title indicated, the conference aimed to ground the vast field of research on global dis:connectivity by probing what theories and methodologies might be fruitful. The conference sought to start the discussion rather than to formulate definitive answers, laying the groundwork for further reflections on these issues over the coming years in conversation with our current and future fellows at the centre. This international conference brought together different disciplines: historians, art historians, theatre scholars and others in conjunction with creative professionals from the arts, including architecture, design and theatre. The dialogue between theory and practice, each with its own distinctive approaches, induced productive friction. Artistic and philosophical approaches showed their potential to offer new modes of studying a phenomenon as complex as global dis:connectivity. The conference featured three panels: interruptions, absences and detours. The presentations revealed how researching these modes of dis:connectivity can mean very different things. Such research can mean asking about tradition and modernity and their relation to globalisation; it meant looking at the interplay of nationalism and globalisation in societies marked by stringent national, ethnic and religious demarcations; it meant searching for connections and disconnections simultaneously in such bounded contexts such as the global interactions of the Cold War era. Many papers also looked at how individuals negotiate global connections and disconnections in their own personal biographies, revealing the affective attributions, emotions and ideological influences that make globalisation processes significant in the first place. Such research also entails recovering the agents and groups that were effaced by later hegemonic narratives. Some participants even sought to understand experiences of  dis:connectivity beyond our conventional Western understandings of linear time and Euclidian space in ways that might enable more personalised modes of dealing with forced or trauma-induced immobility.

@Ben Kamis

Dis:connectivity is an expansive research object and always threatens to elude us. The papers and unconventional presentations of this conference emphasised both the need to refine the term and the extent to which unconventional methodologies and theories allow us to approach dis:connectivity. The complexity of globalisation processes that the conference sought to explore affect our present in dramatic ways. As was highlighted in the conference’s wrap-up, seeking to better understand this complexity can tangibly affect society. The original announcement and the full programme of the conference can be found here. Continue Reading

The global politics of give and take: a workshop with Susanne Schütte-Steinig and Sabine Sörgel in two parts

sabine sörgel
Image 1: In lieu of the audience: the gaze of the touch-spectre
Our performance workshop started from the premise of ‘give and take’ in the global dynamics of social and economic exchange to investigate the notion of ‘dis:connect’ from a phenomenological perspective. By emphasising sensual touch in the encounter with personal objects, we sought to abstract from the visual and intellectual engagement that is often the focus of such transaction in other contexts. The debates on the restitution of art objects from the Global South to their countries of origin was also at the back of our minds, yet we did not want to make this our direct and obvious starting point. Rather, we sought to address some of those issues at a micro-level of interhuman exchange and communication. Our shared interest in objects and hands also arose from a common background in yoga, meditation and somatic practice. We both wondered about how such practices affect communication and how we cope with the global intersections of contemporary crises, as the wider consequence of the many so-called darker sides of global modernity and racial colonial capitalism. Our initial conversations started over socially distanced walks and coffees in the Englischer Garten. Susanne Schütte-Steinig soon showed me a sketch of two wooden boxes facing each other closely resembling a basic puppet theatre. Except that in this case, the puppeteers use their own hands only, whilst their bodies are held in upright stillness, resting their chin on a soft foam pad, legs shoulder-width apart in a relaxed posture, with their pubic bone just underneath the open window facing their partner on the opposite side (Image 1, 2 and 4).[1]
Image 2: The somatic “box set”
That sketch ended up depicting the position held by our workshop participants for several heartbeats a couple of months later, half-way through my research fellowship. And whilst each participant centred their hands on their chest, focusing their attention inwards before offering their object for exchange, I wondered about the shadows of globalisation in that empty space (Image 4).

Part one: interviews at global dis:connect

Image 3: A sprocket cassette from Taiwan
Interviews are a common method in various types of research, including oral histories, anthropology and history. They are also a common feature of the TV and social-media world, and many of us will have sweated through an interview as the final hurdle to getting their dream job. However, our artistic workshop was not particularly interested in any of these interview techniques and formats. Rather, the focus was to be solely directed towards the object itself, as well as the gestures of the hands holding it. The objects were therefore initially chosen by each participant with the following instruction:
  • Bring a personal object related to your current research project, either an archival source or an everyday tool, that is indispensable to the way you work at your best.
Later in the artistic process, this instruction was modified to say that the object would have to be three dimensional and fit between two hands and no larger than a laptop screen, for the practical reason that it had to fit through the window set-up as well, as we became more and more interested in the idea of being able to hold something of personal value in your actual hands from both a kinetic and felt-energetic perspective. Some of the interview questions arose from my academic research on the Jungian notion of the shadow to investigate the darker aspects of globalisation, as those repressed parts of the Western European psyche run havoc in the present shaping of contemporary crises, from the resurfacing of unaddressed systemic racism to the extraction of resources and climate change. The aim of the interview was thus to interrogate the extent to which Europe itself, and perhaps academia and academics more than others, must question many commonplace Enlightenment values and liberties, which have historically been built on the exclusion and exploitation of human and non-human ‘sources of life’ from the Global South.[2] Susanne’s artwork, on the other hand, addresses some of these questions through her practice in dance and architecture to investigate the in-between space of encounter through the performative engagement with objects she designs and choreographs as set spatial scores and actions. Through dance and body work, we each had a point of reference that connected us throughout the initial conversations on the theme of ‘give and take’ that led to the following set of interview questions for the workshop participants:
  • Why did you become a historian (researcher)?
  • Why did you choose to bring this object?
  • What is your fondest memory of visiting an archive?
  • What is your relationship to the European Enlightenment?
  • Did you ever experience theft, steal something or was something stolen from you?
The interviews were planned so as to meet our participants in our everyday work surroundings at the global dis:connect offices and to introduce the object as a personal object closely tied to both the researcher’s sense of self as well as their profession and research. As a researcher at global dis:connect, I was very aware of the risks this workshop was asking my colleagues to take. A professional habitus is hard to acquire, difficult to shed and marks so much of our market value as humanities researchers in the contemporary world. Therefore, we were careful to create an open situation of mutual trust that would make it very difficult for the researcher to automatically fall into their default academic habitus of presenting themselves through an elaborate talk or paper, but rather to give us an impromptu and spontaneous response of no more than three to four unprepared sentences. Such initial thoughts and associations, as a matter of fact, enabled an open encounter with the participants’ objects as a form of disconnect rather than a carefully crafted argument that would usually have to be closed to persuade. It was thus that I hoped to get hold of the shadow aspects entailed in this form of presentation. On the day of the interviews, we had four participants from global dis:connect share their objects and responses, whilst the camera captured the ‘handling of the object’ in a posture of care no wider than the camera frame between lap and top and the gestures one makes in this sacred space between the pelvis (lap) and the heart (top).

Part two: the Yoga of talking hands

Hand on your heart, are you ready to give your object?
Disconnected from our everyday working environment, the invitation to Susanne’s Atelier in Munich’s Baumstraße offered the researchers an opportunity for a performative encounter with each other and our objects in a different setting. The day was sunny and two more members of global dis:connect were able to join us, as they had recovered from a Covid-19 infection the previous week. In their cases, we had no accompanying interview to go with but only their yoga of hands. Not unlike the European Enlightenment, yoga practice has also journeyed across the globe into our living rooms and local gyms. Yet, as a practice it predates the European Enlightenment by centuries and perhaps is the more sophisticated for it. Although many people around the world practice yoga and meditation these days, there is still a tendency to consider these spiritual and physical activities separate – as separate as is the body from the mind, even now, for some of us brought up in a false sense of neutral objectivity grounded in notions of Enlightenment philosophy and the split that was supposedly created there. In this second part of the workshop, it was our chance to break with the Enlightenment conventions of European research and bring these disconnected spheres of research and artistic practice together. With the help of the artist’s skill to re-connect the disconnected through her theatrical set-up, we hoped to shed some light on the shadow aspects of global exchange practices in other realms. And as each participant entered Susanne’s installation, they found themselves no longer able to hide behind elaborate words or even in a photographic representation of themselves as in aesthetic realism, because all but their hands touching was withheld from their own view. In this vulnerable moment, the hands started talking their own language, as they were led by the energy of the individual heartbeat.
The Yoga of Hands and the Space In-Between
 

The wounded researcher

A week after the workshop, I listened again to the interviews in search of the shadows of our hidden thoughts, those truths we so often do not dare to speak. This is to say that in each of our thoughts there is always a disconnect from all that is not thought in that moment so that an in-between space marks this shadow area that is always also at work in thought processes. As Merleau-Ponty continues to explain this idea in an essay called The Philosopher and his Shadow:
Just as the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothing, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same thing and the same world), so the works and thoughts of a philosopher are also made of certain articulations between things said.[3]
These ‘certain articulations between things said’ are now captured in the yoga of hands and the silent negotiation that takes place in the in-between encounter of Susanne’s edited film of this performative installation in two parts. Deprived of their elaborate wordings, the researchers in this project opened themselves to become vulnerable to the essence of touch. This in-between space holds, for me, the colon in the conceptual idea of the centre’s name: ‘Dis:connect’ then offers an opportunity to account for the shadow aspect of that absence, which is only made visible by all that is not seen much less explained, but merely felt in an instance of touch.   [1] There is no audience in the conventional sense, only the camera (alias ‘The Touch-Spectre’), which zooms in on the exchange of hands and the space in/between. No one claps, the beginning and end are decided by the two participants only and guided by Susanne’s movement instructions and action score. [2] Achille Mbembe addresses this point in several of his works and the term ‘sources of life’ reflects on the energetic and creative essentials of living that have been sacrificed to the necropolitical project of Western colonial modernity whilst they remain a constant source also for the rebuilding of new African subjectivities. [3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 160.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums. The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2020. Iyengar, B.K.S. Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. London: Thorsons, 1993. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London/New York: Routledge, 1990. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Priyamvada, Gopal. ‘On Decolonization and the University’. Textual Practice 35, no. 6 (2021): 873–99. Romanyshyn, Roman. The Wounded Researcher. Research with Soul in Mind. London/New York: Routledge, 2013. Savoy, Bénédicte. Africa’s Struggle for Its Art. History of a Postcolonial Defeat. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. Schütte-Steinig, Susanne. Going to Paradise. München, 2022. www.sss333.de.  
citation information:
Sörgel, Sabine, and Susanne Schütte-Steinig. ‘The Global Politics of Give and Take: A Workshop with Susanne Schütte-Steinig and Sabine Sörgel in Two Parts’. Blog, Global Dis:Connect (blog), 29 November 2022. https://www.globaldisconnect.org/11/29/the-global-politics-of-give-and-take-a-workshop-with-susanne-schutte-steinig-and-sabine-sorgel-in-two-parts/?lang=en.
Continue Reading