2019.1 | The New Alphabet School HKW Berlin

9. Oktober 2018  by 

I am happy to announce my participation in The New Alphabet School at HKW Berlin (January 2019)

The New Alphabet School is a school for artistic, curatorial, archival, poetic, activist, critical and affirmative research practices. Over the course of 3 years, it will function as a colloquium to engage in discussions and develop ideas for HKW enthusiasts, new voices in the field, and those who already collaborate with HKW.

HKW offers a space for research approaches outside of academic, disciplinary, or genre constraints, seeking different methods of learning and unlearning in order to rethink the idea of criticism as a practice of shared responsibility and care.

The New Alphabet School will combine a HKW-based colloquium and site-specific workshops at libraries, archives, collections, and museums worldwide. In this fieldwork, taxonomies, categories or institutional frameworks will be analyzed in order to come to an understanding of the logics of cultural domination, national chauvinism or human exceptionalism that permeate institutional landscapes in the field of culture and beyond and to develop strategies of reframing and renarrating the discourses they produce.

The New Alphabet School is part of Das Neue Alphabet, curated by Bernd Scherer and his team. It will be inaugurated with an (Un-)Learning Place during the opening days of Das Neue Alphabet in January 2019.

More information: https://hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2019/das_neue_alphabet/the_new_alphabet_school/the_new_alphabet_school_start.php

Own statement

My current main research area — apart from my expertise on the work of American artist Paul Thek and questions of ephemerality, materiality and documentation — is dedicated to 1) the question of how we as curators and researchers can approach the development of modernity by the juxtapositioning of archival-based, historic research of the „document“ to new strands of theoretical concepts of modernity. This key question becomes especially apparent when we are confronted with the subjective side of artistic and curatorial practices and decisions. These are often interconnected to structures of cultural policy, the market or personal aspirations. The task of contemporary research is bring to light historic items and contextualize them within a new narrative. My other research focuses on 2) strategies of radical pegagogies, especially those of the Brazilian context around Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal and bell hooks. I am interested in how far these concepts, via the platform and mediation of UNESCO channels, reached European ground. It is particularly interesting to me how these concepts can be actualized within the current discussion of a reformulation of the academic and scholarly world. This leads me to my third research area, 3) the question what we can learn from the non-human. Challenged by my own training as an animal shiatsu therapist and animal communicator I am looking for joint areas in the context of what science would call the theory of the mind.

The particular connection between humans and non-humans, especially domesticated animals such as dogs and horses, urge me to think about ways of the (un-)learning. Historically speaking, the paradigm of the unlearning is strongly connected to anarchist pedagogy (Illich) and many art related open schools. In this context I am working on an own concept of a school where the knowledge of especially dogs and horses are observed and adopted in an essayistic and non-conform way.

Based on the ideas above I have just finished a scientific-essayistic novel on the relationship between me and my dog while I was away for a residency in London. The output is a conversation about the limits and possibilites of intra-spiecies conversation, intermingled with my observations of being in a large city such as London. The writing is a sort of serious and unserious commentary on the relationship between a city, a dog and a human.

The comments above show my interest in the connection of the humanities and research of the mind that circles around the impact the discovery of the genetic code has on the position of the human species in our world. Geopolitics is decided without the consideration of the animal kingdom. Alternatively it seems time to think about a new vocabulary which takes into account the false dimensions of human exceptionalism and seeks to reassess it. How can fake information be reformulated and uncovered via the language of the non-human species?

Comments are closed.