“Unlearning (University)” is an ongoing collective learning process. It involves somatic transformations of the power relations we embody. The symposium Unlearning University builds on decades of often invisible work by positions that remain mostly excluded from the university. Spaces for collective echoes accompany the symposium as participatory formats. They invite multi-perspective, resistant and caring echoes as forms of collective evaluation. They offer space for love letters as well as for the expression of dissent. It is about learning processes that extend beyond the symposium. From the perspective of anti-discriminatory and critical art education, the following questions will be asked: What needs to be emphasized or repeated? What is neglected or missing? The echoes will be collected in an online zine by the tender and tentacular Wht-th-fck oracle. The oracle is a ravenous and voracious being. It lives in Echo Space, a portal that opens to futures that are less violent. The oracle is greedy for participants’ experiences of critical diversity and (un)learning at university and in life. It is greedy for the echoes of the participants on Unlearning University, their messages, questions and concerns.
The Spaces for Collective Echoes are the responsibility of the Echo Space Collective. It consists of students and teachers from the Institute for Art in Context as well as members of the Sickness Affinity Group. The collective shares an interest in anti-discriminatory practices between art, education and activism.
The following formats are planned:
- Echo Space First feeding of the oracle: To kick off the symposium, the tender and tentacular Wht-th-fck oracle will be fed with wishes, visions, fears, hopes, anxieties of the participants regarding Unlearning University.
When: Thursday, 8/2/24, between 10 and 11 am
Where: Aula
Languages: spoken German, GSL
- Echo Space Further feedings of the oracle: The tender and tentacular Wht-th-fck oracle is hungry for echoes on the contributions from participants after all symposium contributions. What is particularly important to you? What needs to be emphasized? What touches you? What makes you angry? What is missing? The tender and tentacular Wht-th-fck oracle feeds the echo chamber with the echoes. There, echoes are digested, regurgitated, excreted and prepared for future “unlearning”. They can become part of the Echo Space online zine.
When: after all symposium contributions
Where: Echo Space in the gallery
Languages: spoken German and English, GSL
- Echo Space Invitation to Unlearn: mini-performance workshop by and with Alisa Tretau. The workshop opens the Echo Room/Gallery.
How do visitors to the symposium understand the practice of “unlearning” and what experiences have they already had with it? What feelings and hopes does the event touch on and what would an unlearned university actually look like? These and many other questions will be negotiated performatively in the mini-workshop with games, statements and wigs.
When: Thursday, 8/2/24, 2.45-3.30 pm
Where: Echo room in the gallery
Languages: spoken German, whispered translation to spoken English if required
- Echo Space Embodying Unlearning: Deep Tissue. A participatory self-massage workshop by and with Zaidda Nursiti Kemal
When: Friday, 9/2/24, 12-12.30 pm
Where: Aula
Languages: English spoken language, German written language, GSL
- Echo Space Wht th fck&Tenderness – Zine and print workshop with silent dinner: for deaf, hard of hearing and hearing guests by and with Mudar Al-Khufash, Barbara Bielitz, Xenia Dürr, Judith Greitemann, Ximena Gutiérrez Toro and Zoë Sebanyiga.
In this format, pressure can be released or built up, love letters can be written and much more. It is a culinary silent format that does not involve spoken communication. Cooking and eating are important forms of community building as well as for unlearning exclusion mechanisms at the table (dinner table syndrome).
When: Friday, 9/2.´/24, from 6:30 pm
Where: Echo room in the gallery
Participants: 25 (with registration)
Please send an e-mail with your name, access requirements and questions/comments to fantastische_gruende@posteo.de by February 7th at the latest. Subject: Wht th fck&Tenderness
Languages: spoken and written German, GSL
- Echo Space Embodying Unlearning: participatory-somatic-performance with Lisa Siomicheva
When: Saturday, 10/2/24, 4 pm
Where: Echo Space in the gallery
Languages: spoken German, GSL
- Echo Space The Tender & Tentacular Oracle: A workshop by Sickness Affinity Group members Frances Breden and Stassja Mrozinski. In this workshop, the oracle-with-tentacles will collect your questions. These will be answered collectively. This workshop was inspired by the Sickness Affinity Group’s oracle format.
When: Saturday, 10/2/24 from 4.30-7 pm
Where: Echo room in the gallery
Participants: 20 (with registration)
Please send an email with your name, access needs and questions/comments to fantastische_gruende@posteo.de by February 7th at the latest. Subject: The tender & tentacular oracle
Languages: German spoken language, German written language, GSL
Echo Space Collective
Mudar Al-Khufash’s work operates at the intersection of cultural studies and art. He is the founder and editor of awham magazine, an anti-orientalist, cultural and political publication. Drawing on queer and feminist theories and a post-human perspective, Mudar articulates his diasporic experience as a Palestinian and develops an auto-theory based on this identity, which he communicates through a mixture of word, video and performative output.
Frances Breden is a curator, artist and editor. She is dedicated to community-oriented and collective art making in digital and IRL spaces.
She is one sixth of the queer feminist art collective COVEN BERLIN (since 2014). Frances was a founding member of the Sickness Affnity Group in 2017, a support and resource group on accessibility, disability and illness. Frances’ latest collective is called Complainers and Killjoys and offers workshops on memes as a form of institutional critique.
Xenia Dürr is a photographer and activist. She loves philosophizing about attitudes towards languages and confronting people with socially critical issues, especially audism.Xenia wants to use photography to raise awareness and encourage people to engage with and question these issues. In addition, Xenia regularly gives workshops critical of audism – mainly in the cultural sector – to sensitize hearing institutions to a conscious approach to working with deaf people and artists.
Danja Erni is rehearsing slowness and enjoys spending time with plants. She* likes different ways of getting in contact and exchanging ideas and learns to do so in spoken or written language, with signs, emotions, in movement and through touch. She* deals – mostly in teams – with questions of discrimination critique and intersectionality between art and education from a critical white, queer-feminist and anti-ableist perspective.
Ximena Gutiérrez Toro carries her time within herself and makes many mistakes. She is a visual artist with experience in art education, art pedagogy and graphic design. She is interested in developing creative projects that bring a critical perspective and promote the unlearning of social constructions.
Judith Greitemann deals with the representability and mediation of human body perceptions/expressions in the field of tension between art and medicine from an anti-ableist and queer-feminist perspective. Judith works cinematically and performatively with aesthetics of accessibility. Judith sees the personal and subjective as a resource and starting point for her collective practice.
Simon Noa Harder is a water rat and a friend of molluscs, is committed to trans*formative spaces, preferably intersectional, community-based and collective with DIY charm and glitter. They operates at the intersections of cultural-political education, art/performance, critical trans* studies, embodied social justice and somatic work. Researches the trauma-informed reclaiming of neuro-queer bodyminds, the trans*formation of shame and the embodiment of pleasure.
Zaidda Kemal asks many questions about the word “being” (the being, the essence, the beingness, the creature). Well-being is one of them. With bodywork, she wants people to tell their well-being and the story of their politicized body.
Nastassja Isabelle Mrozinski is a designer and researcher. Stassja is interested in how different bodyminds and other material-semiotic actors interact, as well as their intertwined power relations and histories. As a member of the Sickness Affinity Group, Stassja helps organize self-help group meetings and participatory artistic formats with a focus on relearning ableism and practices of access design.
Zoë Sebanyiga feels most comfortable in spaces of reflection. Needle, thread and textiles are her tools to overcome or tear down social walls. Her work as a dressmaker and fashion designer, costume designer and anti-racism speaker questions discriminatory structures and aims to provide strength for a path that is critical of discrimination.
Lisa Siomicheva works with documentary-based and site-specific art, with communities and their narratives. Through various media such as photography, video, theater, performance and installation, she often works with personal and collective memories, collects stories and fantasies, browses through archives and uses observation and reflection to develop new embodied forms of reflection.
Alisa Tretau believes in the community as a motor of creative transformation and practices theatrical subversions of everyday power structures. Whether as a director or performer, author or workshop leader – she deals, preferably improvised and interactive, with issues that performatively draw together the private and the political, most recently with cognitive dissonance in the face of the climate crisis and emancipatory practices in the context of parenthood.