Ofri Lapid
Writing the Spectral: a collaborative writing workshop with AI
Workshop, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Mondays, 10-12h, Weekly, starts 20.10.2025, Hardenbergstraße 33, room 110

In `Artifacts of History: Events and the Interpretation of Images´, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern recounts how, upon the arrival of Europeans, a Papua New Guinean community did not greet them as strangers, but as long-anticipated figures: the return of yet-unborn children, the reappearance of ancestral spirits. This encounter collapses linear chronology, folding past and future into a single, uncanny moment—one that troubles the boundary between memory and anticipation, presence and absence. Such moments, Strathern suggests, reveal ways of knowing that resist conventional historical interpretation, opening onto deeper structures of meaning.

This seminar invites participants to explore these entanglements of time, absence, and arrival through the practice of reading and writing. Can a text become a threshold for ghostly visitations—for unexpected encounters with human and non-human presences? How might we welcome such interruptions—with suspicion, ambivalence, curiosity? Through artistic, theoretical, and poetic lenses, we will trace the spectral: what lingers, what returns, what resists articulation. Alongside close reading, we will engage in experimental modes of textual production—collaborative writing, translation, AI-generated text, and deconstructive play—to surface what haunts the page and shapes meaning beyond intention. This is a space for working with and through ambiguity, uncertainty, and disruption.

The seminar is open to all who wish to engage text as a site of experimentation across disciplines, languages, and forms, in a non-goal-oriented manner. 

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation: Participants are expected to attend and actively participate in seminar sessions, engage with short readings assigned between meetings, contribute to the collaborative writing process.

Ofri Lapid is a visual artist and Ph.D. candidate at HFBK Hamburg (submitted). Her work explores the reconfiguration and activation of knowledge through site-specific research and collaboration, resulting in media installations and performative readings that blur boundaries between research, narrative, and collective authorship. She has exhibited internationally, including at IFA Gallery Berlin (2022/23) and the Yiddishland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2022). Together with Marija Petrovic, she published Silver (Material Verlag, 2023), and has contributed texts to Re/Versionen (Neofelis, 2024) Slug (online, 2020) and Archiv Dekolonialisieren (Transcript, 2018). She has taught seminars at HFBK Hamburg ("verdauen, entgrenzen, bessesen-sein") and with ELES Studienstiftung ("Das temperament der Wörter"), focusing on language, materiality, and speculative text practices.