Viviane Tabach
Radical Futurity Toward Ecological Justice
Seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Thursdays, 10-13 h, 9 dates: 16.4., 23.4., 30.4., 21.5. 28.5., 4.6., 11.6., 18.6., 2.7.2026, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 151

Registration on Moodle starts on 9.4.2026:https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=3039
Enrolment Key: ecological

This seminar explores how art institutions and museums can move beyond their entanglement with colonial histories and extractive logics to actively shape futures grounded in environmental responsibility, reparative justice, and community-led transformation. It centers practices of restitution, environmental stewardship, and long-term alliances with Indigenous, diasporic, and land-based communities — not as peripheral gestures, but as essential foundations for institutional transformation.

What institutional forms and policy frameworks are necessary to redistribute power, land, and resources? How can curatorial practices and cultural infrastructures support ecological solidarities that resist extractivism, anthropocentrism, and technocratic visions of sustainability?

Building on the previous seminar Ecological Thresholds: Environment, Activism, and the Future of Museums and in dialogue with the 2025–26 Studium Generale theme Zukünftigkeit / Futurity, this seminar treats futurity as a contested site of collective imagination and reconfiguration, driven by the refusal to reproduce dominant logics of preservation, progress, and control.

Through site visits, critical readings, and experimental methods, participants will investigate how museums and cultural organizations can serve as practical spaces for collective engagement and action, encouraging the development of approaches to transform cultural institutions toward ecological and social justice.

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation: Active, regular participation.

Viviane Tabach is a Brazilian curator, art mediator, and artist based in Berlin. Her practice explores the intersections between education, curation, and artistic research. She works through participatory and situated methodologies, engaging with ecological justice, de/countercolonial perspectives, and transdisciplinary collaboration. Viviane Tabach co-curates the project Dissident Paths at nGbK Berlin, and initiated Devolver a Terra à Terra – an ongoing project curated by her that investigates the spiritual, political, identitarian and cultural aspects of the land. Viviane has taught at the Universität der Künste Berlin and contributed to various educational initiatives, including the School of Commons in Zurich. She is a member of Cruising Curators since 2020 and ReRouting, collectives that experiment with modes of research and exhibition-making. She has founded and directs the project space Co-Making Matters, at Haus der Statistik (Berlin), and co-founded and co-directed the art space Casa Aberta in São Paulo, where she organized transdisciplinary projects that integrated music, dance, visual arts, and other forms of expression. She has worked for institutions such as documenta, Berlin Biennale, Gropius Bau, Flughafen Tempelhof, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Sesc Pompeia, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, and others, and has collaborated with projects and spaces such as Buro Stedelijk, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, HKW, Floating University, Brücke Museum, Arts of the Working Class, Hopscotch Reading Room, OSTEN Festival, Grassi Museum, and Pilotenkueche Art Residency. Viviane Tabach holds a Master's degree in Art in Context at Universität der Künste Berlin and a Master’s degree in Cultures of the Curatorial at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig. She holds a postgraduate degree in Art: Criticism and Curatorship from PUC-SP, as well as a Teaching Practice and Bachelor of Visual Arts degrees from the Instituto de Artes da Universidade Estadual Paulista.