Anna Lauenstein | Leon Vatter
There is always Urgency: Artistic, Political and Social Speculations on the Climate Disaster
Online seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Mondays, 16-18 h, weekly, starting 19.4.2021

The seminar proposes a space for initiating, continuing and reflecting artistic, social and political works, following Donna Haraway’s urgent plea for speculations as a way of living on a damaged planet and as a way out of the climate disaster.

In one half of the seminar we will examine the modern western divide between nature and culture as well as the growing correlation of climate change and migration. For this we may introduce and discuss theoretical and artistic positions by Karen Barad, Philippe Descola, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Walter D. Mignolo, Timothy Morton, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing as well as Gabrielle Brady, Cyprien Gaillard, Lisa Rave and Philip Scheffner.

The other half of our class will focus on sharing and reflecting your own particular artistic, social or/and political works and their development throughout the semester. We understand the seminar as an interdisciplinary classroom to reflect on your artistic practices as well as practices of activism and social work. Besides this joint reflection on individual works, the seminar values and enables possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations and for sharing your particular skills and practices for a common purpose.

Your participation in this seminar will go well along attending the weekly lecture series “Get going. Exploring ways through the climate disaster”, which takes place right after the seminar sessions. So if you feel motivated by the lecture series and you want to get going by working on projects concerning the climate disaster, you are more than welcome to join this seminar. As far as the pandemic situation allows this, we are planning to do one field trip besides our weekly online seminar.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: Regular and active participation as well as sharing ones artistic/social/political practice.

Anna Lauenstein, who grew up in Chemnitz and Leipzig, lives and works as an artist and filmmaker in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts with a focus on New Media at the University of the Arts (Berlin) with Prof. Jimmy Robert, Prof. Ming Wong and as „Meisterschülerin“ with Prof. Hito Steyerl. In her exchange semester she was at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens. She also studied Cultural Anthropology at the Humboldt University (Berlin) and the University of Leipzig. In her artistic research she combines artistic as well as cultural anthropological methods and works within the tensions between knowledge, poetics and politics, whereby a decolonial perspective on Europe is central. Her works have been shown e. g. at Kunstquartier Bethanien, the Museum of Photography, Berlin and the BWA Gallery, Wrocław. She was nominated for the President's Fine Arts Award of UdK and she was awarded the NaFöG fellowship. Since August 2020 she is also working at Studium Generale as an artistic and scientific assistant.

Leon Vatter studied philosophy and political sciences at Freie Universität Berlin and Universitá di Urbino. Since October 2019, he has been working as a research assistant in the Studium Generale team at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he regularly teaches seminars in both cultural studies and interdisciplinary arts. His areas of work are in political philosophy, feminist philosophy of science and futurology. In addition to teaching, he is active in the DAAD-funded Integra project Beyond UdK, founded in 2020.