This summer seminar is a continuation of the 2024 SoSe seminar (PARA)Sites at Floating University. It is a site-specific, expanding theory-practice seminar. The seminar explores fragile spatiality using trans-disciplinary artistic methods, unlearning the coloniality of botany and working towards a series of spatial imaginaries of symbiotic care.

The potential of imagination is a very important and powerful tool for future worldbuilding. The assertion that „only if you can imagine it does it begin to exist“ is a fundamental underpinning of this approach. In the context of increasingly dystopian and hateful political landscapes, the imperative to resist is paramount. A radical reimagining of structures is therefore vital: structures of fragility and love, of symbiosis and resilience. The focus will be on the profound impact of colonial science and epistemologies, with particular attention to botany and biology.

Commencing on 6 May, a series of site-specific learning and experimental sessions will be held at the floating university, the former rainwater basin of Tempelhof Airport, which has been transformed into a third natureculture landscape. A first session on Rottenness will be hosted in collaboration with the artist Dan Lie.

Following this, we will engage with Ailton Krenak's Ancestral Future, and initiate an on-site recording of its implications, serving as a form of feedback or response to Krenak's essay.

By commencing the preparatory phase at an early stage, we will initiate the process of testing and refining various choreographies of spatial imaginaries of care, with the objective of preparing for a subsequent public encounter or presentation at the Floating University. The notion of care, in its various forms, is inherently linked to the questions of what we care about and who we are. The objective is to establish a collective understanding of how to achieve this transformation artistically, whether collectively or individually, and to explore new possibilities of what movement can entail.

First seminar at Raumstrategien Library Tuesday April 29, 2025

Starting date at Floating University: May 6 2025

Final feedback sessions at Floating University: July 15 -22 2025

Presentation weekend Floating University: Sa 12 - Sun 13th of July 2025

Literature:

Ailton Krenak, Ancestral Future, 2022

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub, Finding Ceremony, 2020

Dan Lie, Rotten Energy. Spaces with Consciousness. In: Strauss, Carolyn F. (ed.): Slow Spatial Reader. Chronicles of Radical Affection. Amsterdam:Valiz, 2021, pp. 301-310

Banu Subramaniam, Botany of Empire, Plant worlds and the scientific Legacies of Colonialism, University of Washington Press, 2024

Françoise Vergès, A Leap of Imagination, 2021