Intending the environment as a complex and contested habitat, in which natural, built and digital elements coexist and interact, the seminar will examine the visible and invisible wounds in these interrelated ecosystems. Within this framework, it will analyze the role and strategies played by other-than-humans as memory agents that actively transform, erase, or preserve structural traumas.

By definition, a wound is a break in the continuity of a bodily tissue caused by any action of external agency. Making an organism or a body vulnerable, penetrable, and thus potentially exposed to contamination, contagion, and corruption. Therefore, wounds turn into accessible territories, and places of passage. Furthermore, these traumas are not to be intended as “post” violence, rather persistent processes that develop in different ways and through various forms.

If, as geographer Jessica Dubow claims, the environment absorbs the events played out on its surface, and in doing so, it buries the marks of past practices as much as it also bears its traces, what signs and how do remain recognizable, while others simply disappear?

However, by creating spaces of transformation, wounds potentially pave the path for forms of regeneration and restart.

Acknowledging natural entities as active subjects that function as memory agents able to structure space and time, how does the environment remember, and what does it forget? To what extent are more-than-humans witnesses and memorials of persisting, structural violence? Within this frame, how do digital tools and products contribute to this process of writing memory and narratives?

Through texts by scholars from different disciplines, such as memory studies, geography, anthropology, visual arts, and artists’ works as case studies, the seminar aims to raise reflections upon and discussions. Furthermore, students are invited to present their own case studies that can enrich and question the perspectives proposed.

During the seminar, the group will participate in activities, such as visits to exhibitions, and encounters with artists and researchers.

As part of the seminar, we'll develop a cooperation with the class of Digital and Time-Based Art, held by Professor Heba Y. Amin (ABA Stuttgart), which will result in a contribution to a public discourse program. This participation is directly connected with the final assignment, as for the course, you are required to write an essay that will be presented occasion of the public program. 

The assessment is based on the participation and contribution during the seminar, and the quality of the writing.

Reading list:

Henni, Samia. 2024. Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara. Edition fink, Zurich (excerpts);

Liboiron, Max .2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press;

Said, Edward. 2000. Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry, 26(2), 175–192;

Dubow, Jessica. 2008. “The Art Seminar,” a roundtable discussion reproduced in Landscape Theory, eds. Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins (London: Routledge);

Teichler, Hanna. “Remembering the Ways of the Water: Transoceanic Memory in Anglophone Literature.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 60 (6): 833–48, 2024. doi:10.1080/17449855.2024.2438739;

Yıldırım, Umut. 2023. ‘War-torn Ecologies: Human and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts’, in War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press). Ebook available here: https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-27/Y%C4%B1ld%C4%B1r%C4%B1m_war-torn-ecologies.html

and others will be provided during the seminar.

SCHEDULE:

The class takes place every Monday from 2 to 5 pm.

Exceptionally, the first class on MONDAY 20 OCTOBER will take place from 10 am to 1 pm ONLINE. Below, the link:

https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/62522102252?pwd=5xuwrvatXXqZkU4a4DWb6baNIBYVbX.1