Seminar, co-teaching with Helene Romakin
Protect Us From What We Want
Protect Us From What We Want, 2024
Workshop with students of HKB (Bern Academy of the Arts) in a high-rise in Bern Bümplitz, Switzerland
Realize that you are on the 14th floor of a 20-story high-rise building. Do you have any ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape? Can you imagine to life here?
With Protect Us From What We Want we inquire about the role of desires and dreams in society.
Artists can serve as role models and fuel desires within society. However, in the materialistic world, desires are often lived out in a consumerist manner. Yet, we are aware that we consume more than the planet can provide. We consider sleep and dreams as part of the immaterial culture, which needs to be valued in the Anthropocene. Sleep and dreams are also central phases, mediums, and methods of artistic work. They spark our imagination and awareness. Dreams are places where desires are renegotiated. Experiences in dreams are biologically as real to our brains as experiences in the waking state. Dreams allow us to experience things that we cannot do in reality. Through exploring dreaming, including lucid dreaming, daydreaming, and dreaming up, the workshop examines approaches to worlds that have long been considered irrational and alien. Using perception and attention techniques, we aim to utilize dreams positively, unlike focusing on “defects” or in neoliberal self-optimization strategies. Since all people dream and potentially remember dreams, and the countless interpretations of dreams offer many possibilities, dreaming as a phenomenon remains current, ambitious, and challenging.
Reiselust im Anthropozän? Storytelling und Träume als kritische Methoden, 2024
Seminar, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Lehrstuhl Moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst: Prof. Bärbel Küster, Universität Zürich
Die globalisierte Welt mit der Selbstverständlichkeit des Reisens für Recherchezwecke oder auch als Tourismus ist durch die in der Klimakrise zunehmend auftretende Naturkatastrophen stark beeinträchtigt. Weltweit stehen Universitäten vor der Herausforderung, nachhaltiges Forschen und Lehren zu ermöglichen und zu etablieren. Zum wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten gehören vor allem Dienstreisen der Mitarbeitenden, um Symposien, Konferenzen oder Summer Schools zu besuchen. Die UZH hat zum Klima‐Neutralitätsziel 2030 erklärt, die flugbedingten Treibhausgas-Emissionen deutlich zu reduzieren. Das Seminar befasst sich mit Reisen aus kunsthistorischen Perspektiven und hat zum Ziel, ein neues Lehrformat zu etablieren, welches die vorherrschende Reisenotwendigkeit in Lehre und Forschung kritisch betrachtet.
Gemeinsam suchen wir nach möglichen Alternativen aus der Perspektive von post-anthropozentrischen und postkolonialen Diskursen. Die Studierdenden erlernen experimentelle Methoden in ihrer Disziplin: Das spekulative Storytelling mithilfe von Aufmerksamkeitsübungen, Fiktionen, Träumen, Annäherung an künstlerische Methoden erlaubt es, neue analytische und kreative Horizonte zu öffnen, die die methodische Vielfalt innerhalb der Disziplin der Kunstgeschichte für das Zeitalter des Anthropozäns erweitern.
Protect Us From What We Want, 2022
Seminar and Innovedum grant, Chair of the History of Art and Architecture, Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung, ETH Zurich
Have you ever resisted the desire to travel and tried to imagine this journey? What does travel mean in the post-Holocene era?
The seminar explores the relevance of the seminar trip as a format in architectural studies while researching possible alternatives from the perspective of post-anthropocentric and postcolonial discourses.
Imagination and abstraction are important skills in the architectural profession. The seminar aims to train students in precise descriptions and to expand them with fictional content. Discussions will elaborate on the advantages and disadvantages of traveling and being on-site. Students will learn to deal with archival material and with digital sources of information and to evaluate them in creative storytelling.
Protect Us From What We Want, 2021
The participants will be divided into "travelers" and "non-travelers". They form a tandem and are in exchange with each other via different media. The seminar will allow participants to explore their own imagination and capacity for abstraction with diverse methods, media and formats such as lucid dreaming and storytelling with documentary and fictional content.
The discussions will elaborate on the advantages and disadvantages of traveling and being on site. In the two different attentions of the students' tandem work, the digital experience and the real experience meet. Discussed are those elements and facts that benefit or come off worse due to the different perceptions.