Vorlesungsverzeichnis

Critical ecologies engage with the relation between art, fragility, and the future. The workshop will explore theories and artistic initiatives that are concerned with environmental transformation and socio-cultural change, as well as with the potential failures and insecurities of our responses to these. From within a theoretical as well as an artistic framework we will specifically ask how to relate attentively and critically to our own everyday routines and actions in the face of ecological crises, pandemic risks, economic instability, and uncertain labor conditions. In collective modes of rehearsing scenarios, ritualized habits shall be put to the test, de-scripted and re-scripted. We will use concepts from ecocritical, posthuman, new materialist, queer-feminist, and critical pedagogical theories as the basis for inventing and testing new ways of acting towards our fragile futures.
The workshop builds on the research project “Rehearsing Scenarios” in Art Education at ZHdK and engages in a practical fashion with theories that programmatically address and reflect on alternative knowledge production and activate new ways of thinking and doing. We will close-read theoretical texts and intensively engage with artistic practices that evolve around concepts such as critical care, failure, response-ability, complicity, virality, and toxicity. Rehearsing as a performative practice will be used as “a modus operandi, a medium, a site of representation and reflection for artistic production processes, and an instrument of critique of institutional power relations” (Buchmann et al. 2016, 11). With the help of methods from the theatre practices of rehearsing and probing, we will also engage in the potential risks that are inherent in all concepts that confront us with a fragile future.
Der Workshop wird zweisprachig (Englisch/Deutsch) angeboten.