Climate change does not begin with the climate crisis. It emerges from histories of broken worlds.

We are living in a time in which the future often appears as something already determined: ecological collapse, climate catastrophe, political instability, extinction and displacement. These are worlds shaped by histories of colonialism, extraction, violence, displacement and unequal access to land, resources and belonging. How can we imagine a future that is not simply a continuation of the present?

This seminar begins with the idea of broken worlds. Drawing on Kathryn Yusoff's A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, we will question the apparently universal history contained in the concept of the Anthropocene. Climate change is not the beginning of planetary transformation. It is entangled with much longer histories in which particular landscapes, peoples, bodies and forms of life have already been damaged, displaced, extracted or rendered disposable.

Malcom Ferdinand’s A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World …

Erster Termin

15.10.2026

Ort

Seminarraum Raumstrategien

**History as Contested Space — A Deep Dive into Michel Rolph Trouillot’s ‘Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History’
**

If we consider what Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot writes about the unthinkability of the Haitian revolution, one has another vantage point from which to appreciate Bwa Kayiman, the ceremonial and political birthplace of the Haitian revolution, gathering that took place on August 14th, 1791 at Morne Rouge in the then San Domingue, and what we call a space of eco-political knowledge.

Trouillot writes that “The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened. Official debates and publications of the times, including the long list of pamphlets on Saint-Domingue published in France from 1790 to 1804, reveal the incapacity of most contemporaries to understand the ongoing revolution on its own terms. They could read the news only with their …

Erster Termin

25.11.2026

Ort

Haus der Kulturen der Welt - Bonaventure's office

In a climate of crisis and uncertainties in which technologies and the politics of the digital contribute to sociopolitical ambivalences and instability, the seminar sheds light on digital tools, media and ecologies as a contested arena where utopia and dystopia, dreams and nightmares, surveillance and witnessing, existence and erasure occur simultaneously. Yet, the internet is everywhere; it has no fixed entry point; it surrounds us (Russell, 2020), in so much as it crosses human and non-human bodies; it offers information, and it extracts from us (Wark, 2025).

As the pervasiveness of AI-generated images and content has challenged how we-users understand and experience reality, and the term “speculative violence” (Della Ratta, 2025) seems to translate “a form of anticipatory harm in which synthetic images pre-stage acts of destruction, erasure, and forced displacement before they even occur” (Ibid.), we-users as “expanded spectators” (Liosi, 2023) are constantly challenged. To understand and engage with the …

Ort

Library room, Concordia (3rd floor, Raumstrategien)

WE DO THIS ’TIL WE FREE US- The discipline of Hope

“Hope is a discipline… We have to iterate it, model it, build it, and practice it every day.”

— Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us

How do we move away from punitive, individualistic, and extractive ways of making and being together? How do we cultivate hope not as a vague feeling, but as an active, daily artistic and relational discipline?

This semester, we take Mariame Kaba’s seminal work We Do This ’Til We Free Us as our starting point to explore abolition, collective care, and liberation as practical strategies within spatial and creative practice. In a world that conditions us toward surveillance, punishment, competition, and capitalist urgency, this seminar invites us to practice building the worlds we actually want to inhabit—here and now.

Continuing our practice-based structure as a workshop / exhibition / reading-room, we will engage with new media and …

Ort

Raumstrategien / Library

In what ways does sound contribute to self-determination and the making of worlds? As an energetic material, sound can be appreciated as a medium for social transformation, supporting movements of emancipatory struggle and the configuration of unique styles of existence. It emerges in scenes of protest, giving way to noisy interruptions; and it underpins the making of rhythms and counter-rhythms by which to synchronize with others, forming unique paths for moving otherwise. Sound is also silence, positioned in ways that shape the distribution of the heard, and how it is we may listen to each other – as well as refuse certain audibilities. It is agitational, vibrational and interruptive as well as binding, sticky and generative, making it possible to interfere with dominant logics of legibility. Such qualities also contribute to a range of artistic projects, defining the field of sound art as the art of sonic imagination. 

Drawing from these …

Teilnehmer_innen Anzahl

17

How do we perceive the city as a layered space, shaped by geology, environmental relations, politics, and aesthetic forms in continuous transformation? This seminar considers the city as a space traversed by different layers that coexist, interact, and conflict, and interrogates their knowledges for future actions, narratives and forms of engagement. The city is approached as a site of critical enquiry, intervention, and reimagining.

The course begins by discussing Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of ruination as a critical lens for identifying and sensing these layers. Stoler shifts attention from ruins as remnants of a concluded past to ruination as an ongoing process through which power persists in landscapes, material conditions, and people’s lives. We will use this lens to interpret urban traces and fragments as evidence of enduring relations of power. For example, the “entanglements of people, soil, and things” that Stoler examines can lead us to recognise processes of urban …

Ort

Library Raumstrategien

Teilnehmer_innen Anzahl

15

THE THRESHOLD

In the winter semester 2026/27, the seminar will explore the concept and experience of the threshold from different perspectives.

The English word threshold has its origins in a concrete physical act. It derives from the Old English þrescan, meaning “to tread,” “to stamp,” or “to beat heavily,” and from wald, referring among other things to wood, timber, or a floor. Threshold originally described the floor or wooden beam at the entrance of a house, a surface that was physically stepped or stamped upon when entering. The history of the word therefore connects a bodily action with a spatial condition: the repeated act of stepping, working, and shaping a surface in order to make a path accessible.

This original physical act serves as one point of departure for the seminar. A threshold is not simply a boundary that is crossed, but can also be understood as a space of transition, movement, and …

Erster Termin

15.10.2026

Ort

Concordia, Raumstrategien