Radical Attention

What happens when we talk to strangers? Julia Bell’s 2020 book Radical Attention states, “thanks to the effects of the climate crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, we are remembering, that we are primarily bodies in an organic world.” Taking this idea as a starting point, this session protests against the virtualisation of our bodies to ask how art institutions like the Gropius Bau can be spaces in which we feel invited to pay radical attention to each other. It acknowledges the limited social interactions that have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, narrowing our radius of life. The session dissolves hierarchies to foster conversations between people from different contexts with different perspectives, enabling embodied exchange in the moment: How are you? How are we?

Radical Attention was developed by Julia Grosse and Pablo Santacana López.

Julia Grosse (moderator) is co-founder and artistic director of Contemporary And (C&) and Associate Curator at the Gropius Bau. She is a lecturer at the Institute for Art in Context at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In 2020 (together with Yvette Mutumba) she was winner of the prize “European Cultural Manager of the Year”.

Pablo Santacana López is an independent artist and researcher based between Berlin and Madrid, and a co-founder of the art collective Vendedores de Humo. He is currently writing his dissertation as part of the DFG Research Group “Identity and Heritage” in Weimar.