Gropius Bau Journal

The structures of media have a huge influence on our own consciousness, allowing for new modes of subjectivity- and control. K Allado-McDowell maps out the evolution of media formats in our century, showing how they are reflected in human social organisation and considers the possibilities of the nascent “neural media” era. 

What does it do to you when leaving feels more common than arriving? What happens when your home is safe and yet feels empty? Do you decorate its walls? Do you hang up pictures of your relatives? 

In this conversation, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and John Njenga Karugia address the Swahili Ocean and Afrasian coastlines as repositories of transcultural memory and ancestral belonging.

This essay captures some of the complex amalgams of embodiment and speech, culture and biology, politics and poetry that demonstrate how the distance between human and machine expands and contracts.

How will deep entanglement with neural networks shape our future selves – and who gets to write the script? The first in a three-part series by Writer in Residence K Allado-McDowell explains some of the fundamental structures underlying AI and the ways neural media are likely to alter human experience.

This essay is an excerpt from a lecture given by Anja Schwarz, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam, as part of Daniel Boyd’s exhibition RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION) at the Gropius Bau. In her lecture, Schwarz focused on colonies of Germany in the Pacific and the role of German-speaking agents within the settler colonies in Australia.

Artist Daniel Boyd’s work draws on Indigenous and diasporic narratives, in particular the lives of his ancestors, some of whom were transported from Vanuatu to Australia to work in the cane fields.
In this poem, writer and curator Léuli Eshrāghi evokes their own Samoan archipelago ancestry, landscape and language and considers – the worlds and lived experiences that are still occluded by Western ways of seeing.

Drawing on research into the Makua people of Mozambique, who were enslaved and transported to destinations around the Indian Ocean, novelist Ari Gautier’s fiction connects different African spirits with those of India and Sri Lanka. Colliding cultures, colonial plunder and starfish-technologies come together in an Afro-futuristic story of forbidden love.

Memories can be passed through generations via song, recuperating histories edited out of history. Author Maaza Mengiste talks to Natasha Ginwala about introducing a chorus of different voices into accepted narratives and why the ability to speak out is one of the most rebellious acts we can make against injustice.

In thinking about care and care work, practices of mothering play a crucial role. In her essay, writer and scholar Sophie Lewis takes her ambivalent relationship to her own mother as well as impressions from two recent exhibitions at the Gropius Bau as an opportunity to critically examine the “solitary cell of bourgeois kinship”.

Based on a three-month archival residency at Bitterfeld’s Kreismuseum and in conversation with the former head of the city’s environmental agency, Dr. Fred Walkow, Lili Carr’s essay witnesses various hydrogeochemical goings-on within a landscape whose more-than-human activities, politics and histories have shaped and are being shaped by chemistry.

How can we create platforms of cross-cultural understanding while making sure that communities and their stakeholders are protected? In this conversation, Eeva-Kristiina Nylander, Marian Pastor Roces Natasha Ginwala examine the role of art institutions in developing diverse ecologies and community perspectives.

Science writer Fiona McMillan-Webster traces parallels between human and non-human forms of communal intelligence and explores how these enable them to reside “on the edge between chaos and order.”

Aboriginal kinship systems can operate as forms of healing from the legacy of colonialism. Artist, curator and scholar Brook Andrew and anthropologist and geographer Marcia Langton explore how community-based projects in research and art build non-institutional sites of mourning, remembering, sharing and restituting cultural heritage.

The European imagination shaped a vision of other continents as resource, ripe for ongoing extraction – creating processes that continue today.

“A year full of circuit-breaker moments”… artist SERAFINE1369 writes about dream-readings and map-makings, confusion, searching, the life of the body and psychic disconnects.

In Igbo, the word Ámà denotes a site of knowledge and collectivity – a communal vibe. But bringing this archetype to Europe requires an awareness of clichéd visions of Africa, and an excavation of the sonic and haptic as vital challenges to Western modes of seeing the world. Writer and political economist Eric Otieno Sumba follows the wave.

In the second of her series of artist texts, Grace Ndiritu considers different modes of re-animating and engaging with the world of “dead matter” established by Western ways of seeing. In particular, she focuses on the role of museums as shared spaces to reflect on consciousness and the wellfare of all beings – audience, building, community, objects, patrons and staff – within it.

As In House: Artist in Residence at the Gropius Bau in 2021, the artist and dancer SERAFINE1369 will engage with questions of intimacy, technology, alienation and boundaries through a practice of performance, dance, writing and choreography. In the following conversation, SERAFINE1369 talks about their experiences of working with ephemeral material, explaining how the body’s porosity can open it up to the oracular, guiding and unfolding the relation we have to ourselves and to one another.

Grace Ndiritu shares the foundational impetus of her Healing The Museum methodology, which is based on the idea of performance as a peace-building tool to deal with issues of global conflict.

If care is a collective responsibility, what does this mean for an art system built upon a Western paradigm of individualism, hierarchy and fragmentation? In the second part of iLiana Fokianaki’s essay, she considers ways to “speak nearby” – giving the floor to others as a way of sharing power more equally.

The current crisis has placed global systems of care in the spotlight, but collective modes of caring – fundamental to Indigenous, feminist and civil rights movements – have been sidelined. In the first of a two-part series, theorist and curator iLiana Fokianaki traces both Western and non-Western modes of thinking and how they might apply to the politics of ethics of care today.

Whether in DNA interactions, bacterial biofilms or city architectures, weaving can be a model for different and relational “ecologies of life”. Ranging across artistic practices, cell biology, and human social forms, molecular biologist Regine Hengge and cultural historian Karin Krauthausen examine what we can learn from nature’s enmeshed processes.

Care activist and researcher Manuela Zechner examines Joan C. Tronto’s model of care as a means to find praxis-based ways out of today’s “care impasse”, pointing to popular movements that might serve as models for the future.

The relation between human and non-human is vital to earthly survival – but what would it mean to situate plants within our politics? Artist Zheng Bo and anthropologist Natasha Myers discuss decolonisation, the essential role of Indigenous knowledges, and how healing land is also about healing community.

Connecting ancient rites to dissident futures, dance can disrupt the rigid orders of time, history and post-colonial “progress“. Noémie Solomon explores the work of Tosh Basco and Marcelo Evelin, who make “rituals for an entangled world“.

An end to this world: Elizabeth A. Povinelli traces her own family’s migrations alongside the ancestral displacements that led to the formation of Karrabing, as a way of re-imagining Europe and its diaspora through the lens of decolonisation.

“Black bodies revivify what time and convention have frozen”: poet Ishion Hutchinson on the changing role of the body in photography and Akinbode Akinbiyi’s series Sea Never Dry.

Humans as just a small part of nature: artist Zheng Bo writes about the Dao De Jing’s foundational ecological thinking and reading to the trees in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

Robert Maharajh explores how the communal practices of Otobong Nkanga and Theaster Gates re-shape the idea of the artwork, the archive and the institution.

What does it mean to be a stranger? Natasha Ginwala and Kathy-Ann Tan draw on collaborative readings with artist Wu Tsang to investigate via James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde.