Gropius Bau Journal

The Gropius Bau Journal is an online platform that aims to explore entangled futures, and ways of thinking and living together, using the broad themes of the exhibition programme as a lens to look at the wider world. Publishing new writing from artists, writers and thinkers, it looks to range across disciplines and to consider the role of an art institution in the 21st century.

Hella Jongerius, Woven Brick (detail), 2019

Hella Jongerius, Woven Brick (detail), 2019, photo: Roel van Tour

Introduction

About the Journal

 To the text
Essay

The Swarm Within at the Edge of Chaos

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

 To the essay
Ámà: 4 Days on Caring, Repairing and Healing
Conversation

Repairing the Social Fabric: Amid the Burden of History

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 – while the fight for recognition of Indigenous peoples in Australia is still ongoing – community-based projects in research and art build non-institutional sites of mourning, remembering, sharing and restituting cultural heritage.

 To the essay
Essay

Planetary Portals: “Dreaming in Continents”

The European imagination shaped a vision of other continents as resource, ripe for ongoing extraction – creating processes that continue today. Based on original research in the Rhodes archive, Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard examine the emergence of these “planetary portals”, and consider how they might be decolonised.

 To the essay
SERAFINE1369, 2020
Artist text

Everything Gets Eaten, One Way or Another, or: Turning Into the Something Missing

“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.

 To the artist text
Emeka Ogboh, Ámà: The Gathering Place, 2021, installation view, Gropius Bau, Berlin
Essay

To Catch a Vibe

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.

 To the essay
Artist text

Ways of Seeing: A New Museum Story for Planet Earth

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.

 To the artist text
SERAFINE1369, BASICTENSION, 2020
Interview

“How Does This Place Speak?”

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.

 To the interview
Grace Ndiritu, Dreaming the Museum Back to Life: The Inner Life of Objects, 2017
Artist text

Healing The Museum

How can artists influence institutions as they look to address urgent questions of care, social welfare and the legacies of colonialism? In the first of her two-part artist text, 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.

 To the artist text
Women's Survial Catalogue
Essay

The Collective of Care: Responsibility, Pleasure, Cure – Part 2

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.

 To the essay
Essay

The Collective of Care: Responsibility, Pleasure, Cure – Part 1

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.

 To the essay
Essay

The Event of a Fibre

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.

 To the essay
Essay

To Care As We Would Like to: Socio-ecological crisis and our impasse of care

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.

 To the essay
Conversation

Politics of Plants: Zheng Bo in Conversation with Natasha Myers

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.

 To the conversation
Essay

Extemporary Rituals: Notes on the Dances of Marcelo Evelin and Tosh Basco

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“.

 To the essay
Rex Edmunds in Night Time Go, Karrabing Film Collective, 2017
Essay

The Rise of an Indigenous Europe and the Genealogies of Indigeneities

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.

 To the essay
Akinbode Akinbiyi, Bar Beach, Victoria Island, Lagos, 2001
Essay

Praise Singer

“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.

 To the essay
Essay

To Not Be a Single Being: Otobong Nkanga and Theaster Gates

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.

 To the essay
Zheng Bo, Drawing Life (24 April 2020)
Artist Text

Walk-Reading Dao De Jing in Berlin: An Exercise

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.

 To the artist text
Wu Tsang, Untitled (Library Studies), 2013–2014/2019
Essay

Strangers, Lovers and Revolutionary Hope: Readings with Wu Tsang

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.

 To the essay

Gropius Bau Journal

Editor at Large
Robert Maharajh

Assistant Editor
Sonja Borstner