Gropius Bau Journal

The Gropius Bau Journal is an online platform that aims to explore entangled futures and ways of thinking and living together through essays, interviews and artist texts.

There Is No Poetry in This Place, Gropius Bau (2022)

Maaza Mengiste and Natasha Ginwala

Rewriting History as a Chorus

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.

To the conversation

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, Spider, Installation view, Gropius Bau (2022) © The Easton Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Sophie Lewis

On Non-Reparative Mothering

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”.

To the essay

Lili Carr

Landscapes seen as Chemistry

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.

To the essay

Johanna Hedva

The Failure of Time and Healing

How can we find ways to rewrite capitalist narratives about recovery and survival? Taking their new installation The Clock is Always Wrong (2022) in the group exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at the Gropius Bau as a starting point, Johanna Hedva talks about the importance of radically questioning western notions of time and healing.

To the conversation

Outi Pieski, Rematriation of a Ládjogahpir / Ládjogahpir rematriašuvdna, 2021

Eeva-Kristiina Nylander, Marian Pastor Roces, Natasha Ginwala

Making Sites of Reciprocity and Rematriation

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.

To the conversation

Fiona McMillan-Webster

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 enable them to reside “on the edge between chaos and order.”

To the essay

Ámà: 4 Days on Caring, Repairing and Healing

Brook Andrew and Marcia Langton

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 community-based projects in research and art build non-institutional sites of mourning, remembering, sharing and restituting cultural heritage.

To the essay

Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden, Casper Laing Ebbensgaard

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.

To the conversation

SERAFINE1369

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

Eric Otieno Sumba

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

Grace Ndiritu

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

“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

Healing the Museum

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 essay

iLiana Fokianaki

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

iLiana Fokianaki

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

Hella Jongerius, Woven Windows, 2021, exhibition view, Woven Cosmos, 2021

Regine Hengge and Karin Krauthausen

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

Manuela Zechner

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

Zheng Bo and Natasha Myers

Politics of Plants

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

Noémie Solomon

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

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

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

Ishion Hutchinson

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 text

Zheng Bo

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

Robert Maharajh

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

Wu Tsang, Untitled (Library Studies), 2013–2014/2019

Natasha Ginwala and Kathy-Ann Tan

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

Imprint

Editor at Large
Robert Maharajh

Editors
Sonja Borstner, Paulina Chaimowicz