In cooperation with ABK Stuttgart and Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe) we invite you to the public presentation by seminar participations of "Reparative Futurities" at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart:

19. December 2023 at 7 p.m.

Participants: Constanze Bahlo Arianna Ballin Pierre-Eric Baumann Antonia Maria Christl Marta Frasson Lukas Klein Rosa Klingelhöfer Jannik Lang Suwon Lee Lasse Peters Dario Schmid Carolina Lara Simunovic Xy June Li Hanna Araujo Ulmer

Füsun Türetken architect, artist, and Professor at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung / Karlsruhe HfG) and Heba Y. Amin, artist and Professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste / ABK-Stuttgart), convene a series of seminars at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart to work with students in developing site-responsive interventions and methods of futurity that contend with ongoing histories of trauma.

To convene these seminars onsite at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart is to necessarily grapple with an immediate site of trauma—to contend with the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart’s historical legacy as an art institution located in a building that was acquired in 1935 by means of Nazi dispossession. It is well known that art institutions are often deeply contaminated sites that collect, present, and embody the living histories, symbolic systems, and operative structures of state violence. How can these sites in the art sector be occupied by other means and repurposed towards other futures? What specific methodologies may be developed and applied towards reparative futures, towards reparations? What contributions can art practitioners make to the longstanding project of reparations and reparations discourses?

As Zoé Samudzi has written: “Reparations discourses articulate a grammar of futurity: not simply a world that does not exist, but one that could be fabricated through attempts to repair historical harm and trauma.” (Zoé Samudzi, “Reparative Futurities: Thinking from the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide,” The Funambulist, Issue 50.

This series of seminars at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart has been organized as a creative unfolding reparations project. Within this project, the concept of “futurity” operates as a technique of ontological reconstruction—challenging historically settled expectations, while enacting a future that is unresigned and unreconciled. This technique activates the telling and the realization of the past—through texts, images, interventions, and situations—as an ongoing critical project that must always be actualized and manifest in the present. Through these seminars, students develop consequential methodologies of futurity and their own “grammars of futurity” in confronting the freighted history of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Looking to how artists advance site-responsive methodologies, these seminars are in conversation with two works by the artist Maria Eichhorn. In October of this year the seminar students worked onsite in Venice, responding to Eichhorn’s project at the German Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. And subsequently in November, the students began working at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, responding to Eichhorn’s in-process work that examines the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart’s ongoing history of property relations. While contending with the history and continued usage of this particular property, these series of seminars and public presentations on December 19th imagine future reparative possibilities that extend to other sites within and beyond the German context.