Anna Lauenstein & Leon Vatter
Transdisciplinary Classroom
Block seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Saturdays/Sundays, 14./15.5. and 25./26.6.2022, each 10-17 h, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 004

Registration starts 14.4.2022, 8 h, via Moodle:https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=1515
Self-enrollment key: feedback

The transdisciplinary classroom is a format for students to present and discuss their artistic, scientific, social and political practices. Once at the beginning and once at the end of the semester, we will spend a weekend of sharing each others working processes, methods and self-reflections. Starting with the teachers/facilitators presenting their current individual practices in the fields of scientific writing and artistic filmmaking on feminist and decolonial matters, each participant will give insights into their individual practices. This will give us ideas of how different, but also similar our practices are situated; how they develop over time; how different disciplines work in particular; it will allow new collaborations to unfold; it is a place to get a diverse feedback to one's own practice; and finally it creates a space for a respectful transdisciplinary exchange.

Our discussions will pick up on feminist and decolonial discourses and circulate around questions like: How does an ongoing critical self-reflection influence ones working processes? How can they both go hand-in-hand in a productive way? What are actual ways of staying with the trouble?

On the one hand sharing ones work in class means to share useful tools, methods and references. On the other hand it means to speak about ones very own doubts and self-critique and to open up these questions for a joint discussion. This being said, it is particularly important to create a culture of non-violent discussions and feedback within the seminar.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: Regular and active participation as well as sharing ones individual artistic/scientific/social/political practice in class.

Anna Lauenstein studied Fine Arts with a focus on the moving image at the University of the Arts (Berlin) with Prof. Jimmy Robert, Prof. Ming Wong and Prof. Hito Steyerl. She also studied Cultural Anthropology at the Humboldt University (Berlin) and the University of Leipzig. Since August 2020 she is working at Studium Generale as an artistic and scientific assistant. In her artistic research she works within the tensions between knowledge, poetics and politics, whereby a decolonial perspective on Europe is central. Her works have been shown e. g. at HAUNT, Berlin; Galerie Bernau; the Museum of Photography, Berlin and the BWA Gallery, Wrocław. She was nominated for the President's Fine Arts Award of UdK and she was awarded the NaFöG fellowship 2021/22.

Leon Vatter studied philosophy and political sciences at Freie Universität Berlin and Universitá di Urbino. Since October 2019, he has been working as a research assistant in the Studium Generale team at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he regularly teaches seminars in both cultural studies and interdisciplinary arts. His areas of work are in political philosophy, feminist philosophy of science and futurology. He is working on his thesis at Prof. Karin Harrasser’s department at the Kunstuniversität Linz. In addition to teaching and researching, he is active in the DAAD-funded Integra project Beyond UdK, founded in 2020.