Artist Kader Attia – observes the film maker and composer Manthia Diawara – has a special gift: He can talk about alterity and the traumas caused by the colonial “Other” without lapsing into antagonisms. Attia’s Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures provides a clear demonstration of this. The work shows familiar looking masks and sculptures from Africa and Europe, all of which are damaged and disfigured and in need of repair. Perhaps it is the trauma that Attia alludes to which generates a sense of commonality: The shared longing to be restored, to be repaired. The carnage of modernity – the guilt of colonialism and the First World War – is the starting point for the relationship between the self and the “Other”. Even if they are only relationships between damaged identities which Attia so emphatically postulates in his work. To article...
War and displacement go hand in hand. The author Stefan Zweig describes what the historian Jörn Leonhard underlines in his analysis of the First World War – the anonymizing and bureaucratizing of violence – using the example of the individual fate: The person who is destined to lose as a pawn in the game played by unnamed and merciless forces. To article in German...
The First World War was by no means “the war to end all wars” it was conceived to be: Anonymous killing and the total removal of boundaries on a technological and bureaucratic war machine are mortgage debts that remain unpaid to this day. According to Jörn Leonhard in his contribution to the project Tatort Schlachtfeld “The victor wasn’t a nation, a state, or an empire, and the First World War’s result wasn’t a world without war. The real victor was war itself.” To article in German...
The connections between war and music are as diverse as they are many. One hundred years after the First World War, the festival program of Singing the War looks at the manifestations of these relationships since then, from technologies developed for use in war that would later take on a central role in music (radio, the loudspeaker, recording, etc.) to music as war propaganda, as a form of resistance, as a means of processing, etc. Singing the War draws an arc over the century to draw attention to just how close war is to Europe today. A Discussion with Bernd Scherer and the curators of the festival Detlef Diederichsen and Holger Schulze. To article...
Emergency administration of the moment versus history as a space of possibility: How can our society develop new models for action instead of just continually reacting to unexpected challenges? In order to answer this question Bernd Scherer has thrown a wide net—from contemporary history to military and technological history. Capitalism, technology and acceleration have given rise to an explosive amalgam whose composition urgently requires analysis: the present. To article...
Without an eye for the breaks, continuities, and ellipses of the past, the crises and conflicts of the present cannot be read. The project series 100 Jahre Gegenwart traces the powers of WWI in the digital present with an understanding of time that allows a perception of history as a space of possibilities. In a series of performances and lectures by the likes of artist collective Slavs and Tatars, ensemble zeitkratzer, or historian Jörn Leonhard time is demonstrated as a key to understanding. To article in German...
