Bard College Berlin

Relational Creatures

How can we go beyond the failings and fixations of the existing, nation-state based, international institutions regarding the protection of the forcibly displaced? While there is no replacement for them in sight?

How can we remember the struggles and dilemmas of exile in the 20th and 21st century, outside of the boxes of national identity, outside of integration/assimilation schemes and (post-)colonial timespace traps?

2021’s research-creation class „Artistic Approaches to Forced Migration and the Dilemma of the Nation State“ combined historical research, artistic practice, and the theories of Hannah Arendt, Achille Mbembe, Loren Landau and others, to bear the ambivalences and discover new ways of understanding ourselves, moving in time and in space, as relational creatures.

Instructors: Marion Detjen, Dorothea von Hantelmann

With contributions from: Vala Schriefer, Leigh Ronen, Alice Luneau, Isabel Danishmend, A. Qais Sangarkhail, Adèle Martin, Anna Stewart, Audrey Bergassoli, Charlene Batlle