Spoken/Unspoken

The semester topic is meant as a general guideline for the program’s main lecture, excursion and panel series, as a lense for exploring the different locations and as a point of entry for the experimentations and practices of the group work.

For the year 2018 and the forth edition of the program the topic is Spoken/Unspoken. Among other things, it addresses questions of language and cultural codes, of implicit and explicit forms of expression, of the limits or different forms of language, of the meaning of secrets and confessions. The interplay of the two entangled yet seemingly opposite attributes creates a field of tension that can be fruitfully explored by way of artistic practice. Questions raised around it move beyond a binary perception of the two aspects and explore their simultaneity or betweenness in daily life, in different cultural settings and in the arts themselves.

Every trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural collaboration carries the danger (and potential) of speaking in fundamentally different tongues, the challenge of creating common ground for understanding. How does a certain discipline influenced by its cultural environment make sense out of a given phenomenon? How can this perception be communicated to other disciplines influenced by other cultural environments? How is knowledge generated and mediated when language plays less of a role? Is there such a thing as embodied knowledge? What can we learn from the performing and the visual arts in this regard? What can they learn from each other? What might artistic research really mean and where are its limits?

In the course of this year’s transcultural collaborations the vast range of possible questions around Spoken/Unspoken shall be addressed by multifaceted artistic approaches that move beyond, beneath or between language and words.