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Building Knowledge: Design, Experiment, and Engage explores Real-Labs (real-world laboratories) as experimental environments where research, design, construction, and everyday use intersect. Organized by the Chair of Constructive Design and Experimentation at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the panel brings together Sabine Hansmann, Tamotsu Ito, Chrissie Muhr, and João Quintela to discuss how living lab processes create architectural knowledge through experimentation, and learning from practice.
Focusing on adaptive reuse, collaborative construction, and working with existing structures, the conversation examines how these approaches are reshaping architectural education, professional roles, and public engagement. Drawing on projects such as Versuchsgut Dornburg, the panel reflects on both the opportunities and the limitations of Real-Labs, addressing questions of scalability, transferability, and their long-term value in differentsocial and spatial contexts.

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Building Knowledge: Design, Experiment, and Engage explores Real-Labs (real-world laboratories) as experimental environments where research, design, construction, and everyday use intersect. Organized by the Chair of Constructive Design and Experimentation at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the panel brings together Sabine Hansmann, Tamotsu Ito, Chrissie Muhr, and João Quintela to discuss how living lab processes create architectural knowledge through experimentation, and learning from practice.

Focusing on adaptive reuse, collaborative construction, and working with existing structures, the conversation examines how these approaches are reshaping architectural education, professional roles, and public engagement. Drawing on projects such as Versuchsgut Dornburg, the panel reflects on both the opportunities and the limitations of Real-Labs, addressing questions of scalability, transferability, and their long-term value in differentsocial and spatial contexts.

Input 3

Building Knowledge: Design, Experiment, and Engage explores Real-Labs (real-world laboratories) as experimental environments where research, design, construction, and everyday use intersect. Organized by the Chair of Constructive Design and Experimentation at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the panel brings together Sabine Hansmann, Tamotsu Ito, Chrissie Muhr, and João Quintela to discuss how living lab processes create architectural knowledge through experimentation, and learning from practice.

Focusing on adaptive reuse, collaborative construction, and working with existing structures, the conversation examines how these approaches are reshaping architectural education, professional roles, and public engagement. Drawing on projects such as Versuchsgut Dornburg, the panel reflects on both the opportunities and the limitations of Real-Labs, addressing questions of scalability, transferability, and their long-term value in differentsocial and spatial contexts.

Input 4

Building Knowledge: Design, Experiment, and Engage explores Real-Labs (real-world laboratories) as experimental environments where research, design, construction, and everyday use intersect. Organized by the Chair of Constructive Design and Experimentation at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the panel brings together Sabine Hansmann, Tamotsu Ito, Chrissie Muhr, and João Quintela to discuss how living lab processes create architectural knowledge through experimentation, and learning from practice.

Focusing on adaptive reuse, collaborative construction, and working with existing structures, the conversation examines how these approaches are reshaping architectural education, professional roles, and public engagement. Drawing on projects such as Versuchsgut Dornburg, the panel reflects on both the opportunities and the limitations of Real-Labs, addressing questions of scalability, transferability, and their long-term value in differentsocial and spatial contexts.

Against a Tight Circle: Speaking in Favour of the Discursive and Digressive

“Against a Tight Circle” draws on five years of research and presentation of the contemporary art exhibition and event programme, The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation (TIAS) to argue that alternative and radical creative pedagogies are inherently critical social practices grounded in collective, collaborative ethos.

The paper contends that the ‘system failure’ in academia is a result of neo-liberal capitalist antipathy for social formations that refute competitive individualism. Eschewing an art-historical analysis the approach will focus on the discursive and performative encounters that shaped TIAS’s deployment of subversive, revolutionary epistemologies that embody the complexity of anti-hegemonic, specifically decolonial, narratives.

As Audre Lorde stated, “Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define a world in which we can all flourish.” This paper highlights the vital importance of such solidarity and collective resistance in reclaiming higher education as a site of radical transformation.

Black and Queer Otherwise Spaces: An Artistic Methodology for Creating Rival Geographies

“Black and Queer Otherwise Spaces: An Artistic Methodology for Creating Rival Geographies” examines my art practice, and its use of rival geographies, as a subversive methodology for art-making, and education within the neoliberal academy. Stephanie MH Camp defines rival geography as a mutable territory marked by the movement of bodies, objects, and information; a space of defiant joy in an antebellum geography of confinement. Fully legible only to certain groups of people, it serves as a temporal/spatial respite from plantation logics.

Ashon Crawley’ defines “otherwise spaces,” as worlds with the capacity to be multiple and a refusal to be stilled. My work embraces communal creativity, exploration, and process over a capital-friendly product. I will expand on the methodology of rival geographies, utilizing lessons gleaned from this collaborative, world-making practice to imagine what comes after: new worlds that defy and survive the ongoing collapse of the neoliberal institution.

Let Them Eat Plastic: Power, Bioplastic, and Deviant Trajectories

This presentation considers the material, tactile, and socio-political structures and effects of university institution ecosystems as they process, filter, and transmute their inhabitants into idealized and idealizing subjects. Panel and audience cook and consume bioplastic together as an active process of making and eating bioplastic together, engaging in shared metabolic practices of smelling, listening, viewing, touching, eating, and digesting in an invitation to trace and queer digestive systems and contexts that “process” us. Building on Kyla Wazana Tompkins notion of “deviant matter” and Moten and Harney’s “undercommons”, these enactments query normative disciplinary categories and suggest deviant trajectories within university institutional contexts. Offering vegan bioplastic snacks to attendees, we activate bodily processes to consider how neoliberal systems are formed, felt, and metabolized by different bodies and subjects into emergent systems and modalities.

Kandinsky. One Century of Ignorance

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) apparently counts among the well-researched Bauhäus¬lers. The 1923 questionnaire inquiring the mutual assignment of basic shapes and basic colours is his most famous contribution to the Bauhaus’s signature. This assignment is nowadays probably more effective than ever before. Regrettably, it was everything but a Bauhaus achievement, which seems to be widely unknown among Bauhaus scholars, due to reasons of language difficulties and accessibility, but also the traditions of Bauhaus historiography and institutional biases.
My contribution is an invitation to leave aside all limitations imposed by acquired ideologies and professional education, to surmount language difficulties and disciplinary boundaries in favour of a really interdisciplinary and unbiased research that is capable of doing justice to its subject. Such research will yield new and important insights into all those matters that before appeared to have been definitely investigated.

“Most Bauhäuslers are…completely intolerant of social injustice, political chicanery, and charlatanism” Reginald Isaacs and his research on the Bauhaus in the 1960s

If the Bauhaus legacy is to inspire transformative research, it is important to examine how scholarship itself contributed to the movement’s elevation. A key moment was the 1968 exhibition 50 Years of Bauhaus in Stuttgart, which presented the Bauhaus as a democratic symbol of the Federal Republic of Germany while largely overlooking its entanglement with the Nazi era.
The paper focuses on an essay by architect Reginald Isaacs, who was then researching a biography of Walter Gropius. Drawing on a survey of former Bauhaus members, Isaacs portrayed them as a morally and politically exemplary community, thereby idealising both the individuals and the institution. What objectives shaped his research? The contribution asks how such narratives can be critically reassessed while taking into account questions of gender, marginalisation, aesthetics, and political history.

Bureaucratic Implementation of Modernism: Vladas Švipas and the Bauhaus as Administrative Capital

Vladas Švipas (1900–1965), a Lithuanian architect trained at the Bauhaus (1924–1927), offers a case of architectural expertise within state bureaucracy in twentieth-century Europe. Rather than producing autonomous architectural objects, his career unfolded primarily within administrative institutions, where modernist principles were operationalized through planning, regulation, and standardization. Švipas entered state service and in 1929 joined the Chamber of Agriculture, responsible for rural modernization following land reform. Within this bureaucratic framework, he promoted rational planning, functional design, and standardized rural construction. His later career reflects the entanglement of architectural expertise with geopolitical rupture and migration. During the Second World War, he worked within occupation administrations, and after 1945 continued his professional activity in Displaced Persons camps in West Germany and later in the United States. This trajectory highlights the transnational mobility of technical knowledge and the adaptability of architectural-bureaucratic expertise across radically different political regimes.

Piaopiao[飘飘] as Method: Dialect (as) Archive and Wandering through Teahouse

The Sichuanese dialect term piaopiao [飘飘] emerged in the 1990s as a vernacular expression for wandering lives. Derived from the verb piao (“to float”), it came to describe those living outside patriarchal, reproduction-oriented family structures and served as an alias through which homosexual men recognised one another in Sichuan’s teahouses. Embedded in spoken language rather than institutional archives, piaopiao condenses histories of sexual dissidence and spatial fugitivity into a single dialect term. This paper develops piaopiao as a research method for architectural history and theory. It argues that the Sichuanese teahouse is not merely a backdrop for piaopiao sociality but a porous care infrastructure organised through passage, co-presence, and hospitality. Reading the teahouse’s permeability through piaopiao thus repositions dialect as a living archive of spatial knowledge and offers a situated account of how architecture mediates gender and sexual dissidence.

Neutrality, Masking, and the Politics of Research: A Reflection on Disciplinary Pressure in Conceptual Work on Autism

This presentation asks how research identity becomes credible within contested fields. Beginning from autism discourse, where terms such as “autistic person,” “person with autism,” “neurodivergent,” and “profound autism” are politically charged, I examine masking as both a lived practice and an unstable research concept. I argue that research cultures also produce masks: forms of scholarly personhood through which researchers become legible as neutral, rigorous, accessible, activist, or professional. Drawing on conceptual engineering, epistemic injustice, and Bauhaus questions of form and function, the talk asks how scholarly forms regulate proximity and distance, visibility and access, and what they enable or exclude. Concepts do not only classify research objects; they also authorise speakers, positions, and distances. The politics of research therefore includes the conditions under which scholarly roles become available, credible, and liveable.

For More Stupidity in Research: Dwelling in the Politics of Research Time

Contemporary research is shaped by demands for measurable impact, acceleration, and constant performance. This paper treats research time itself as a political problem. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s critique of the explicatory order and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of messianic time, I propose research-as-dwelling: a form of inquiry that suspends predefined ends and inhabits an unfinished present.
Following Tyson E. Lewis, I call the mode of this dwelling “stupidity.” Here, stupidity does not mean anti-intellectualism, but the capacity to stay with not-knowing, hesitation, and impotence without immediately converting them into output. Through a temporal reading of Hedwig Houben’s lecture performance Five Possible Lectures on Six Possibilities for a Sculpture, the paper argues for a politics of research centered on study, suspension, and unfinishedness.

Housing Music Volume 2: A Mixtape Methodology

Through spoken word, moving collages and vinyl records this performance lecture will describe how Black and South Asian diasporas have made spaces, objects and broadcasting infrastructures within the sonic cultures of reggae, dub, bhangra, jungle and grime. In the UK and beyond, these sonic cultures have not only remapped geographies but have been inscribed into landscapes as a form of spatial, aural, material, and embodied evidence. As these inscriptions have been largely ignored by the field of design and architecture, to uncover this history requires alternative modes and cultures of researching, archiving and mediating.
Over the last years, I have been searching for these inscriptions by ‘digging in the crates’ of historical radio, TV, documentary interviews and vinyl records that sit outside of conventional design and architecture scholarship. Once inscriptions are edited, sampled and mixtaped, they begin to build a counter archive of design experience and knowledge for other voices and perspectives within the canon of design history.
Housing Music Volume 2 will focus on and depart from the home and house as a site of Black and South Asian creativity.

After Alberti: Frictions with Reality

Following Alberti’s distinction between the intellectual conception and the physical execution of a building, architectural thought is commonly expected to reach completion before construction begins. This research challenges that assumption. It investigates an architectural practice in which the worlds of thinking (designing) and making (building) deliberately converge: the architect begins to build with her own hands—walls, doors and windows. These unscaled, built artefacts occupy a peculiar intermediate condition: As “living models,” they preserve the selective freedom of the architectural model while already becoming inseparable from the material, spatial, ecological and social realities of construction – turning them into tools for provocative inquiries into “reality.” The lecture explores the epistemic potential of such “particular cases” when architectural knowledge emerges through the act of building.

Drawing as a Research Methodology: Spatial Productions in the Context of Sex Work on Potsdamer Straße in West Berlin

Focusing on various case studies situated around Potsdamer Straße in West Berlin, my contribution examines how drawings can function as a research method in architecture. Around 1970, Potsdamer Straße was known for its sex workers, who worked throughout the day, waiting for clients in front of the many bars, hotels, and clubs lining the street. In this setting, I investigate how sex workers and other actors in the red-light district produced, appropriated, and defended urban spaces – and how the state and civil society responded through strategies of control, welfare, and displacement. For each of my ten case studies, I created speculative colored-pencil drawings based on building records, interviews, photographs, and maps. The contribution argues that drawings can generate and question knowledge, making counter-/architectures of sex work visible.

Re-enchanting technical representations. Matter entanglements revealing the invisibilizing power of the cross-section

Today, images shape knowledge as much as they convey state priorities and geopolitical forces. We examine encoded representations as modern instruments of (supra-)nation-forming political projects, focusing on the politics embedded in architectural and geological representations and the material and (un)worlding consequences they produce.
Analysing the cross-section as a tool of both abstraction and extraction, we show how mapping conventions are interwoven with logics of profit and exploitation. Spanning the strata of the walls of a colonial, fascist borgo in Sicily (IT) and the subsurface post-coal Campine landscape (BE), we argue that the standard grammar of these technical representations neutralises the imaginaries of an authoritarian project and an extractive fossil fuel regime. To render this invisibility visible, we propose re-enchanting the cross-sections, reintegrating neglected histories to suggest ways to interfere with dominant visualisations.

Abstract to be announced.

Knowledge Policies in the Arts: The Institutionalization of Artistic Research in German-Speaking Countries

While Artistic Research has already been established in many European countries over the past thirty years, it is still received controversially in German-speaking countries. As a relatively young research discipline, institutional structures and funding as well as career paths are often lacking, especially in Germany. In the presentation, I show empirical research on different organizational settings und funding policies for artistic research in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Using a sociological field analysis based on the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, I analyze how the institutionalization of artistic research is permeated by powerful knowledge orders. The analysis of institutionalization processes reveals struggles for the legitimacy and recognition of artistic research and fierce battles over the power to define knowledge and research. Furthermore, by analyzing examples of artistic PhD programs and art-science collaborations, the presentation highlights the potential of performative artistic research practices for transdisciplinary academic knowledge production and for rethinking traditional knowledge orders in general.

Ghost researchers, governance, and diversion at the intersection of science and art

This paper examines how governance practices within Mexico’s SECIHTI have restructured the relationship between scientific research, cultural policy, and institutional ethics. Three documented cases expose the material consequences of opacity and discretionary spending in state-funded cultural infrastructure. The Museo de la Luz in Merida reveals financial irregularities exceeding thirty million pesos, leading to the termination of its collaborative agreement with UNAM. The Centro Kalan in Mexico City, a multimillion-peso cultural complex, remains inaccessible to the public while official cost figures are inconsistent and allegations of nepotism in artwork commissions persist. A third case involves the private studio of artist Jimena Garcia Alvarez Buylla, whose architectural firm subsequently received the Kalan contract without open bidding, raising unresolved conflicts of interest. Against this backdrop, the author theorizes artist-researchers as structural ghosts: subjects made legible only through rankings and grant metrics, while precarious institutional conditions neutralize critical capacity. Research, the paper concludes, is never neutral; it is shaped by incentive structures that can serve democratic accountability or consolidate power.

The Humboldt Forum as a Colonial Thought Space

This paper proposes walking through Berlin’s Humboldt Forum not as a restored museum, but as a machinery of thought and participation: a Colonial Thought-Space that, through its architecture, organises what counts as civilised and historical, relegating represented communities to the condition of „objects of study.“ Drawing on the Warburgian concept of Denkraum, it examines how the baroque façade of the reconstructed Royal Palace (2013–2025) — with its golden cross and imperial sculptures — functions as a spatial system of coordinates that, together with the still-visible racial hierarchy of Adolf Bastian, founder of the Ethnological Museum, weaves together imperial nostalgia and colonial plunder as science and common sense: a space that turns the chaos of colonial violence into a rational place and silently justifies dispossession to secure the future of the collections. How does a colonial thinking take shape that renders imperial nostalgia rational and presents plunder as prudent and scientific?

The Politics of Proximity: Architectural Research on the “Tropics” in the GDR and the Scientific Department of Building in the Tropics and Abroad in Weimar

This paper examines the Scientific Department of Building in the Tropics and Abroad (WB TAB), founded in Weimar in 1985, as a site of architectural knowledge production in the late GDR. Drawing on archival sources and interviews, it explores how research on the “tropics” was shaped by socialist internationalism, political alliances, and limited mobility. Using Cuba as its main case study, it argues that the tropics served less as a geographical category than as a political framework through which selected socialist and anti-imperialist partner countries became objects of research, training, and international engagement.

Forging Modernity Otherwise: When a Metalworking Company in Medellín Contradicts the Global History of Design

Forging Modernity Otherwise examines ElOspina, a Colombian metalworking company active during the first half of the twentieth century, to explore how alternative histories of modern design emerge from fragmented archives. Drawing on catalogues, photographs, surviving furniture, business records, and family memories, the paper treats archival discontinuity not as a limitation but as a productive method of inquiry. The study follows the trajectory of ElOspina’s metal furniture from its industrial origins to its later reappropriation by artists, revealing a historical tension between utility and the production of meaning. By tracing the movement of objects from foundry to home, archive, and artistic practice, the paper challenges universal narratives of design history and argues for a more plural understanding of modernity, knowledge production, and material culture in Latin America.

Against Onenism, and the Coloniality of Knowledge Production

I call “Onenism” the Western ideology aimed at ordering the world—and life—in terms of a single principle—theological, enlightened, or post-enlightened—which posits one-archical ordering principle—god, king, reason, truth, law, etc. Such ideology was structural to the colonization of the Americas, and today structures the coloniality of knowledge. One area where the university’s drive for onenism goes still unnoticed is methodological design and research pragmatics. Indeed, in this paper, I aim to discuss the research (un)methodological design I am carrying out in Peru concerning mestizaje, fusion, and the emergence of what is called New Andean Pop. Specifically, I will address the distinction that Latinx academics in the United States have been making between “fieldwork”—emphasizing its colonial connotations—and “homework,” which refers to our being part of the communities we study, our purported “objects of study.”

Embodied Ways of Knowing: Unsettling Research Norms through Cripistemology

How do embodied experiences shape what counts as knowledge? This paper introduces cripistemology as an approach for questioning normative assumptions underlying dominant epistemologies. Taking blindness as a case study, it critiques the longstanding reliance on visual metaphors that equate seeing with knowing and blindness with ignorance. Rather than framing blindness as a deficit, the paper explores it as a distinct mode of sensory engagement with the world that reveals the embodied conditions under which knowledge is produced and validated. It argues that disability studies provide conceptual tools for examining how research cultures privilege particular ways of knowing and for opening interdisciplinary dialogue.

Beyond Hearing: Multisensory Politics and Brass Band as a Site of Expanded Musicality

Becoming Cyborg: Care, Artistic Research, and the Politics of Motherhood as Performance

“Becoming Cyborg” is a lecture performance developed from the artistic PhD The Other|Mother. Everyday Care as a Performative Practice of Troubling that explores motherhood, care, and artistic research as embodied, relational, and politically situated practices. It asks how performance can reframe care, dependency, and exhaustion as epistemic forces. Through the figure of the M:Other – a hybrid of mother, other, and cyborg – it proposes feminist strategies of survival under conditions of structural overload. Within the performance, the physical components of the dissertation are activated as performative objects. Combining text, action, sound, and scores, the work reframes research as a material, affective, and collective practice. By foregrounding embodied knowledge and the politics of research formats, „Becoming Cyborg“ advocates transformative modes of knowledge production.

Praxis, Positionality, & Ways of Knowing

This paper examines canon and heritage through visual ethnography, pedagogical praxis, and design fiction, asking: how do my educational roots inform my design-educator positionality? Raised homeschooled on experiential learning, Bauhaus principles felt natural[ized]. Universal languages of form/function resonated with my prior knowledge systems. I explore this multivalent heritage in process-based experiments. Teaching design history, I root students in pluralistic, global references. We ask: how do humans make sense through designed systems and artifacts? Students contribute primary research to a public archive, investigating their own culture—or respectfully exploring others‘. This collective work is radical, politically and disciplinarily. How might we imagine a future where knowledge, archives, and historical narratives are credible, accessible, and pluriversal? Drawing on my positional context and the radical archiving work I do with students, I hypothesize such a future.

The Ghosts of MRI: On the Political Economy of Neuroscientific Research

This paper begins with my participation in a colour-perception experiment inside an MRI scanner at Charité, Berlin. While I was personally motivated by 25 cents per correct answer, I was assured economic factors should be neglected. This denial frames the paper’s central questions around the politics of empirical research and the production of aesthetic subjectivity.
By reducing one’s reaction to a pure stimulus (Reiz), the experiment recasts subjective responses into a generalised subject, while erasing the economic conditions of its own measurement. Theodor Adorno, who developed his own anti-positivist but still naturalist aesthetics, insisted on necessity of empirical investigation for perceptible phenomena, while rejecting any identity between stimulus (Reiz) and response. Building on his critique of behaviourist conditioning and the role of cultural mediation, I would offer a dialectical reading of neurovisual research.

Seeing Otherwise: RNA Microscopy and the Politics of Research Cultures

This paper repositions RNA microscopy as a site of design-led knowledge production, examining how imaging ideologies shape evidence and identity within artistic research. Based on collaborations between NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media and the DaRE Lab, the project treats microscopic images as both roots—technical inscriptions of the unseen—and routes for speculative visual languages. Through workshops and practice-led visualisation, the research asks how imaging systems govern scientific aesthetics, how “inside-out” images redistribute agency, and which formats best translate lab data into public artefacts. Methodologically, the project evolves in two phases: Roots introduces microscopy and critical image literacy; Routes transforms datasets into narrative and speculative visualisations. The paper argues that RNA imaging, when approached through design, exposes their socio-cultural dimensions: proximities between molecular events and public perception; control in biomedical imagery circulation; and cultures of research redistributing authorship. It proposes an “aesthetics of accountability,” where the making of images becomes a way to account for the claims and responsibilities of RNA research.

Visio Cordis

Visio Cordis is a 20-minute moving-image portrait of research—of the heart as a physical organ, and of the metaphors through which we navigate its emotional and cultural meanings. Rooted in an investigation of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as broken-heart syndrome, the project explores how medical imaging, affect, and machine vision co-produce contemporary understandings of the heart. It foregrounds the image as neither neutral nor self-evident, but as an aesthetic, ethical, and political construct that shapes research practice. As an audio-visual essay, Visio Cordis approaches research as a poetic and critical method, insisting on the uncertainty of looking in a world increasingly governed by automated sight.

World Building Beyond the Nation State: Diaspora as Science Fiction

This project examines the development of Diaspora Aesthetics, a newly established field at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, within a political climate shaped by rising right-wing populism, authoritarianism, and post-truth discourse. While Austria’s history and present are marked by cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity, contemporary nationalist narratives increasingly construct the nation as a homogeneous community rooted in exclusionary notions of identity. In response, the project proposes a methodology that understands diaspora not only as a historical and sociopolitical condition but also as a speculative framework aligned with the logic of science fiction. Diasporic experience—characterized by displacement, temporal rupture, hybridity, and the negotiation of multiple realities—shares key features with science fiction’s modes of imagining alternative worlds and futures. Reading diaspora through science fiction foregrounds the creative and critical world-building practices of dispersed communities, offering strategies to resist authoritarian constructions of identity, challenge manipulated notions of truth, and envision forms of belonging beyond the constraints of the nation-state.

Mai Ling’s Accented Anonymous Collectivity as Diasporic Methodology

This contribution takes as a case study the Vienna-based, anonymous artist collective Mai Ling’s online protest Not Funny! (2020), which responded to the racist parody of a Chinese correspondent during Covid-19 aired on the late-night show Gute Nacht Österreich. By focusing on the aesthetics of the ‘accented anonymous collectivity,’ the contribution will examine how the collective deconstructs the notion of ‘Asianness’ and bypasses racial taxonomy without losing multiplicity. Speaking with an accent is one of the most racially charged experiences for a diasporic subject. Yet, unlike a static identity marker, an accent “doesn’t say anything precise about the speaker’s social location or locution.” Thus, speaking with an accent resists simple labeling and stereotyping. This contribution will highlight how Mai Ling expands on the methodological potency of accents by amplifying its liminality and staged conflation by voicing collectively and anonymously.

Between the (Scientific) Model and the Precedent: Research in architecture under the pressure of the “scientific pragmatics”

What does it mean for architecture to be scientific? The discipline’s relationship to science—its desire to adopt scientific rigor—can be traced back to the Enlightenment. An early example of such aspiration is Claude Perrault’s distinction between natural and arbitrary beauty. The former arises from an “apparent […] balanced correspondence of size, number, disposition, and order,” while the latter is deemed agreeable “merely by custom.” For Perrault, natural beauty aligns with a scientific model, whereas customary beauty rests on historical precedent. Colin Rowe was perhaps the last major figure to adopt such methodological distinction in the study and analysis of architecture, until the linguistic and cybernetic, and – later – the digital turn(s) did away with the customary (or attempted to do so). Scientific pragmatics have sought to subsume precedent under the authority of the scientific model, with artificial intelligence standing as the apotheotic example of this ambition. Can architecture truly dispense with the customary, with precedent, and if not, as this paper argues, why? To claim that architecture is scientific is, paradoxically, to demonstrate the impossibility of architecture ever being fully scientific.

Research as Encounter: How Bodies Negotiate Influence

Performers negotiate what is allowed to influence them in a live situation. Somatic consent operates as the ongoing decision of what to admit or refuse from a space, partner, object, audience, or task. Treated as an epistemic procedure, it generates knowledge through the body being altered by an encounter. Attunement names this capacity: remaining open to the present without losing structural coherence.
Within practice-as-research contexts, institutional pressures to produce legible outcomes train the opposite habit. Pre-emptive stabilisation locks timing, geometry, and relational settings in advance, foreclosing what the live event can propose.
Studio journals and rehearsal protocols reveal three recurring patterns through which performers refuse influence: clinging to a prior image of themselves displacing the one the situation produces; subordinating the live encounter to a predetermined compositional frame; and correcting a somatic consequence before it has time to register as information. Somatic consent functions as a diagnostic tool for locating these refusals and redesigning the conditions that generate them.

The Biennial of Care: Politics of Aftercare in Project-Based Artistic Practice

The “Biennial of Care” is an arts-based action research process. We contribute to the current debate on “hidden costs of care” and the “careful turn” in socially engaged art. While cultural events like biennials and festivals often feature process-based socially engaged work within local communities, they usually operate on a project-based framework with defined goals and a definite end. Support structures end while vulnerabilities, needs, and expectations in social environments persist. In Chemnitz, we currently investigate the effects of the European Capital of Culture on the local creative scene and on the public that became actively involved. We close a gap, refocusing the discourse and the framework of evaluation from “legacy” to “care” in the aftermath of large events. The Biennial of Care is conceived as an evolving methodology over the longer term. We create a “Mobile Care Unit” as an archive and toolbox, designed to travel across different large-scale cultural events.

Input 1

Uncertainty forms the core of research, as venturing into the unknown involves unpredictability and potential failure, aggravated by funding, erratic scientific agenda-setting, and broader political contexts. While research always entails maneuvering within heightened uncertainty, the panel examines the particularities of researching authoritarian contexts. Notwithstanding differences between authoritarian settings, they share traits making research unpredictable, ranging from difficulties building trust and lack of data to ethical dilemmas balancing field access against risks for participants or oneself. The panel offers a platform for exchanging experiences on navigating research under such conditions.
Drawing on Hungary, Russia, Georgia, and Serbia, the panel discussion highlights specific uncertainties to deepen understanding and exchange strategies. Since most panelists research from the outside, we also critically reflect on our positionality and responsibilities as researchers.

Input 2

Uncertainty forms the core of research, as venturing into the unknown involves unpredictability and potential failure, aggravated by funding, erratic scientific agenda-setting, and broader political contexts. While research always entails maneuvering within heightened uncertainty, the panel examines the particularities of researching authoritarian contexts. Notwithstanding differences between authoritarian settings, they share traits making research unpredictable, ranging from difficulties building trust and lack of data to ethical dilemmas balancing field access against risks for participants or oneself. The panel offers a platform for exchanging experiences on navigating research under such conditions.
Drawing on Hungary, Russia, Georgia, and Serbia, the panel discussion highlights specific uncertainties to deepen understanding and exchange strategies. Since most panelists research from the outside, we also critically reflect on our positionality and responsibilities as researchers.

Input 3

Uncertainty forms the core of research, as venturing into the unknown involves unpredictability and potential failure, aggravated by funding, erratic scientific agenda-setting, and broader political contexts. While research always entails maneuvering within heightened uncertainty, the panel examines the particularities of researching authoritarian contexts. Notwithstanding differences between authoritarian settings, they share traits making research unpredictable, ranging from difficulties building trust and lack of data to ethical dilemmas balancing field access against risks for participants or oneself. The panel offers a platform for exchanging experiences on navigating research under such conditions.

Drawing on Hungary, Russia, Georgia, and Serbia, the panel discussion highlights specific uncertainties to deepen understanding and exchange strategies. Since most panelists research from the outside, we also critically reflect on our positionality and responsibilities as researchers.

Oceanic Colour Practices: Negotiating Epistemic Agency and More-than-Human Labour

Colour from microalgae and cyanobacteria carries the material memory of the waters it has lived through. It bears witness to cohabitation, environmental stress and contamination.
Trained as a painter, my artistic practice and PhD research explore growing and harvesting colour from microalgae and cyanobacteria in experimental settings. This work becomes a site for rethinking natural-scientific knowledge practices by privileging the agency of these organisms over reproducibility or rigid protocols. Colour becomes both material and methodology: an ecological trace and multispecies storyteller. Drawing on feminist science and decolonial scholars, my work situates scientific knowledge alongside artistic, poetic and relational modes of engagement. I further wonder how the industrial scaling of microalgae and cyanobacteria farms, and the language built around it, normalise extractive practices. Through artworks, collaborative workshops and writing, I develop embodied, sensory methods that challenge disciplinary norms and explore more ecological, relational and ethical ways of knowing.

Governing the Return of Wolves: EU Environmental Research Funding, Human–Wildlife Conflict, and the Politics of Conservation from the EEC to the Age of Populism

Over the past fifty years, EU environmental research has played a key role in shaping biodiversity conservation. The return of the wolf (Canis lupus) across Europe, enabled by legal protection and programmes such as LIFE and Natura 2000, provides a revealing case for examining the politics of research. This paper analyses how EU funding has produced not only scientific knowledge but also governance models and political narratives around large carnivore conservation. Drawing on historical policy analysis and the concepts of “civilizing nature” (Wöbse) and state legibility (Scott), it argues that the wolf has become a governance object through monitoring, management, and coexistence strategies increasingly challenged by nationalist and populist critiques. The paper asks whether EU-funded environmental research can mediate conflicts over biodiversity or whether it risks reinforcing the political polarisation surrounding nature conservation.

Cement and Limestone: Toward Embodied Epistemologies Across Human and Nonhuman Plateaus

This presentation draws on my research-creation practice, which combines sensory ethnography and technologically mediated methods in order to explore how embodied knowledge emerges across human and non-human plateaus. In the multicultural area of Amerikis Square in central Athens, I collaborated closely with my interlocutors to co-create spatial and relational understandings through a methodology I developed called narratives-in-motion. Some of the research material was later transformed into an interactive audio walk located in the same neighborhood, inviting others to listen, move through it, and re-perform the emerging hybrid space. During an artistic-research residency on the island of Chios, I developed aepos: I found seashells on a plateau, a sound-based performative work that carries human and non-human presences across the limestone landscape of the Aepos mountainous terrain. In both works, I approach research as a practice of co-existence, care, and attention, and as a space in which knowledge emerges through embodied, situated, and shared encounters.

Volcanic Futures

Volcanic Futures is a 10-minute video essay. The work weaves my personal experience of growing up in the Andean region with a feeling of estrangement from today’s planetary condition. Structured into four parts, it begins by questioning the meaning of the term “Andean,” then reflects on how this landscape has shaped my subjectivity and perspective as an artist. The third part turns to the contemporary global condition: wars, artificial intelligence, and the climate crisis, framed through capitalist science fiction, the ideology promoted by billionaires who imagine an interplanetary project of a humanity without a world. The final section proposes a speculative return to ancestral Andean ways of knowing, which see nature as a world rather than a resource, imagining a future based on reciprocity with this sacred web of life.

The piece brings together personal photographs of mountains I have taken since my youth, YouTube footage from tech companies seeking to colonize Mars, archival images of the Pichincha volcano eruption, and scientific illustrations of the Andes by European explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt.

Politics of Feminist Research

Feminist research has real agency to make visible what can often be insidious structures of power, like laws and policies that exert immense influence in shaping the built environment; and in particular, the physical landscapes of reproductive healthcare of abortion clinics and birthing facilities in the United States. Since the repeal of Roe v Wade in 2022, with more states across the U.S. unabashedly hostile towards women and women’s healthcare, reproductive healthcare has become one of the primary sites where women’s rights are differentiated depending upon the geography of where one lives.
Research and advocacy in reproductive healthcare have become more challenging work, paralleling a woman’s oftentimes inability to access safe and science-based healthcare. Given these restrictions, politically focused research is under assault in the U.S., even more so if this research focuses on women. Architects are crucial but often, unexpected partners: abortion clinics need architectural expertise, lawyers need architects to help visualize space and interpret building codes, and healthcare providers need architects to design safe and supportive spaces.

Research in the Debris: Disrupting Architectural Paradigms Through Design Phenomenographies

This paper advances artistic and design-driven research as a dissident practice capable of unsettling the hegemonies governing architectural decision-making. Situated within industrial ruins of the former Eastern Bloc, it confronts the cultural amnesia that has rendered these sites politically inconvenient and institutionally invisible, places once inscribed with the utopian promises of collective futurity, now dissolving and at risk of being obliterated by predatory real estate practices.
Through hybridised phenomenographies (hand drawings, filmic overlays, and atmospheric vignettes), the research excavates submerged layers of grief and embodied experience that conventional methodologies suppress. Grounded in autoethnographic situatedness, it positions the researcher as an implicated subject rather than an external authority.
Design-driven inquiry can reclaim the ruin as a politically charged epistemic space, one where silenced histories are reactivated, and architecture is compelled, to listen before it builds.

Archive, Broodthaers, Catalogue, Dockx

With their work Projet pour un livre. Projet pour un film, Nico Dockx and Helena Sidiropoulos realised in 2009 the production of an altered version of an unpublished catalogue to the exhibition Marcel Broodthaers. L’homme de lettres et la conquête de l’espace, which had taken place at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from March 9 until June 10, 2001. The catalogue had not been published as a result of discussions with the rights holders concerning the permission to use the images of works and documents in the catalogue. While researching the institution’s archives in 2009, Dockx and Sidiropoulos rediscovered the model of this catalogue. Projet pour un livre. Projet pour un film is the result of their decision to publish the catalogue at last, or at least to produce a work of art that would testify to the existence of this unpublished book. Wit its large number of black non-images, their work looked like a visually loud protest against the fact that the rights holders had forbidden to use a lot of images. One could think of it as a Broodthaersian Open Letter accusing the excesses of the institution of copyright, the question being not whether the author is dead, but whether the author is dead long enough.

“Negative travel advice” from Collectors: issues of access in research

In this paper we examine issues of access in universities and cultural educational institutions, showing how institutional gatekeeping shapes who enters academic spaces and contributes to knowledge production. We adapt Martínez Colá’s mentoring model—Collector, Night Light, and Ally—to institutions to analyze how they include, exclude, or condition marginalized groups and non hegemonic knowledge sources. One case study examines museums with problematic collections, facing questions of restitution, repatriation, and repair, as oscillating between Collectors and Allies. Another explores research with Latin American communities in violent or officially “high risk” areas, where researchers positioned as Allies are constrained by blanket institutional policies. Together, these cases shed light on hegemonic and counter hegemonic frameworks shaping art and heritage research and teaching within European institutions.

An inauthentically decolonial Southern subject, anxiously ascends and descends a stairway

Through simple, repeated acts of regression and progression, this multi-modal lecture-performance activates the iconic stairways of the Weimar Bauhaus while reflecting on the politics of Decolonial Theory. In a tangential register, it highlights the disturbing irony that in parts of the Global South, the emancipatory discourse of Decolonial Theory is increasingly harnessed to infrastructures of unfreedom. Drawing on speculative scenarios rooted in Abhishek’s longstanding interest in non-institutionalised forms of knowledge production, the performance also enacts the contradictions of representation at conferences where the Global North invites the Global South. In the present conjuncture, Decolonial Theory, despite its institutional capture, or perhaps because of it, is arguably a prevailing paradigm for critiquing the colonial legacy. But does this imply that a Southern researcher-artist should, almost by default, feel affiliated with its program of epistemic delinking from the West?

Ghost and Rigor: Militarized Transdisciplinarity and Affective Solidarity as Ethical Otherwise

This research traces the history of transdisciplinarity within the arts and humanities, starting from the co-option of visual and cultural research in US military operations and national defense during the Cold War. Positing that such a co-option exemplifies an emergent transdisciplinary impulse, it argues that, within this development, Third World culture was assimilated into a false alliance with Western epistemology that sustained the life-force of humanities institutions during the postwar period. Regarding this, the research pays particular attention to ethnography as a beyond-humanities research method within the field of Southeast Asian art history, specifically how this gesture further institutionalizes the militaristic aspect of transdisciplinarity. In response, it theorizes the notion of “ghostly transdisciplinarity,” which points to art writings and other forms of theoretical works across marginalized socio-cultural contexts, as a way to demilitarize knowledge production, challenge extractive (institutional) alliances, and reconstitute ethical transdisciplinarity that merits affective engagements.

Against neutrality, within ideology: from Bauhaus to the Global South, a perspective on project and research methodologies in the Design Field

This paper challenges the assumption that project and research methodologies in the Design Field are neutral and universally applicable tools. Drawing on critical theory and historical materialism, it argues that methodologies are historically and ideologically embedded in capitalist societies. From the eighteenth-century “culture of the project” to the Design education institutionalization through the Bauhaus and later the Ulm School, methodological frameworks have shaped how design projects are organized while reproducing imperatives of efficiency, standardization, and market alignment. Grounded in the work of Marx, Mészáros, Konder, and Vieira Pinto, the paper understands ideology as the expression of social relations rather than false consciousness. Combining analysis with reflections from teaching and advising in the Design Graduate Program at UFRJ – Brazil, it examines practices from a Global South perspective and argues for an understanding of design as socially situated praxis.

To Touch What Refuses Resolution

“To Touch What Refuses Resolution” is a 60-minute participatory workshop for researchers, artists, educators, and practitioners who want to work with the difficult politics of research through the body, the hand, and the collective room.
Grounded in Metabolising Through Making (MTM), the workshop invites participants to press, weave, tear, sound, and witness tension as material. Cicadas act as epistemic companions: creatures who spend years metabolising underground before emerging together to disrupt the dominant sonic field. Their rhythm becomes a way to think about slow transformation, hidden labour, collective emergence, and refusal.
Participants will move through MTM’s cycle of Orient, Enact, Witness, Action, engaging contradiction and discomfort through making. The workshop creates a shared space for feeling what research politics does in the body, and for asking how embodied practice can reconfigure the ways we know, act, and respond.

Guided Tour

Take a guided tour to the artworks presented at the XV International Bauhaus Colloquium. Talk to the artists present.

The Secret Grant: Reclaiming Research Bureaucracy

How do research grant indicators (mis)shape the way research forms? How do research horizons make and unmake ‘transformative research’ and what are the ways of feeling transformative successes? This workshop will put pressure on the terms that shape who gets resources for research and how, in order to imagine research outcomes otherwise. We will open up a series of embodied activities and conversations that strive to reclaim and refuse ‘research grant indicators’ as bureaucratic instruments of collective for closure. We will explore tools and practices that instead put indicators in service of indicating practices of communal + mutual aid, collective and embodied research, pleasure-centered demands of and on the collective body so that a body politics of liberation would be possible. Moving from a queer-, trans*- and crip-informed practice that questions what it means to optimize time, or to gather ‘results’ — we will take each of the indicators of a success of a grant and play with them.

Tripping on Modernist Monuments

The Tripping on Modernist Monuments artistic research project explores how monuments—whether intentionally or unintentionally—make societal conflicts visible, and how expertise from monument preservation, activism, art, and engineering can be integrated. Rather than focusing visually pleasing representations, the project engages with built heritage in its raw reality, its current use, and its entanglement in postsocialist politics.

This walk demonstrates how student-led, collaborative research can function as a counter-hegemonic academic endeavor that reimagines the methodologies of knowledge production. Reflecting on the time that has passed since the XV. Bauhaus Colloquium, it traces heritage dating back to the era of the I. Bauhaus Colloquium, situating it within the broader context of knowledge production across the former Eastern Bloc and Yugoslavia.

Desire, Dissidence, and Path-Making: Walking as Artistic Research

Walking always begins with a pull: a quiet impulse that aligns us toward an elsewhere. In urban contexts, this pull sometimes materializes as a trace, a desire path; those informal, crooked lines in the grass or gravel that reveal how people move through space differently from prescribed routes. This pull is expressed by a desire.
This contribution combines the format of presentation, drawing on the year-long program of artist-led walks titled Dissident Paths co-curated for nGbK, Berlin (2025-26), with a walk-based workshop. Through which we will explore desire and dissidence as forces shaping how bodies move, encounter one another, and imagine alternative possibilities for public space. We will examine how walking redirects attention, creates social, spatial, and epistemic relations that open spaces of access engagement, and alternative or unplanned uses of built environment, and therefore new knowledge.

Abstract to be announced.