Program & news 

The starting point for the annual theme of the artrogram and the Arts & Humanities LAB is the observation that we are living in a time in which many things that were taken for granted in liberal societies have been irretrievably lost. A long period of political stability and reliable economic and international legal assumptions seems to be over.

There is talk of the “end of the West”. Geopolitically, planetarily and ecologically, but also in our individual experience, we are entering a new phase.

Against this backdrop, under the title “The Time After”, we want to examine historical and biographical constellations following significant historical or traumatic events that involved similar upheavals.

This refers to the post-war period, times after revolutions, major natural disasters and civilisational ruptures, or after the abrupt end of certain forms of rule and ways of life, such as after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On the one hand, we want to ask how history is processed or repressed in these phases and how new visions of the future emerge at the same time. Is the future in ‘the time after’ only thought of as a phase in which everything bad is hopefully over and forgotten, or everything good is considered lost and mourned? What does it mean to speak of the zero hour?

What does it mean for our view of the future when the present is understood as a break with the past? We would like to address these questions using very different, but also very concrete historical examples. To this end, we are planning a lecture series, a symposium and an exhibition with a growing participatory archive on Friedrichshafen in 1946.

Lecture series and symposium

In the lecture series, sociologists, cultural scientists and philosophers will discuss in eight lectures and a symposium how, after traumatic biographical experiences, wars, revolutions and natural disasters, recourse to the past takes shape and how the future can be conceived under such circumstances.

Lecture topics include ‘The Art of the Zero Hour. Pathologies of a War Generation’(Karen van den Berg), ‘2046: One Year After Technological Singularity’ (Jan Söffner), and ‘Cultural Policy after the Arab Spring’ (Meike Lettau).

The lecture series will conclude with a symposium in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Bregenz, in which philosopher Armen Avanessian, sociologist Dirk Baecker and sociologist Eva Illouz will discuss how thinking and feeling can change after drastic, sometimes even traumatic historical events.

Jewish star scientist Eva Illouz will speak about her book ‘The 8th of October’, Dirk Baecker will talk about the ‘noise of information’ and thinking without subjects, and Armen Avanessian will discuss ‘vibe shifts’.