"Wo kommen wir hin".
An Artistic Research Laboratory at the Akademie der Künste

Concept: Kathrin Röggla, Karin Sander and Manos Tsangaris

Where are the arts and society developing today? And what about the potential for resistance from the arts in the political arena? From March to the beginning of June 2019 the new main focus programme of the Akademie der Künste is dedicating itself to these questions. The aim is to re-examine and reflect on the tools used for artistic production. Akademie members and guests use writing, composing, acting, scenography and conceptual work to rethink the forms of their artistic actions and question their limitations.

The programme was launched in December 2018 with a "Vorbereitungsbüro" at the Kolumba Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne. It will pick up again on 21 March 2019 with a series of events and talks in the Akademie building on Hanseatenweg that culminate in a 14 day period of special events (18 May to 2 June). Acoustic and interdisciplinary works and installations are planned that negotiate diverse approaches to thinking and working.

Composer Manos Tsangaris, director of the Music Section at the Akademie der Künste, calls it "scenic anthropology": "A person who listens, watches, or discusses something with us becomes the focus of the composition, the production or the installation." What does this approach mean for artistic production and its medium?

Writer Kathrin Röggla, vice president of the Akademie, looks into communication crises in both private and public communication, in which concepts like dramaturgy, narrative or continuity increasingly play a role. Where are the ruptures in seemingly functional communication to be found today? And what is their relationship to politics? Can a new form of avoidance aesthetics embody this?

Visual artist Karin Sander, member of the Akademie der Künste, will collect visions of the future as productive forces, staging the spaces at the Akademie der Künste in a presentation from 28 April to 12 May. Together with Harald Welzer, sociologist and founder of FUTURZWEI, she poses questions about visions of the future, letting those who represent the future in our society speak for themselves.

In their mixed media performance comprised of film, dance, text and music, filmmaker Jeanine Meerapfel, president of the Akademie der Künste, and musician Floros Floridis address how artificial intelligence colonises people's daily lives.

Unlike the sciences, the potential for anarchic or paradoxical action exists in all artistic works. In this respect "Wo kommen wir hin?" is concerned with a research laboratory which creates possibilities for resistant action and thinking, providing the impetus for a sustainable co-creation of society. In addition to Kathrin Röggla, Karin Sander, Manos Tsangaris and President Jeanine Meerapfel, this sense of possibility is bringing together other members of the Akademie and guests, including: visual artist and scenographer Mark Lammert, writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, author A. L. Kennedy, the composers Helmut Lachenmann and Marc Andre, radio play author and visual artist Eran Schaerf, actors Jens Harzer and Hanns Zischler, sociologist Harald Welzer, dramaturg Malte Ubenauf, musician Floros Floridis, the actresses Valery Tscheplanowa and Angela Winkler and radio play author Oliver Sturm.

A constant negotiation between different working approaches is expected to emerge – a kind of perpetual conference in which individual narratives remain visible and yet connect with one another at the same time – but also a dynamic experimental field of actors for the deconstruction of practiced certainties.

Eileen Gray. E.1027 Master Bedroom. A modern Gesamtkunstwerk

In her debut work, the house E.1027, which was built in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Mediterranean between 1926 and 1929, the Irish architect Eileen Gray (1878–1976) designed almost all the parts herself.

The installation of the Master Bedroom in the passage of the Akademie building at Pariser Platz gives the visitors an immediate idea of the comprehensive architectural concept of an unjustly neglected pioneer of modernism.