Led by: Sandra Selimović, Zoe Gudović, Carmen Gheorghe
Language: German and English

“Honour” is a powerful concept that the patriarchy employs to restrict the rights of women and queers. As a consequence, more and more Roma women’s activists and queer-feminists and artists in various countries, above all in Eastern Europe, are working on questioning the politics of “honour”. They are creating new narratives around the body, gender identity and sexual orientation and are trying to use political means to change how these are represented in a range of areas of society. The workshop will analyse how this struggle can put the combination of art, theatre and activism to strategic use.

Register here.

Led by: Arne Vogelgesang
Language: German

This workshop gives an overview of the means and methods with which political battles are being conducted on social media and beyond: by both anti-humanitarian and progressive movements. It will pay particular attention to the question of where activist online practice between identification and anonymity touches on areas of theatre and the performative.

Register here.

Led by: Black Earth Collective
Language: German and English

This workshop addresses intersections between colonialism and the climate crisis and uses performance as a tool to embody breaking open the binary oppositions between human and nature, men and women, Black and white. It is concerned with recognising centuries-old anti-colonial struggles, listening to movements and communities that have been silenced, who now stand at the forefront of the climate crisis, and paying attention to prognoses for the coming decades that are currently being ignored.

The Black Earth Collective particularly welcomes BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) and queers to attend this workshop.

Register here.

+++ This workshop is cancelled. +++

Led by: Can Gülcü
Language: German

This workshop focuses on the question of how artistic-activist strategies can be used to attack racist normativity and right-wing extremism. How can we change the rules about who can speak and who can be listened to and taken seriously? How can buried and repressed knowledge be disclosed? Art as art and as kanakish, anti-racist, proletarian, anti-capitalist activism. During the workshop these emancipatory struggles will be discussed and considered together, for example with reference to issues around the NSU.

Register here.

Black Earth Collective is a BIPoC environmental & climate justice collective founded in Berlin. The collective is concerned with issues including sustainability, veganism, environmental and climate justice from decolonial perspectives. How are the oppression of marginalized groups of people and the oppression of nature connected? Who is particularly affected by climate change? And how can movements dedicated to these issues be reclaimed? The collective not only seeks to scrutinise the white and cis-heterosexual dominated, left-wing environmental activist sector but primarily to create a space for intersectional activism.

Carmen Gheorghe is a Roma feminist, activist and scholar from Romania. She has been engaged in civil society for the last 19 years and her main work was focused on Roma women and girls’ rights through grassroots work, community development, gender issues, intersectionality, politics of identity, gender-based violence and reproductive justice. She is the co-founder of E-Romnja Association, a Roma feminist NGO in Romania who’s building a new narrative about Roma girls and women in Romanian. She was also co/author for articles about Roma feminism, anti-racism for social justice, intersectionality and labour market. Since 2019 she developed an academic course on Roma feminism and politics of identity.

Zoe Gudović is a lesbian artist, feminist, activist, cultural manager, producer and organizer. She comes from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and moved to Vienna in October 2021. Since 1995, she has been involved in the work and research of informal and engaged theatre forms. In her practice, she combines art and activism in order to change the existing consciousness and social relations. Theatre educator. Performer. Drag King Transformer. Toilet artist. Worked, founded or was in groups and collectives: Women at Work, Act Women, Queer Belgrade, Charming Princess-band, Reconstruction Women's Fund. Lecturer at Women's Studies (Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade), on the topic of Feminist Art in Public Space. Organizer of street engagement performances against violence against women. Organizer of numerous campaigns for the visibility of LGBTQ +, women's human rights and people from the margins. Since 2001, she has connected artists from all over the world with activists from Serbia under the name "Women's Movement - Women's Theatre - Women's Body". Winner of the Jelena Šantić Award for a combination of art and activism. Winner of Befem’s Feminist Achievement Award for promoting feminism outside the feminist movement. She edits and hosts the radio show Ženergija.

Can Gülcü was born in Bursa in 1976, has lived in Austria since 1990 and works in Vienna as a cultural creative, public relations and campaign worker and activist, focussing on political communication, political/participatory cultural work and social, political and socio-economic power relations. He currently works in the department for digital agendas at the Arbeiterkammer Vienna.

Sandra Selimović is an actor, director, rapper and activist. Born in Zaječar, Serbia in 1981, she first appeared on stage in 1994. She is currently appearing at the Burgtheater Vienna in ‘The Doctor’ by Robert Icke and at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin in ‘Roma Armee’ directed by Yael Ronen. She has worked as a freelance actor and director at the Volkstheater Vienna, Schauspiel Essen, Staatstheater Kassel and in the independent theatre sector in Austria, Germany and Romania. Together with Tina Leisch, she co-directed her first documentary film ‘Gangster Girls’ in Schwarzau women’s prison, which was screened at the Viennale and the Munich Documentary Festival. In 2010 she founded the first ever feminist Roma theatre organisation Romano Svato together with her sister Simonida Selimović – at the same time the two of them started making music as the rap duo Mindj Panther. Their productions examine racism, sexism, identity, feminism and exclusion while shattering stereotypical images and clichés of the Roma as an ethnic group. As a self-aware and queer romni, Sandra Selimović is both a pioneer of women’s rights within the Roma community and also an activist against discrimination against gypsies. In 2013 her debut work as a director at the Vienna Akademietheater won her the Junger Burg’s audience award.

Arne Vogelgesang realises experimental art projects using documentary material, new media, fiction and performance with the theatre label internil and under his own name. Among other topics, these focus on radical political propaganda on the internet. He also gives lectures and workshops on his research, plays around with virtual reality and human representation in 3D and writes occasional texts. https://vogelgesang.internil.net

With: Natalie Ananda Assmann and Gin Müller (Programme Leads ACADEMY #2)

Lecture by Isabell Lorey (Professor of Queer Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne) followed by discussion
in person + online
Language: German
Entry is free of charge. No registration required.
Click here for the online stream.

This lecture argues for a radical, new, democratic queer-feminist activism in the political present. It does not foreground identities and representations, but rather caring relationships and a common bond in shared vulnerability. Here it formulates a radical alternative to neoliberal democracy and the authoritarian populisms that result from it.

Register here.

Shuttle bus to the Impulse SHOWCASE in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Return journey around 23:00.

Natalie Ananda Assmann has worked as a freelance artist, director, performer, actor and cultural creative since 2006. Residencies in São Paulo, Tel Aviv and New York played a key role in forming her artistic thinking. Assmann’s works operate in the crossover between performative interventions, theatre in public spaces and activist approaches to art and culture. In recent years she has worked increasingly in queer-feminist collectives and focussed on a variety of artistic resistance practices. This year Natalie Assmann became Co-Director of the festival Wienwoche. She lives and works in Vienna.

Isabell Lorey is a political theorist and Professor of Queer Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She also works for transversal (http://transversal.at), the publication platform of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp). Her books include: ‘Immer Ärger mit dem Subjekt. On Butler and Foucault’, 1996/2017; ‘Figuren des Immunen. Elements of a Political Theory’, Zürich: Diaphanes 2011; ‘Die Regierung der Prekären, New Edition’, Vienna: Turia+Kant 2020; ‘Demokratie im Präsenz. A Theory of the Political Present’, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2020.

Gin Müller is a dramaturg, queer ar/ctivist and teacher. He currently works as a Lecturer at the University of Vienna (Institute of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, since 2008), and was Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 2017 to 2019. At the same time, he has created numerous theatre/performance/art projects (principally in co-operation with brut Vienna) and worked as a curator, dramaturg and activist on the projects ‘Queer Base’ (Welcome and Support for LGBT-Refugees), ‘TransX/-Rosa Lila Villa’ (since 2009), ‘VolxTheaterKarawane’ (2001–2004). He is the author of the book: Gin/i Müller, ‘Possen des Performativen. Theatre, Activism and Queer Politics’, republicart 7, Vienna: Turia+ Kant 2008. http://ginmueller.klingt.org

Register here.

Online lecture by Ricardo Dominguez (Professor for Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego)
followed by discussion
Live stream + online
Language: English
Entry is free of charge. No registration required.
Click here for the online stream.

Ricardo Dominguez will focus on three lines of flights he has co-created: The history of Electronic Civil Disobedience, flight facilitation gestures for immigrants and refugees, and speculative dronology.

Meeting point: Keupstraße 40, 51063 Köln

Ricardo Dominguez is the chair of the Department of Visual Arts, UCSD. Dominguez was a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (http://critical-art.net/) and a co-founder of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998 (https://anthology.rhizome.org/...). With Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool - https://tbt.tome.press/ - (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. He was under investigation for 3 years for this project by the FBI, U.S. Congress and UCSD. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited in many national and international venues. He was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University (2017-18), a Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio Center, Italy) during the summer of (2018), and a UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Fellow (2021). Ricardo is also chair of the Department of the Visual Arts. Many of his articles and essays can be found at: https://ucsd.academia.edu/Rica... And he recently has re-collective exibition of 40 years of collaboration at the Center for Digital Culture in Mexico City, Mexico: https://hipermedial.centrocult...

Lecture by Natasha A. Kelly (communication sociologist, author, curator and artist) followed by discussion
in person + online
Language: German
Entry is free of charge. No registration required.
Click here for the online stream.

Register here.

Shuttle bus to the Impulse SHOWCASE in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Return journey around 00:30.

Natasha A. Kelly is an author and artist who holds a PhD in Communication Studies and Sociology. She made her film debut at the 10th Berlin Berlinale in 2018 with the award-winning and internationally successful documentary ‘Milli’s Awakening’. She made her directing debut in 2019 with the international production in three countries and in three languages of her doctoral thesis ‘Afrokultur’. She published two further books in 2021: ‘Racism. Structural Problems Require Structural Solutions’ with Atrium Verlag and ‘Sisters and Souls’ with Orlanda Verlag. http://www.natashaakelly.com

Online lecture by Karin Harrasser (Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Design Linz) followed by discussion
Language: German
Entry is free of charge. No registration required.
Click here for the online stream.

The pandemic and the massive changes in global environmental conditions have worldwide have produced fragile political bodies. Subjects perceive themselves as under threat. The reactions to this shared experience that takes on very different forms depending on geography, social standing, gender and age are uneven: politics of (common) care meet attempts at self-isolation. A solidary approach to vulnerability meets with attempts to negate this vulnerability and to outsource the responsibility that arises from it.

Shuttle bus to the Impulse SHOWCASE in Mülheim an der Ruhr. No return journey.

Location: Kölner Straße 313, 40227 Düsseldorf

Karin Harrasser is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Design Linz, where she is also Vice Rector for Research. After studying History and German Literature, she completed her doctorate at the University of Vienna with a thesis on the narratives of digital cultures and her postdoctoral qualification at the Humboldt University in Berlin on “Protheses. Figures of a Wounded Modernity” (published in 2016 by Vorwerk 8, Berlin). Alongside her academic career, she has also participated in various artistic and curatorial projects, for example at Kampnagel Hamburg, Tanzquartier Wien and with MAPA Teatro and the Colombian Truth Commission in Bogotá. Together with Elisabeth Timm, she edits the ‘Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften’. Her book ‘Surazo. Monika und Hans Ert: Eine deutsche Geschichte in Bolivien’ will be published soon.