Research Workshop: Rejecting Closure
Design: Masoud Morgan
Gofteman (Discourse)
Masoud Morgan’s graphic design is a bilingual and textual response to the topic of the research workshop: ‘Rejecting Closure’, written in Latin letters, meets the Persian word گفتمان for ‘discourse’ on the poster. While the Latin letters provide information about the workshop, the Persian word گفتمان conveys the workshop theme also on a textual and sensory level. This approach connects to Morgan’s recent body of work, Dar in Miyāne (Inbetween), a series of typographical sculptures and spatial installations exploring transitions between languages and cultures. The two languages on the poster do not dominate each other; there is interference as well as space for each language to be present and flow. Particles grow between the two languages and in the cracks of the Persian writing. Its texture is inspired by mineral structures found around the city of Torghabeh in Khorasan, Iran, and the lichens that settle in their folds and cracks. Like minerals, writing and language are lively and porous matters that reject being fixed to an eternal form and meaning.
With contributions by Ko-Le Chen, Anne Hölck, Omar Kasmani, Wilma Lukatsch, Karolin Meunier, Masoud Morgan, Zuleika Bibi Sheik
Organized by Annika Haas, University of Hildesheim
DFG Research Training Group “Aesthetic Practice” (German Research Foundation)
Coordination: Sonja Dinter
Support: Joshua Beck, Annika Falkenreck, Thanh Hoa Nguyen, Robin Babatunde Ogunmuyiwa, Clara Scheda
Thursday, 3 July, 10.30 am – Friday, 4 July 2025, 1pm
PULS, Angoulêmeplatz 2, Hildesheim
(5 mins walking distance from Hildesheim main station)
Die gesamte Veranstaltung wird in englischer Sprache abgehalten.
Die Räumlichkeiten (und Toiletten) sind mit dem Rollstuhl zugänglich.
Please register until 30 June 2025 via email: grk2477(at)uni-hildesheim.de
This research workshop is dedicated to writing’s forms and their aesthetic forces that are often overlooked or marginalized in many academic fields. At the same time, the control mechanisms of academic discourse heavily rely on form and formalities and tend to include ways of writing that actively work with form by framing them as ‘experiments.’ This is not just overlooking the specifics of knowledge creation in the arts and literature, it also dismisses that “formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves“ (Hejinian [1983] 2009). Drawing inspiration from poet Lyn Hejinian’s observation that “form is not a fixture, but an activity,” the proposition of this workshop is to consider the engagement with form and with the wide range of aesthetic and literary practices as a continued re-working of knowledge hierarchies in (academic) discourse and related institutional politics (cf. Ahmed 2012, Harney & Moten 2013, Doyle 2024).
What are the stakes of doing that work in the current climate of ideological polarization that turns towards the “fiction” of closure and thus towards the “pleasurable effects” of texts that “are directed toward a single reading”? (Hejinian 2009) What are the many ways, in which “the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure” (Hartman 2008) can take form in writing and other media? This question also concerns the ways in which aesthetic practices in research are currently called upon to prove useful for coping with complexity on intellectual and practical levels. In the workshop, we will discuss these questions in view of the epistemic racism, sexism and violence that is part of the crisis of the Westernized system of knowledge production (Grosfoguel 2013). What are the practical, aesthetic and writerly implications in working towards “knowledge cultivation” and “life-affirming research”? (Sheik 2023)
Over 1.5 days, writers, artists and researchers from anthropology, media studies, and art history will engage in a practice-based exchange about and through storytelling, (non-)translation, poetry, responsive reading, conversation-based and polyvocal writing as well as multilingual collaboration moving towards decoloniality in research. What can, e.g., writers and anthropologists learn from each other? Which role do material conditions and different positionalities play in the continued work of ‘rejecting closure’ in different fields?
Program
Thursday, 3 July 2025
PULS, Angoulêmeplatz 2, Hildesheim
10:30–11:00
Workshop Registration
11:00–11:30
Welcome & Introductory Remarks
Dr. Annika Haas, postdoctoral researcher & media scholar, DFG Research Training Group “Aesthetic Practice”, University of Hildesheim
11:30–12:15
Instant Storytelling Session I / Introduction Round
Anne Hölck, scenographer & artist, Berlin
Instant Storytelling Sessions
The format instant storytelling sessions offers participants the opportunity to experience encounters through and with objects. It enables us as activators to enter associatively into a shared narrative, within a few minutes of exchange, a flow of conceptual and visual associations bring about constant changes of perspective.
12:15–12:30
Coffee break
12:30–13:30
Conversation-Based Research
Or: How to Write Nearby/Alongside Voices
And Furthermore: How to Publish Spoken Words
Dr. Wilma Lukatsch, art historian, Berlin
Moderated by Hannah Chodura, Lukas Graf, Dr. Ruben Pfizenmaier
Conversation-Based Research
We are living amidst kakophonia, multivocal noises, sounds and resonances. A cacophony which often occurs to us as unreadable, as hardly not understandable, as undecipherable babbling. As writers, thinkers, and witnesses we nevertheless are asked to translate. So how can we learn to understand the act of translating the spoken words into written ones not as a curse but as each specific processes of an engagement with the histories we are surrounded by?
Translating what you hear into text is challenging in the first place, but for quite a number of readers the resulting texts are a welcome way to ‘listen-read’ along voices and to experience contemporaneity with a multitudes of worlds otherwise. This talk takes place along different voices from different times, and along some sounds, which seem unconnected at first. We look into how voices can be assembled on the page of a publication. The talk focuses on how the process of research calls on us to use our ears – to listen listen listen –, and joyfully embrace the possible overload we encounter when we wish to situate our research close to lived lifes and think along artist’s voices and their practices.
13:30–15:00
Lunch Break / Time for Storytelling
15:00 – 18:00 Parallel Workshops
Moderated by Dr. Annika Haas & Juri Wasenmüller
- 15:00 – 15:45: Joint Workshop Introduction
Dr. Ko-Le Chen & Dr. Zuleika Bibi Sheik - 15:45 – 17:15: Parallel Workshops:
- Writing My Way Out of the Multiverse
Dr. Ko Le Chen, design researcher and filmmaker, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne
Writing My Way Out of the Multiverse
How can we resist the pressure to post-rationalise our actions within academic discourses? This reflective workshop invites participants to share their experiences of articulating research processes through writing, and to reflect on the voices, expressions, and cultural contexts they are entangled with.
Envisioned as a shared platform, the workshop will examine key concepts circulating in media-related disciplines. Drawing from my experience coordinating a peer-mentoring project with a group of culturally diverse women based in Southeast Asia, I aim to stimulate cross-disciplinary conversations around the dominance of Anglophone frameworks.
I will share how my collaborators and I resisted the impulse to flatten our experiences into a single coherent voice for a journal article. Together, we will explore the functions and limitations of pluriverse or multiverse imaginaries and critically question how these frameworks currently accommodate—or fail to accommodate—non-Anglophonic standpoints and rationalities.
- Liminagraphy - Life affirming research in times of crisis
Dr. Zuleika Bibi Sheik, Assistant Professor of Decolonial Approaches, Gender and Black Studies, University of Utrecht
Liminagraphy—Life affirming research in times of crisis
In this workshop we will discuss ideas around the challenges faced in decolonizing methodologies and what that means in practice. Taking Audre Lorde’s dictum ‘the Masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ as our starting point in thinking more carefully through the decisions made during the research process. Liminagraphy will then be introduced as an alternative practice in research, that critiques the modern/colonial knowledge system whilst reclaiming knowledges that were sought to be eradicated through epistemicide. Liminagraphy is presented as one possibility for doing research that privileges the vantage point of the colonised, so we can do research with our communities on our own terms. The workshop includes a drawing exercise on relational ethics.
- 17:15–18:00: Joint Discussion
18:00–18:30
Refreshments
18:30–19:30
Scenes of Translation
Dr. des. Karolin Meunier, artist, Berlin
Moderated by Lukas Graf & Julia Rüegger
Scenes of Translation
“Scenes of Translation” provides a space for listening and discussion. What does it mean to translate texts together from and into languages that not all of us speak or understand equally well? How can we refer to someone’s thinking without relying solely on academic sources? I will read from and introduce my experimental translation project “A Commentary on Vai pure by Carla Lonzi”, which consists of edited conversations with several collaborators. It is based on a dialogue between the Italian art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi with her partner, Pietro Consagra, published in 1980. Given Lonzi’s radical decision to publish it in this particular form, how can the original text remain visible? Can the temporality of a ‘translation in conversation’ be captured in a book: the slowness, the digressions, the processual nature and moments of banality?
20:00
Dinner near the workshop venue
Friday, 4 July 2025
PULS, Angoulêmeplatz 2, Hildesheim
09:30–11:00
Falling Out of a Story
Dr. Omar Kasmani, Guest Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, FU Berlin
Dr. Annika Haas, postdoctoral researcher & media scholar, DFG Research Training Group “Aesthetic Practice”, University of Hildesheim
Moderated by Noah Grossmann & För Künkel
Falling Out Of A Story
In The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson describes how falling in love is like falling into a story (2007, 82). It is why, she notes, falling out of a story hurts, the story of a love that we might have wanted very much. But a moment of closure can also be an opening. Our readings bring to the fore fragments that dwell in such breaks, traverse genres, offer themselves as scenes of knowledge making and archives of public feeling. Reading side by side, the scene of reading emerges as a site of co-thinking and companionship, response and relation.
11:00–11:30
Coffee break
11:30–13:00
Instant Storytelling Session II / Closing Discussion
Anne Hölck, artist & scenographer, Berlin & workshop participants
13:00–14:00
Light Lunch / Departure
Contributors
Ko-Le Chen is a feminist design researcher and filmmaker based in the school of design at Northumbria University. Her creative practice is collaborative and typically involves making documentaries on subjects that are underrepresented or marginalised in design and HCI discourses. Her most recent work involves creating survivor-led performances with a theatre company (Workie Ticket) based in the North East of England.
Annika Haas is scholar in media studies and works as a postdoc in the DFG Research Training Group “Aesthetic Practice” at the University of Hildesheim. Her current research is concerned with artistic practices in a broken world beyond repair. She received a PhD from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) with a dissertation about Hélène Cixous’s philosophy and writing through the body. Recently, she has published the essay collection Feeling Bad AFK about our attachment to habitual connectivity, bad feelings and techno-capitalism. https://annikahaa-s.com/
Anne Hölck has been a scenographer since 2002 for theater projects in Germany, France and Switzerland. She is a board member of Meinblau project space Berlin and responsible for the realization and coordination of art exhibitions with a team of artists. Since 2014 she has realized curatorial concepts, artistic and scenographic works for collaborative exhibition projects in the artistic research field of Human-Animal Studies. She worked as independent lecturer at art academies and universities and publishes essays on her ongoing research project focusing critically on the design of zoo architecture. https://wp.hoelcka.de/wordpress/
Omar Kasmani is a transdisciplinary thinker and writer based in Berlin, currently serving as guest professor at Freie Universität Berlin. Across cultural anthropology, affect theory and queer-of-color critique, his research is concerned with ideas of intimacy, post-migrant be/longing and queer worldmaking. He is the author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (Duke UP 2022). His current book-project turns to the self as a public archive of daily loves and migrant un/feeling in Berlin. https://omarkasmani.com/
A writer, editor and researcher based in Berlin, Wilma Lukatsch has graduate degrees in Art History, History of Religions and Sociology from the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität of Berlin. She has since worked with artists and is focusing on developing a dialogue-based writing practice in close exchange and collaboration. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the interrelational practices in works of Maria Thereza Alves and asked for decolonial terms and methodologies to understand and re-vision arthistory, artworks and artists voices in the 21st century.
Karolin Meunier is an artist, writer and educator based in Berlin. Her performance, text and video works explore the implications of different cultural techniques. Her research focuses on feminist strategies in film and literature, translation processes and the politics of dialogue. In 2025 she received her PhD on „Dialogisches Material“ at the HFBK Hamburg. She is a member of the collective bookstore and publisher b_books in Berlin. Her artist book "A Commentary on Vai pure by Carla Lonzi" is forthcoming. https://karolinmeunier.org/
Masoud Morgan born in Iran, is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist exploring the sensual and material dimensions of writing, typography and language. He uses installation, sculpture as well as digital and interactive media as means of reflecting upon the interactions between writing, space and the body in social contexts. He studied Visual Communication at the Berlin University of the Arts, followed by completing a Meisterschüler with Prof. Gabi Schillig. His work has been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions, some of which are now part of the permanent collections of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and the Iranian Museum of Graphic Design in Tehran. https://masoudmorgan.com/
Zuleika Bibi Sheik (she/he/they) is a South African poet and scholar of South Indian indentured descent. She is currently Assistant Professor of Decolonial Approaches, Gender and Black Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her particular interest is in ‘decolonizing methodologies’, considering the ‘how’ of doing research that is non-extractive, life-affirming and aimed towards social justice and collective liberation Sheik was awarded her PhD cum laude, for her thesis, Liminagraphy: Lessons in Life-affirming Research Practices for Collective Liberation. Her academic series of essays on Decolonizing the Self has featured in the journal Education as Change and Imbiza Journal for African Writing. Her latest poem ‘Senzenina, what have we done?’ is featured on ‘Planting the seeds of Collective Liberation’ (2024) the inaugural issue of OneStateCollective that brings together creatives and activists united for a Free Palestine.
Unsere Jahrestagung „Macht ≠ Stärke. Schwache ästhetische Praktiken“ findet am 29. und 30. Januar 2026 am Kulturcampus Domäne Marienburg statt.
Sprecher
Prof. Dr. Jens Roselt
Koordination
Dr. Sonja Dinter
Postanschrift
Universität Hildesheim
DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 2477 „Ästhetische Praxis“
Universitätsplatz 1
31141 Hildesheim
Standort
Kulturcampus Domäne Marienburg
Domänenstraße, Haus 3
31141 Hildesheim
Kulturcampus Gebäudeplan
Anfahrtsbeschreibungen zum Kulturcampus