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Projects Research Area 2

Transnational Representations of War and Migration in Theatre and Literature (2020-)

The exploration of transnational movements in literature and theatre is not to be achieved without cultural and aesthetical reflections on entanglement of time and space. In a historical and systematic perspective, the project deals with transnational ties in literature and theatre after World War II and in the present. The main focus lies on determining how war, displacement and migration correlate to the transnational and transcultural character of theatrical scenography and literature topologies. The crossing of borders and spaces constitutes not only a transgression of physical borders but also of symbolic ones. These movements are also connected to concepts of temporality, which affect the outer processuality of time and acting as well as the inner one of generating the subject and its identity.

Visual Translations – Material Transformations (2020-)

One major factor in keeping texts and literatures relevant across space and time and in allowing them to circulate is their translatability. The history of a text is always also the story of its material rendering and its formal aesthetic composition. The project begins its explorations with late medieval manuscripts, on the basis of which principles of layout design were developed that remain valid even today. These principles give rise to wide-ranging and complex questions relating to the material contexts of texts and their semantics.

Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art (2020-)

The Transfer Project "Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art" will explore how diverse histories inform performative practices and shape communities as embodied knowledge. In collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the project will primarily focus on the intersections between Southeast Asian and 'Western' performative practices while addressing the blind spots in traditional historiography in 'the West' as well as the consequences of colonialism and relationships capable of advancing the deconstruction of the 'Western' canon.

Extended Audiences (2019-)

"Extended Audiences" will investigate the ways in which performances are seminal for the formation of temporal communities that both emerge from and transcend co-present theatrical communities. Issues of performance and audience involvement always have a temporal dimension: ephemeral as the moment of a recital or performance may seem, an audience's engagement with the literary experience outlasts the actual event.

The Wandering Torso: Becoming Fragment in Early Modern Material Culture (2019-)

The aim of this project is a book-length study on the entanglement of the most famous fragment in Western culture – the so called Torso Belvedere – with the aesthetic concepts of body and materiality in the European Early Modern period. The medial and material transformations of the Torso in art and literature will be examined in the broader context of antiquity reception, medical knowledge, and cultural techniques.

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