With Katharina Brenner and Lioba Wachtel.
Once upon a time, there was an exhausted group of students at an art academy who worked late into the night on their semester projects. They were so tired of the dusty power structures, the brutal mechanisms of exclusion and the neoliberal work culture of their institution. They shared their suffering with each other and one of the students spoke: "Sometimes I wish we could all turn these dull structures upside down and make the art academy a place where everyone can have a say." In the middle of the dark night, the rays of the full moon hit the students and it happened: a witchcraft force was cast over them that was stronger than all the historically grown, unspoken and written rules and laws of this university. It shook everything! The group of students suddenly realized that they didn't have to accept all these injustices that had been written down in the institution, and they excitedly and joyfully began to formulate wishes: "All the standardized seating, the hierarchical arrangement of tables and the barrier-free entrances will disappear. All the different bodies will feel comfortable, welcome and included." The classroom changed and the group ended up in a completely new architecture full of accessible, soft and flexible structures that invited them to participate, negotiate, engage and care for each other. They looked around and suddenly saw lots of people who had never set foot in the art academy before. This inspired the students so much that they spent the whole night expressing their wishes...
In the cross-institutional workshop series "Witchy Wishes", we invite students to dream of radically new university structures within the framework of a fictitious scenario and to manifest ideas in short stories, fictitious newspaper articles, lists, poems and witches' spells. The collective imaginations of the participants from various art academies will be brought together in an anthology and published in spring 2025.
Accessibility:
The workshop will be held in German spoken language. No previous knowledge of writing is necessary. We will work with sound and light in the workshop and can respond to your needs. Please let us know your access requirements in advance by email (to liobawachtel@ao l.com).
Katharina Brenner works at the intersection of institutional critique, queer feminism, mental health and activism in the context of collective teaching, critical design practice and experimental text production. She studied Visual Communication at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Estonian Academy of the Arts and recently completed her studies at the Kunsthochschule Kassel with the thesis "Practices of Unruly Learning Spaces". Since 2019, Katharina has been co-organizing student seminars, including in collaboration with Eine Krise bekommen, In the Meantime and Klasse Klima. More information: katharinabrenner.xyz
Lioba Wachtel prefers to work on educational formats in collective structures on topics such as institutional heartbreaks, alternative learning spaces and learning from each other. She also works as a graphic designer. Lioba studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle and the Estonian Academy of the Arts and recently completed her studies with the project "The Institution, the Witch, the Collectivity and Me.". Since 2023, Lioba has been part of the still nameless collective, which emerged from the collaboration between the collectives Eine Krise bekommen and In the Meantime.
Date & location
November 28, 2-5 pm, room 325, Nordbau
The workshop is aimed at all students of the Kunsthochschule Kassel / University of Kassel.