Subproject I

Culture – Pre-enacting Democratic Spaces

The Subproject Culture explores the democratizing potentials of performative practices by which artists/activists in different parts of the world seize and appropriate existing institutions. The goal is to investigate how these practices expand the democratic imaginary by

  • experimenting with more democratic and egalitarian ways of ‘inhabiting’ existing institutions,
  • using these institutions to generate public awareness of pressing issues,
  • producing non-academic, activist forms of democratic theory and
  • inventing visions of alternative democratic futures that are explicit and implicit in these practices.

The subproject is led by Dr. Viktoria Huegel.

 

 

The Subproject concentrates on the prefigurative appropriation of three institutional formats:

Theatrical Occupations

Through theatrical occupations, activists reclaim public space and institutions to experiment with democratic forms of self-organization, thus enacting different imaginaries of democratic futures.

Counter-Summits

Counter-summits subversively appropriate the institutional format and symbolic authority of global summits. Their composition and scope prefigure radically inclusive forms of political deliberation.

Civil Society Tribunals

Civil society tribunals appropriate legal formats of criminal proceedings outside of official frameworks. With that, unrecognized experiences of violence and systemic injustices are qualified as crimes through counter-hegemonic, participatory, and victim-centered trials.