DESIGN OF SPECIALIZED TOPICS
Course convened by Dr. Ana Bezić
In this interdisciplinary course we will be ‘excavating’ a new form of solidarity as an entanglement and an emerging possibility of life and non-life to create support, care and alliances. In order to do this, we will be ‘searching’ for mudbricks that travelled from Egypt to the Joanneum Museum in Graz in the 19th century. Colonial economies leave scars on ‘objects’ too! The arrival of these mudbricks and their subsequent analysis were scientifically justified yet the claim to scientific knowledge continues to obscure the silent histories ‘objects' are not allowed to voice.
Keeping in mind these histories of appropriation, in this class we will rethink life/non-life beyond colonial models, presupposing solidarity between bricks carrying seeds and seeds supporting bricks. Thinking with bricks and seeds means investigating activation, transformation, and contingency, as well as collaboration, boundaries, and alliances —how forms of life and the life of forms take shape and persist, how they adapt, resist, support each other, and sometimes fail.
Bricks and seeds exist at the threshold of archive and future. They hold the potential to become. Can bricks and seeds be collaborators in dreaming new futures?
While life is often understood as an organic process of growth and reproduction, we will befriend and engage deeply with autopoiesis—introduced by two biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela—which offers a different perspective: life as a system continuously producing and maintaining itself through dynamic interactions.
Students will engage in theoretical readings, material investigations, museum visits, archival research, site-based explorations, hands-on exercises, and collaborative projects. The course will culminate in individual or group research-based projects (in a medium of your choice).
Image credit: Photo-archive, Museum of African Art, Belgrade, Serbia