Stefan Gebhard
Johanne Hoppstock
How can we correspond with the future from within a landscape of remains? Our workshop Anarchive of time – remembering and imagining before ruins invites participants to the Bochumer Westpark, a post-industrial terrain where steel, vegetation, and leisure intertwine, to explore how remembering can become a practice of imagining what is no longer, not yet in ruins. The workshop applies approaches from artistic research and related fields to sense infrastructures not as fixed remnants of the past, but as temporal actors that continue to shape collective imagination.
Over the course of the day, participants will engage in a series of small, performative field practices that attend to the past, present, and future of the site. Through acts of tracing, walking, recording, and writing, we will move between observing material traces and projecting speculative futures, between sensing what has endured and anticipating what may come. The day will unfold as an embodied correspondence with the place, an attempt to rehearse relations to time before ruins. The traces we create (images, textures, text fragments) will be gathered onto a large site map of the Westpark as a basis for a collective Anarchive of the Future. This tactile map will hold the multiple ways in which the group has encountered and imagined the site’s temporalities, becoming a temporary record of shared speculation and situated memory. Rather than aiming for closure or results, the workshop invites participants to linger in the tension between remembering and not-yet, sensing how infrastructures remember and anticipate at once.
The case will take place as a one-day field workshop at the Bochumer Westpark, within easy reach of the conference venue. Breaks and informal exchange are integrated throughout.
Practical Information
- Location: Bochumer Westpark
- Duration: 10am – 5pm (breaks included)
- Costs: costs (transportation, food, …) have to be covered by participants
- Languages: english, german
- Accessibility: partly uneven terrain, wheelchair accessibility not guaranteed
- Materials provided: site map, polaroid cameras, paper, pens
- Materials to bring: your smartphone (charged battery; plus power bank if necessary), headphones, comfortable shoes, weather-proof clothing, and your curiosity
Application
We welcome up to 15 participants from diverse fields including STS, artistic research, anthropology, performance, landscape studies, and education. We especially invite colleagues interested in embodied and sensory field methods, infrastructural temporalities, and speculative practices of imagination.
Please include short responses to the following questions when applying:
- What draws you to the theme Before Ruins?
- Do you have any experiences with artistic research? If so, please describe them briefly.
Organizers
Dr. des. Stefan Gebhard – researcher and performance art educator, University of Koblenz Johanne Hoppstock – artist, performer and teacher, based in Herdecke