Die Zivilisationsfrage: Day 1

2 pm
Welcome
Anselm Franke, Bernd Scherer

2.30 pm
Material Histories: Evidence Against the Standard Narrative
With Alain Schnapp, Liv Nilsson Stutz, Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture, Johannes Müller, Alfredo González-Ruibal and Mirjam Brusius
Presentations

Whose Life, and Death, matters?
Liv Nilsson Stutz

In the mid 20th century, archaeology started approaching burials to systematically identify social inequality, a quest that soon came to focus mostly on emerging elites. Earlier periods, such as the Mesolithic, where Nilsson Stutz’s work has been focused, become interesting for this research since they were perceived as constituting pivots toward inequality. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, the post-processual reaction turned its attention to the individual in the past, mirroring a general social and cultural zeitgeist of neoliberalism, and a focus on individual achievement and identity. This lecture in the spirit of The Dawn of Everything calls into question these paradigms and asks the question: does a human life or death have to be exceptional to matter?

Counter-Archives as Evidence
Mirjam Brusius

Museological artefacts and historical archives are considered to be normative sources for finding evidence. Yet they are often embedded in colonial structures that determine the conditions of knowledge-making. If epistemological frameworks stay the same, what could evidence against the standard narrative potentially look like? The talk explores alternative (used here to describe something deviating from the dominant not the ”normal”) ways of engaging with material culture. How can one move beyond teleological narratives that assume the establishment of institutionalized knowledge and indeed evidence? And is the term in itself a problem when it comes to translation and concepts?

6.30 pm
Keynote
David Wengrow
Followed by a conversation with David Wengrow and Alpa Shah

7.45 pm
Book Signing for “Anfänge. Eine neue Geschichte der Menschheit” (Klett-Cotta)
With David Wengrow

8.15 pm
Keynotes
With Christina von Braun, Erhard Schüttpelz and Robin D. G. Kelley,