Transcribing Violence: Art, Nature, Politics
We have the pleasure of inviting you to the discussion program Transcribing Violence: Art, Nature, Politics, which will take place on Saturday, May 24, 2025, at 4–9pm at taz Kantine, Friedrichstraße 21, in Berlin.
Although violence is a key societal phenomenon and one of the fundamental concepts of politics, the social stereotypes and existential fears that dominate discourses on violence have created an artificial zone of reflexive disability and analytical silence around it. Violence is being traditionally inscribed in the historical context of the 20th century with its totalitarianisms, genocides, and mass terror and is clearly defined in negative terms. Hence the idea of non-violent development and the achievement of a state of society in which manifestations and methods of violence would morph into increasingly civilised forms, which seemed to have become generally accepted in the last few decades, being particularly inspired by a range of the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 that were dubbed “non-violent.”
This approach, which seeks to reduce or avoid violence in society, to make it controllable and transparent, has utterly failed in the last years. In the context of brutal full-scale wars and genocidal attempts in Eastern Europe, violence in its most savage and archaic forms once again merged with the very fabric of society, penetrating all spheres of life and leading to the degradation of social cohesion and solidarity. Against the backdrop of raging wars and a fascist turn in global politics, the discussion program tackles the multifaceted realities of violence and its societal impacts by addressing the extreme violent ideologies and their political applications, war traumata and devastation, the destruction of nature particularly due to military hostilities, the current visual violence and the variety of forms of its representation in arts and media.
Program
Saturday, May 24, 2025
taz Kantine, Friedrichstraße 21, 10969 Berlin
16:00 Bloody Mass and Bureaucracy – Two Faces of the Fascist Violence
Keynote: Michał Herer
Discussion with Michał Herer and Vasyl Cherepanyn
17:40 War, Body, Landscape
Discussion with Stanislav Aseyev und Yana Kononova
Moderated by Kateryna Mishchenko
19:00 Reception
19:40 Images of Violence / Violence of Images
Discussion with Lesia Kulchynska, Mykola Ridnyi and Till Gathmann
Moderated by Susanne Strätling
Event language: English
Registration is requested due to limited room capacity, please register under: https://www.bpb.de/veranstaltungen/veranstaltungskalender/561669/gewalt-umschreiben-kunst-natur-politik/
The event is organized by the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin, the Project Group for Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education), and the Visual Culture Research Center.
Graphic design: Kirstin Eichenberg
