Category Archives: Discussion

Discussion, Event, Exhibition

Protecting Trees – Crafting Houses – Parrot Tree Caretakers Association meets Morgenvogel Real Estate

The TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater invites you to an evening of dialogue and presentations on the preservation of bird habitats through activism and visual art. Featuring conservationist and activist Nick Byaba (Parrot Tree Caretakers Association, Uganda) and artist duo Maria Leena Räihälä & Manuel Bonik (Morgenvogel Real Estate, Germany/Finland), the event explores the intersections of interspecies care and the shared agency of birds and humans in urban and rural environments.

Event details
Date: March 25, 2025
Time: 6–8 pm
Location: Tieranatomisches Theater, HU Berlin, Campus Nord, Philipstr. 12/13, 10115 Berlin
Language: English
Admission: Free

With
Nick Byaba (Parrot Tree Caretakers Association), Kampala, Uganda
Maria Leena Räihälä & Manuel Bonik (Morgenvogel Real Estate), Berlin

Moderator: Felix Sattler, TA T

The event is part of the exhibition Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories (on view at TA T until March 29) by artists Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger in collaboration with Nick Byaba and CMUK.

While operating in distinct contexts—Uganda’s tropical forests and European urban landscapes—both initiatives reflect a commitment to birds as valued co-inhabitants.

Morgenvogel-Haeuser-Spatzen-Kolonie-Mauerpark-Berlin-Mitte
Morgenvogel houses for a colony of sparrows, commissioned by Grün Berlin, potato hall in the extension area of Mauerpark in Berlin-Mitte, 25 February 2019 © Morgenvogel

Parrot Tree Caretakers Association (PTCA)
Founded in 2020 by Nick Byaba, the PTCA is a community-based organization dedicated to conserving grey parrots and their habitats. Through tree-planting initiatives, educational outreach, and scientific monitoring, the PTCA works with local farmers and conservationists to ensure the survival of this endangered species. Key achievements include planting over 6,000 indigenous trees, monitoring parrot flyways, and integrating rehabilitated parrots back into their original habitats.

The PTCA also runs educational programs for children, fostering a new generation of conservationists who advocate for the protection of parrots and their ecosystems. Looking ahead, the PTCA aims to establish the world’s first Grey Parrot Museum in Uganda, serving as a hub for education, research, and awareness. greyparrotmuseum-uganda.org

The exhibition Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories includes the joint work SEEDS by Hörner/Antlfinger and Nick Byaba.

PTCA-Museum-Drawing-by-Ronald-Ajuna
Child’s draft for the Grey Parrot Museum, drawing by Ronald Ajuna. ©PTCA/Ronald Ajuna
PTCA-Rose-Kembabazi-Portrait
Rose Kembabazi, a local farmer, close to her oil palm tree, a proud member of the Parrot Tree Caretakers Association. ©PTCA

Morgenvogel Real Estate
Morgenvogel Real Estate (M0RE) is a long-term artistic initiative by Maria Leena Räihälä and Manuel Bonik, addressing the loss of nesting opportunities for urban birds in the wake of urban redevelopment. For over a decade, the Berlin-based art project Morgenvogel has engaged in ecological urban interventions by producing and distributing handcrafted birdhouses tailored for species like tits, sparrows, and pied flycatchers.

With support from conservation foundations, Morgenvogel has placed over 1,000 nesting boxes across Berlin and other European Cities, often accompanying installations with art events such as BirdChurch, Avanti Natura!, and BirdTalks.

Beyond Morgenvogel Real Estate, Maria Leena Räihälä and Manuel Bonik have been engaged in landscape restoration, most recently by their MAJAVA project (2021–2024), an initiative inspired by beavers as ecosystem engineers (Majava is the Finnish word for beaver). Through dam-building and water filtration structures, Morgenvogel seeks to counteract environmental degradation in Finnish wetland and forest areas. morgenvogel.net

Morgenvogel-Haus-Mauerpark-Starling-Darling
StarlingDarling @ Morgenvogel-House, Mauerpark, 16.05.2020. © Morgenvogel
Image credit top banner: African Grey Parrots taking a meal on oil palm trees. © PTCA
Discussion, Event, Exhibition, News

Parrot Terristories: Rethinking More-than-Human History, Conservation, Care, and Colonial Legacies

The transdisciplinary roundtable, which is part of Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories exhibition at TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater, investigates intersections of more-than-human global history, animal agency, conservation, care, and colonial legacies. The panel examines how African grey parrots make culture in freedom—expressing complex social behaviors, cognition, and adaptability—and how captivity disrupts these processes. This commodification of parrots serves as a lens for broader histories of exploitation and the ethical challenges of conservation. The roundtable further explores the role of indigenous knowledge and practices in rethinking conservation and highlights the need to decolonize approaches that reflect interconnected human and nonhuman histories. By critiquing the colonial provenance of natural history collections, the discussion reveals how power dynamics have shaped preservation ethics and interpretation. Linking these perspectives, the roundtable envisions equitable conservation and museum practices that emphasize shared responsibilities across species and cultures.

The event will be held in English.    

Caption: Ölpalme auf Danniel Mbahurire’s Land, Uganda 2022, Foto: HörnerAntlfinger (links); A. Goering, in Carl Hennicke, Der Graupapagei in Freiheit und Gefangenschaft, 1895 (rechts)


When:

Tour of the exhibition with artists Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger: December 12, 2024 at 5 p.m.

Round table: December 12, 2024, at 6  to 8.15 p.m.

Venue: TA T — Tieranatomisches Theater, Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, HU Berlin Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13/Haus 3

Roundtable Discussion at TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater

Participants

Nancy Jacobs, Brown University, Providence, is a historian and author of the book The Global Grey Parrot: The Worldwide History of a Charismatic African Animal https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/global-grey-parrot-worldwide-history-charismatic-african-animalhttps://www.brown.edu/news/2024-02-29/grey-parrots She is very much concerned with animals as historical actors and parrots as political, cultural, and world-making creatures. She is also interested in human efforts to improve life for parrots in captivity and to conserve the birds’ existence in their native forests.

 Katja Kaiser, Museum for Natural History Berlin, Research associate in the project “Guidelines for the handling of natural history collections from colonial contexts”. Katja Kaiser collaborated with Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger on their work “One of Thirtysix” that traces the provenance of single grey parrot specimen from the museum’s collection https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/about/team/katja.kaiser

André Krebber, guest fellow in cultural history and theory at LeipzigLab at Leipzig University and adjunct lecturer at the University of Kassel. André’s interested in knowledge cultures and how they shape and are shaped by human-nature relations with a particular focus on the role of nonhuman animals therein to respond to the current environmental crisis. In his forthcoming book The Forgotten Animal, he proposes an aesthetic practice of animal remembrance that makes the recognition of animal self-determination the foundation for overcoming appropriating relations to nature. https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/fachgruppen-und-institute/geschichte/lehrgebiet/sozial-und-kulturgeschichte-human-animal-studies/dr-andre-krebber

Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, Lecturer, Culture and Heritage Studies (CHS) at Bindura University, Zimbawe and Research Fellow at inherit. heritage in transformation at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research interests include decolonising heritage conservation practices, African archeology, and museology.

https://inherit.hu-berlin.de/fellows/munyaradzi-elton-sagiya

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger are professors of multispecies storytelling at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and have been living together in a multispecies household with grey parrots for over 20 years. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with relationships between humans, animals and machines and open up critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of equal interaction. Their communal living with non-human animals is characterised by shared social actions and how these produce a shared space. In 2014, Hörner/Antlfinger founded the interspecies collective CMUK with the grey parrots Clara and Karl, who are also contributing artistic works to the current exhibition.

Felix Sattler is head and curator of the TA T – Exhibition Research Space at the Centre for Cultural Techniques, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His curatorial strategy aims to foster dialogue between a variety of communities. Felix Sattler’s projects have addressed topics as diverse as the art and design history of unicellular algae, an archaeology of the multiple past, and the postcolonial controversies surrounding museums and human remains.

Contact:

Felix Sattler,  felix.sattler@culture.hu-berlin.de

Discussion, Event, Publication

CANCELLED! Synthetic materials as heritage? A book launch conversation – 4 November 2024 | The event is postponed

Book launch and fish bowl conversation on the occasion of ‘Rest in Plastic’ .

Synthetic materials such as plastics, but also concrete and even aluminum, are often not considered to be valuable and as such usually excluded from thinking about heritage. Ethnological museum collections feature little if any synthetic materials, due to the origin of the collections in colonial times, but also due to Western perceptions of these materials as unauthentic and not local to Non-Western social contexts. Little has been written about plastics and the likes in these collections, while there is some work on conserving plastic materials in collections, showing that these are quite hard to preserve, different to what may be expected of these undying materials.

On the occasion of launching the book ‘Rest in Plastic: Death, time and synthetic materials in a Ghanaian Ewe community’ (Berghahn 2024) by social and cultural anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker, this panel discussion brings the author in conversation with anthropologist Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko, curator Elisabeth Heyne, material scientist Bright Asante and industrial designer Heidi Jalkh. Conversation participants will be introducing to their work in relations to synthetic materials and discussing how their insights speak to the idea of synthetics as heritage, both difficult and welcome. The conversation invites the audience to participate by offering an empty chair for questions and comments.

Confirmed participants:
Saskia Abrahms Kavunenko (Humboldt-Universität, in.herit fellow working on plastic on Christmas Island, anthropologist).

Heidi Jalkh (associated member Matters of Activity, co-curator of Matters of South / Kunstgewerbemuseum, experimental industrial designer).

Elisabeth Heyne (Museum für Naturkunde, Natur der Dinge collection).

Bright Asante (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung BAM).

Isabel Bredenbröker (Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik).

Moderation: Magdalena Buchczyk (Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)

About the book:
In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living.Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.

More about the book on the Berghahn Books website.

Date:
tbc (the event is postponed!)

Event Location:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik
Philippstr. 13, Haus 3, Kurssaal
10115 Berlin
Germany

Plastic_Crush_Exhibition_IB
View of the Plastic Crush exhibition at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. Photo: Isabel Bredenbröker, 2023.
Discussion, Event, Exhibition, Workshop

Queer Sonic Fingerprint – Transdisciplinary Research – Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz

How do bodies sound? And how can a group of cultural belongings in an ethnological museum collection resonate in unexpected queer kin relations? In their interactive multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker (Hermann von Helmholtz Zentrum für Kulturtechnik) speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. The installation amplifies the collection‘s materiality through sonic fingerprints—that is—the reflections of a body’s acoustic characteristics. In a transdisciplinary encounter with sound processing and evolutionary computing, dynamically changing fingerprints bring selected parts of museum collections to life in a multichannel sonic ecology.

Queerness contains a tension, something which gender and sexuality studies scholar Susan Talburt identifies as a fundamentally productive quality. Cultural belongings in ethnographic collections are things deeply affected by the colonial encounter and its political aftermath. They, too, are caught in a tense state, as current debates about ownership, their history, their representative functions, and proper place come to show. Voices from indigenous communities and scholars have reframed so-called ethnographic “objects” in museum collections as person-like entities. The installation includes those relations that are currently being claimed with increasing insistence, alongside relations between collection items.

The playback of the sonic fingerprints will form part of a multichannel sound installation also involving field recordings and spoken narrative. Here, kinship and relations between objects become sonic relations, contributing a different register to what is traditionally a visual experience. Museum displays and collections are governed by strict rules: most things may not be touched and many things remain inaccessible in storage. In response to such restrictions, the sonic domain can provide access through a different sensory modality. Here, imagining a sonic image of these bodies offers a sensitive way of not looking or touching, not representing or claiming ownership.

Throughout the installation the sonic fingerprints will merge, recombine, and create new generations of virtual fingerprints with their own acoustic properties, evading museal categories and representational claims, just like queer identities and ways of kinning evade normative ideas of gender, relations, and sexuality. Through evolutionary computing and audience interaction, Queer Sonic Fingerprint highlights new object-relations that transcend the logic of the museum as a place of clear-cut display, education and safekeeping. A multisensory and interactive format challenges such established forms of museal practice. Through the speculative sonic-material futures that emerge, non-normative kinship and queer narratives work toward a critique of the ethnographic collection’s colonial roots.

Venue
Art Laboratory Berlin
Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin

Dates and opening hours
Opening: 19 October 2024, 8 pm
Running time: 20 October – 1 December 2024
Fri – Sun, 2 – 6 pm

ALB Team
Tuçe Erel, Christian de Lutz, Regine Rapp, Alice Cannavà, Camila Flores-Fernández

Photo documentation
Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz Melbye

Supported by
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Dansk Komponistforening/ KODA Kultur
Sound Art Lab
The Speculative Sound Synthesis Project

Queer_Sonic_Fingerprint_Transdisciplinary_Research_Poster
Exhibition poster. Copyright: Alice Cannava
Discussion, Event

Language in the can. How language ends up in the archive

To mark UNESCO World Mother Language Day on February 21, art and cultural historian Uta Kornmeier will be talking to Mandana Seyfeddinipur (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Albrecht Wiedmann (Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv des Ethnologischen Museums) and Christopher Li (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) about linguistic field research and language archives, about the documents that are created in the process and what can be researched with them.

Due to illness, this event has been canceled and will be rescheduled at a later date.

When: Wed, 21 February 2024, 05:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Where: Mechanical Arena in the Foyer of the Humboldt Forum
Free admission
Further information: „WeSearch Extra“ at Humboldt Forum

Image: Gramophone recordings in the Wahn prisoner-of-war camp by Wilhelm Doegen and Alois Brandl, October 1916, photographer unknown. Sound Archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Discussion, News

Gesa Grimme and Sarah Elena Link discuss “Afterlives of Empire”

Gesa Grimme and Sarah Elena Link, both Coordination Centre for Scientific University Collections in Germany (HZK), discuss academic collections in general and their sometimes problematic, imperial contexts of origin. The panel discussion with art historian Jo Vickery (Princeton/Berlin) and literary scholar Birgit Neumann (Düsseldorf) will take place within the framework of the research project “Afterlives of Empire – Encounters of Art and Academia”, initiated by Gesa Stedman (HU).

Art students from Oxford and Berlin habe been invited to work at Lichthof Ost, turning the room into a temporary studio, before transforming it back into an exhibition space. The students show how their interaction with several scientific collections at HU as well as with Berlin museums, among them the sound archive, the geographical collections, and the Winckelmann collection, have led to a new understanding of some of the colonial legacies at HU and in Berlin.

The panel discussion will take place on 10 September at 6:30 pm in the Lichthof Ost of the HU main building.

Discussion, Event

Curating as a cultural technique

Daniel Tyradellis, Vice Director of the Helmholtz Zentrum, will discuss in a panel discussion with cultural practitioners in Gera on 16 June 2023, starting at 6 pm: What can culture contribute to the cohesion of society today? What is the role of curating as a transdisciplinary cultural technique in a knowledge society?

Friday, 16.06.2023, 6.00 p.m.
Altes Wannenbad
Event space of the Kulturhaus Häselburg Gera

Discussion, Event

Sorting machines. The reinvention of the border in the 21st century

Dissolution of borders – this is the great narrative of globalisation: borders are becoming more permeable, cross-border mobility is becoming a universal experience, states are less and less able to effectively control their own borders. Steffen Mau shows in his new book “Sorting Machines. Die Neuerfindung der Grenze im 21. Jahrhundert” (Edition Mercator, CH Beck 2021), that this view is deceptive: in many places there has been a new fortification, the construction of new deterrent walls and militarised border crossings. Borders are also becoming increasingly selective and – supported by digitalisation – upgraded to smart borders, and border control has expanded spatially on a massive scale. Borders are still powerful sorting machines and today fulfil their filtering function more effectively than ever – moreover, as a global and highly diversified enterprise. Nowhere is the Janus face of globalisation more evident than at the borders of the 21st century.

Sociologist Steffen Mau (Humboldt Universität Berlin) will discuss the theses of his book with migration researcher Naika Foroutan (Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research – BIM) and philosopher Stefan Gosepath (Freie Universität Berlin). The event will be moderated by journalist Christiane Hoffmann (Der Spiegel).

An event of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in cooperation with the publisher C.H. Beck, the Cluster of Excellence Contestations of the Liberal Script – SCRIPTS and the Stiftung Mercator.

26.08.2021, 19:00 to 20:30
Humboldt Labor im Humboldt Forum
Schloßplatz
10178 Berlin

Admission free, registration required – free tickets from approx. 14 days before the event via the Humboldt Forum website.

Photo: Steffen Mau (c) HU/Matthias Heyde

Discussion, Event

Le voci ritrovate.

Le voci ritrovate: parole e canti di prigionieri italiani in terra tedesca durante la Grande Guerra.

An event of the Italian Centre of the FU Berlin, in cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Presentation by Dr. Britta Lange, Prof. Dr. Antonio Lucci, Emilio Tamburini (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Prof. Ignazio Macchiarella (Università degli Studi di Cagliari).
Discussion with Prof. Dr. Sebastian Klotz (Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Dr. Albrecht Wiedmann (Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).
Introduction and moderation: Prof. Dr. Maria Carolina Foi (Italian Cultural Institute Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Filipponio (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).

15.06.2021, 19:00 c.t., online, Zoom https://bit.ly/2RSY69j

Presentation and discussion in Italian and German with simultaneous translation.

Le voci ritrovate @ Istituto Italiano di Cultura Berlino