Disrupted Infrastructures

Hosts: Jonas Leifert (Essen), Rika Sakalak (Bochum)

Chair: Jörn Etzold (Bochum)

Speakers: Maria Esperanza Rock Nuñez (Bochum, Concepción), Britta Peters (Bochum), Katarína Marková (Brno, Bochum)

The social fabric of societies undergoing deindustrialisation can be understood as disrupted infrastructure, accompanied by the rise of neoliberal techniques of governance and subjectivation. Taking the Ruhr region, Chile, and Eastern/Central Europe as case studies, this panel explores the role of art institutions in these processes, examining how comparable yet distinct experiences of deindustrialisation resonate with the current resurgence of militarisation, nostalgia and authoritarianism.

Chair: Tomaz Amorim (São Paulo, Bochum)

Speakers: Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño (Buenos Aires, Köln), Lívia de Souza Lima (Regensburg)

This panel examines how historically marginalized communities transform urban space into infrastructures of political imagination, collective survival, and alternative futures. Rather than treating the city as a neutral setting or understanding refuge as protection from violence, the panel explores refuge as an active political practice through which spaces are reclaimed, meanings are reworked, and new forms of collective life become possible.

Speaker: Hanna Göbel (Hamburg)

The public retreat is a public place with pleasure and healing qualities of any kind, relating to various existing spatial typologies, and could be developed as a spontaneous form in any other infrastructural heritage of cities’ fabrics between public and half-public kinds. It highlights the theatrical qualities of urban environments, and in this sense public retreats provide an “aesthetics of infrastructure” for various assemblies. Aside from the neo-liberalized connotation of the retreat, which means commercialized privatization of spaces in the context of singularized luxury, wellbeing, psychological pathologization and digital detox, the healing qualities of public retreats for building future common grounds could engage future intimate ways of commoning in public space.

Speaker: Filip Pawlak (Warsaw)

A few words about the creative process behind the ‘Freak Show’ project, which comprises a stage performance and a documentary film about a group of artists with disabilities. I will present selected dilemmas relating to the funding system, which has consistently required the objectification of the story’s protagonists – it is suffering, pain, shame and pity that bring money to people with disabilities. But what if the story we are telling is meant to be about pride and reclaiming space? How far can we disrupt the existing order without demolishing the house we wish to enter?

Filip Pawlak (Warsaw, Poland) is Theatre maker, self-advocate for artists with disabilities, independent curator and producer. Graduate of the Film School in Katowice, Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw and MA programme in Performing Arts at Malmö Theatre Academy / Lund University. PhD candidate in film and theatre arts at the University of Silesia in Katowice from 2025. Involved in the Europe Beyond Access project as an ambassador and expert. In his work he combines the role of artist and art producer. In 2024, he received a scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage in the “Young Poland” programme, and was a resident at the Hellerau European Art Centre in Dresden and the Komuna Warszawa Theatre. In the institutional field, he specialises in leading production teams of medium and large cultural institutions.

Filip Pawlak

Kha Villanueva (Barcelona)

Transmission of antifascist practices of collective partial reparation.

Speaker: Kha Villanueva (Barcelona), Danja Burchard (Essen, Hamburg)

Kha Villanueva (Barcelona, Spain) is a psychologist, performer, and scenic researcher with postgraduate training in group psychotherapy and psychodrama. Their work is grounded in a transfeminist and anti-fascist positioning, integrating gender, anti-racist, and intersectional perspectives. The artistic research focuses of Kha Villanueva is on collective processes of desire, discomfort, and embodiment among marginalized and gender-disidentifying bodies, while actively developing and implementing strategies for the redistribution of symbolic, material, and economic capital within cultural and artistic contexts.

Their work across performance, research, and cultural mediation, creating collective practices that challenge normative, patriarchal, and colonial structures and foster transformative forms of participation and care. Kha Villanueva is Co-funder, Co-director, and Co-Manager of P0RN0T0PIA Collective, additional artistic works with prominent companies such as La Fura dels Baus, Teatro São Luiz, and Sala Beckett. They hold a Research Fellowship in Cultural Mediation and Participation at Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica.

P0RN0T0PIA Collective

Kha Villanueva

Institute for Resistance in Postfordism / Elisa Müller (Berlin)

Durational Performance running throughout both days of the conference (including breaks)

The Institute for Resistance in Postfordism rehearses the emergency: in the form of mini-interventions, as already carried out on the grounds of the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and as part of the Ruhrtriennale Campus on the grounds of the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum, what the crises of the present are telling us is brought to an aesthetic point: an emergency has long since arrived. The consequences of industrialisation and structural change in the Ruhr region lead us directly both to the erosion of democratic principles, for example through the dismantling of the welfare state, and into ecological catastrophe.

Supported by a research grant from the Kunststiftung NRW.

Institut für Widerstand im Postfordismus

Chair: Gerko Egert (Bochum)

Speakers: Sebastian Randerath (Bonn), Kathrin Ebmeier (Bochum, Köln), Elisa Müller (Berlin), Hedi Tounsi (Lüneburg)

Industrial infrastructures do more than extract resources, organize labor, and generate profit: they shape the ways we live, work, and come together. In the Ruhr, mines, factories, and railways have produced not only coal and steel, but also communities, collective imaginaries, and resistance. This panel asks: What traces of these struggles remain, and how might they inspire new forms of collectivity today?

For ten years, Andreas Liebmann has been developing Tårnby Park Studio, a site-specific performance space in Copenhagen’s suburb Tårnby. In his talk, he reflects on the paradoxes of building a performance institution within a place that appears untouched by disruption, exploring performance as a fragile social infrastructure between stability, belonging and transformation. Andreas published three artistic research books about his work in Tårnby. As part of the input, he will read from the artistic-research theatre-monologue „The suburb“ about a theatre maker trying to do theatre in a suburb.

Andreas Liebmann (Copenhagen, Denmark) Swiss performance artist, author and researcher in Copenhagen. Artistic director of ‘Tårnby Park Studio’. Tårnby Park Studio emerged as an institutional performance from his previous work, inviting artists and neighbours to shape this nascent public space. There he has been organizing for several years the international and site specific Tårnby Park Performance Festival and created performances focusing on local stories and citizen participation. His artistic research deals with questions of public space in relation to performance practice and has led to three publications about artist driven institution making and long term dedicated local work.  As an author, director and performance artist, he has been responsible for numerous theatre and radio play works in German-speaking countries in the independent scene and in municipal theatres. He has been teaching  performance and conceptional theatre at The Danish National School For Performing Arts in  Copenhagen since 2015.

Tårnby Park Studio

Andreas Liebmann

Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski (Skopje)

Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski (Skopje, North Macedonia) is a cultural worker, researcher, curator, and writer working at the intersection of dance, theatre, and visual arts performance, and has been an active part of the independent scene both locally and across the ex-Yugoslav region. She works as a freelance critic in culture and curator, and is affiliated with several organisations and networks. She is co-founder and a program director of Lokomotiva – Centre for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture (2003-), one of the co-founders and a decision-making member of Nomad Dance Academy (NDA); co-founded and curated the Kino Kultura (KK) — an independent project space for contemporary performing arts and culture (2015–2020); LocoMotion Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance (2008–2016), Performance Platform festival (2024-), Curating in Context school (2019-), among other initiatives.

Kino Kultura

Lokomotiva – Centre for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture

Host: Leon Gabriel (Bochum)

Speaker: Katharina Pelosi (Hamburg)

Katharina Pelosi is an audio artist whose artistic research explores sound as a medium of memory culture. She creates audio walks and installations that often address historical and political themes in public space, examining and reworking them from an acoustic perspective: What is audible? Who is speaking? What does a utopian resonant space sound like? In her talk, she will present several of her projects. In doing so, she will analyze the potential of sound art practices—such as recording, arranging, and listening—as practices of memory culture, and discuss, both practically and theoretically, how the production and reception of acoustic forms of memory can become a site for a reflexive, feminist, and anti-racist culture of remembrance. Following the talk, the artist and Leon Gabriel will join the audience in discussing how the withdrawal of counter-communities and counter-movements can generate impulses capable of disrupting, transforming, and expanding public discourse and space.

In collaboration with:

Dramaturgies in the Afterlife of Violence: Transnational Theater between Global South and North

Chair: Gwendolin Lehnerer (Kassel, Salzburg)

Speakers: Jeannette Petrik (Enschede, Emsdetten, Berlin), Marie Samrotzki (Köln)

In conversation with Jeannette Petrik and Marie Samrotzki, DIY practices are understood not merely as aesthetic or pragmatic strategies, but as forms of creating one’s own infrastructures: How are spaces, public spheres and communities organised beyond established structures? What forms of knowledge and collaboration emerge in the process? And to what extent can disruption, withdrawal and infrastructural gaps serve as productive starting points for other forms of artistic and social practice?

Host: Ruth Schmidt (Bochum)

The closing session brings together participants, speakers, and guests to reflect on the conversations, questions, and perspectives that have emerged throughout the program. Rather than offering conclusions, it opens space to revisit key themes, identify resonances across different contexts, and consider how the discussions might extend beyond the symposium.

Departure at Dortmund Hbf

Complementing the symposium programme, a curatorial tour of the exhibition Uncanny Shifts by Urbane Künste Ruhr invites participants to explore questions of disrupted infrastructures, societal transformation, and the renegotiation of public space through the lens of contemporary art. The exhibition offers artistic perspectives on uncertainty, change, and collective futures, extending the symposium’s discussions into the exhibition space.

Website Urbane Künste Ruhr

Fri 02.10. 10:30-13:00

Künstler*innenhaus Dortmund

Sunderweg 1

44147 Dortmund

Host: Laura Strack

As an intimate workshop format, this session brings together participants with four international guests. Through short inputs and individual conversations, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Andreas Liebmann, and Kha Villanueva connect their practices in curatorial work, performance, urban research, and cultural activism to questions of disrupted infrastructures, public space, and democratic reorganisation. The focus lies on building personal networks and deepening individual research interests within the broader themes of the symposium.

Fri 02.10. 14:00-19:00

Hans A

Hansastraße 6-10, 44137 Dortmund