MoA's Annual Conference on 19 Sep 2025, 9 am-9 pm at silent green Kulturquartier
Hands create, measure, guide and dismantle. They distribute, negotiate, translate, express and embrace. This is understood both through concrete, embodied practices, and through operations of manipulation, maintenance and handling, indicating the planetary scale of human activity and control. Interestingly, the latter are often fostered through strategic passivation—efforts to decrease the inherent activity of materials, justified by imperatives of innovation, progress and standardization.
The annual conference of »Matters of Activity« addressed such complexities by intertwining material activities on multiple scales with questions of modeling, making, and playing on unsteady grounds. Prompted by the observation that substantial ›matters‹ are increasingly getting ›out of hand‹ in the current ecological predicament, we intended to bring critical attention to their environmental, technological, and socio-material ambiguities. By convening a variety of interdisciplinary positions, the conference inspired collaborative means to negotiate the legacies and futures of material-driven research.
After welcome remarks by Cluster Co-Director Claudia Mareis and an introduction by Conference Co-Organizer Léa Perraudin, the conference, co-organized by Bastian Beyer, José D. Cojal González and Christian Stein, evolved across four panels and culminated in the keynote delivered by Karen Barad (UC Santa Cruz).
Moderated by José D. Cojal González and activated by discussant Maja Avnat, the first panel opened the event through the lens of »Ecologies of Light« and their interscalar complexities. Media theorist Jussi Parikka (Aarhus University) and artist, and formally trained physicist, Abelardo Gil-Fournier (BBVA Foundation Scholar) provided insights into their shared research practice on (non-)optical images and light as an active agent. Experimental biophysicist Joachim Heberle (Freie Universität Berlin) took us to the nanoscale and light induced transformations in proteins. The panel was followed by a screening of the video work Lumi (2024, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka), which offers a speculative vision of climate restoration through synthetic intelligence.
The second panel, moderated by Bastian Bayer and activated by discussants Karin Krauthausen and Robert Stock, delved into the »Liminalities« of (architectural) worldmaking. It featured a talk by architectural theorist and philosopher Hélène Frichot, who called attention to material urgencies of planetary devastation through the unlikely journey of a tree. Architect and artist Philip Beesley provided an invitation to think with metastable space and what resilient optimism can teach us about possible futures.
»Get a Grip?«, moderated by Christian Stein, gathered four flash talks intended to instigate discussion on interdisciplinary objectives: by senior luster director Horst Bredekamp and cluster members Anna Kubelík, Carlos-Andres Palma, and Rodrigo Martin Iglesias. The panel concluded with insights from the workshop »Radical Interdisciplinarity« on 12 years of research conducted at both Clusters of Excellence »Image Knowledge Gestaltung« and »Matters of Activity«.
The final panel, moderated by Léa Perraudin and activated by discussant Michelle Christensen, was concerned with phenomena and operations »Beyond Containment«. Feminist science and technology scholar Thao Phan (Australian National University) provided a critical assessment of the pursuit of technological purification through algorithmic practices. Feminist science and technology scholar Xan Chacko (Brown University) unpacked the ambiguities of hope as portrayed through politics of classification in seedbanking and biodiversity conservation.
Moderated by cluster director Wolfgang Schäffner, the program concluded with the keynote by feminist scholar, physicist and philosopher Karen Barad (UC Santa Cruz), who urged to consider »What if Matter is Always Already Out of Hand?«. Linking quantum field theory and new materialism through their formative theory of agential realism, they provided a poetic and conceptually expansive account of the intricacies of touch, the alterity of the self, and the in/determinacy of the void.
The evening continued in the courtyard of silent green Kulturquartier with a performance by Berlin-based collective Masketiere and a pop-up exhibition. The exhibition, organized by Dimitra Almpani-Lekka with Franziska Wegener, showcased material driven research of »Matters of Activity« through prototypes, installations, demonstrators and video documentations.