Uncertain States – Affective Societies Repeated Flight.
The Human Body as the Cultural Memory of Flight, Displacement and Migration

Not only in theatre but also in contemporary art, the body is a key medium of artistic expression. In a range of media, artists are exploring the potential of re-enactments, the concrete physical repetition of situations experienced personally. What connections does this process create between the past, present and future? How does the body remember transcending borders, whether geographical, linguistic, social, or imaginary? How do artistic re-enactments actualise and process experiences of pain, suffering and trauma, and which perspectives do they create for life afterwards and in the future?

Doris Kolesch is a theatre scholar at the FU Berlin and Head of Project in the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies”. Robert Walter-Jochum is a German studies scholar and post-doctoral researcher in the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies”.

As part of the lecture series "Emotions and their Effects. Affective Dynamics of Flight and Migration".

A cooperation between the Akademie der Künste and the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies” at FU Berlin.

What role does affectivity play in the social and cultural upheavals presently shaping our globalised world? How do emotions contribute to the impression of social stability and security, and how do they provoke insecurities, threats and marginalisation? Which affective dynamics accompany the loss of familiar environments, and which emotions promote or hinder arrival in a new life? How is emotion used to shape the political agenda, and why it is often so difficult to counter this by argument?
This series of lectures and talks looks at contemporary art as an outstanding location for investigating and reflecting on emotions and affectivity in the context of flight, migration and mobility. In the process, academics and scholars involved in the “Affective Societies” Collaborative Research Center at Freie Universität Berlin enter into a dialogue with the artists, works and topics in the Uncertain States exhibition.

The interdisciplinary “Affective Societies” research centre at Freie Universität Berlin is investigating the fundamental importance of emotions and affectivity for social life in the mobile, networked and mediatised worlds of the twenty-first century.