Abstracts and Bios
Rosa Reitsamer: Social inequalities, diversity and solidarity in higher classical music education
In this presentation, I will consider the role of music conservatories in the production and reproduction of social inequalities by exploring the admission process, particularly the cultures of valuation at entrance exams. Drawing upon interviews with music teachers working at elite state-funded higher music education institutions in Austria and Germany, I will explore how the teachers’ self-concepts shape their valuation practices and the construction of the ‘ideal’ classical music student to an extent that they can result in acts of self-affirmation and self- reproduction. I will argue that these acts contribute significantly to the reproduction of the association of the classical music profession with white middle-class culture. I suggest that increasing diversity in relation to “race”/ethnicity and class among music teachers can help to disrupt processes of “social cloning” and to support solidarity among teachers and students.
Rosa Reitsamer is professor of music sociology and head of the Department of Music Sociology at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna Austria. Her research interests include the sociology of higher music education, cultural work and music labour markets, valuation practices at higher music education institutions and intersectional perspectives on music, gender and social inequalities.
Artist Talk: Isabel Lewis (Tanzquartier Wien)
Solidarity, for me, begins with a question of format. As an artist working across choreography, discourse, and hosting, I ask: how do the structures in which we gather— conferences, stages, gardens, clubs, academies—shape what can be sensed, said, and done? Every format distributes power and responsibility. It contours whose voice counts and how difference is perceived. To rethink solidarity, we must therefore rethink the compositional conditions of encounter.
My work departs from a critique of the visual as the dominant modality of knowledge in the West. As Donna Haraway reminds us, vision has long been tied to distancing, objectification, and control. Against this “god-trick” of seeing from nowhere, I advocate for the rehabilitation of the sensorium: embodied, situated, reciprocal modes of perception. Solidarity cannot be built through detached observation alone; it requires attunement, vulnerability, receptivity, and an acknowledgment that we are always implicated in what we perceive.
Through what I call hosted occasions, I approach composition as a public practice of care. Hosting is a socio-spatial choreography in which responsibility is explicit and shared presence transforms spectatorship. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s insistence that difference is a generative force of interdependency, I understand solidarity not as sameness but as the fragile, practiced negotiation of non-dominant differences. In this sense, the choice of format—how we convene, how we sense, how we compose together—is already a political act and a rehearsal for other ways of being with one another.
Isabel Lewis trained in dance and choreography, literary criticism, and philosophy, is an artist and choreographer whose work takes on many different formats: from lecture performances and workshops to listening sessions, publications and what she has named “hosted occasions.” She has created projects around open-source technologyand dance improvisation, social dances as cultural storage systems, collaborative choreographic formats, future bodily techniques and ecological thinking, and rapping as embodied speech act. Her works have been presented in the contexts of contemporary art, music, dance, and theater by the Archiv der Avantgarden (2024), Sophiensæle (2023), Biennale Son (2023), Dance First Think Later (2022), Ocean Space (2021), Kunsthalle Zürich (2020), Sharjah Biennial (2019), Roskilde Festival (2019), Berliner Festspiele-Gropius Bau (2018), Tate Modern (2017), Steirischer Herbst (2017), Dia Foundation (2016), Ming Contemporary Art Museum Shanghai (2016), and Tanz im August (2015) among others. Lewis is a professor at the Fine Art Academy in Leipzig leading the Class for Performative Arts since 2021. She is the artistic co-director of the Tanzquartier Wien: Open House for Dance and Performance Cultures.
Christine Lang: »Dramaturgies of Solidarity«: Feminist Aesthetics in Film
What does it mean to tell stories from a place of solidarity? And what dramaturgical practices enable solidarity-based perspectives in film? These questions are at the heart of this lecture, which examines feminist approaches to what I call dramaturgy of solidarity.
The demands of identity politics may be legitimate from a political perspective, but in dramaturgical and aesthetic practice they pose fundamental challenges for filmmakers. The requirement that stories should only be told by those who have lived them conflicts with core principles of cinematic storytelling: the possibility of perspective-taking, engaging with experiences beyond one’s own, imagining other lived realities. At the same time, identity politics rightly points out that such narrative practices can be presumptuous, appropriating, or exoticizing. The question, then, is: How can cinematic storytelling—whether fictional or documentary—make other perspectives accessible without appropriating them?
Drawing on historical and contemporary examples from both fiction and documentary film, the lecture explores feminist strategies including: gestural performance styles, decentered protagonists, polyphonic narrative structures, self-reflexivity, and collective authorship— practices that simultaneously invite identification and maintain critical distance.The central question is: How can filmmaking practices honor the insights of identity politics while creating space for complex, relational, and solidarity-based forms of storytelling?
Christine Lang is professor of film and media studies at the Film Academy Vienna. She studied cultural studies, art history and literature in Bremen and Berlin, followed by film directing at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. She works as a dramaturge, author and filmmaker. Her research focuses on dramaturgy and film aesthetics. In her publications, she combines theoretical reflection with artistic knowledge. In 2023, she published ‘Understanding David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE’ (transcript), and in 2013, ‘Breaking Down BREAKING BAD’ (Fink, with Christoph Dreher). Her short films have been screened at over a hundred international festivals. From 2014 to 2021, she worked as an author and dramaturge in theatre, and since 2021 she has been working as a dramaturge for TV series and a lecturer in dramaturgy at ZDF.
Luce deLire: critique is over, morality is dead and surreal utopias is where it’s at
In this talk, I argue that the age of political critique is over, that morality can no longer be used as a solid foundation for political judgment nor action and that we should turn to surrealism and utopian thinking instead. In my talk, I will draw on anti-trans discourses in particular, as well as on the writings of Thomas More and Margaret Cavendish as well as on music and art works by SOPHIE, Alice Longyu-Gao, Toyen, Dorothea Tanner and Remedios Varo.
Luce deLire is a ship with eight sails and she lies down by the quay. As a philosopher, she publishes on the metaphysics of infinity but also on art, queer theory, anti-racism, postcolonialism, and political theory. In her performances, she embodies figures of the collective imaginary and generates empowering hospitable situations (for example www.queerokratia.de). She holds a PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and has taught widely across Europe and the US. deLire is also politically active. For more (including booking), see getaphilosopher.com
Mbongeni N. Mtshali: Unruly Allegiances: the possibilities and limits of postapartheid solidarity
In this paper I explore how Steven Cohen stages his white, Jewish, queer, male body to confront colonial violence and the transgenerational, transnational legacy of displacement, alienation and trauma left in its wake. I read Cohen’s broader political project alongside the reception of his 2026 retrospective, Long Life, at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, to examine how competing decolonial imperatives and differing intimacies with power and violence bedevil political solidarity across cultural, racial and gendered lines.
Mbongeni N. Mtshali is a performance maker, scholar, artist and teacher. He read in a Ph.D in Performance Studies at Northwestern University as a Fulbright Scholar, and is currently Director of the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town. Mbongeni’s research explores black queer/femme performance in South Africa as well as Africa and its diaspora more broadly, with a focus on how black queer/femme subjects use performance tactically, challenging nationally sanctioned repertoires of African respectability, cultural intelligibility and belonging. He has recently turned his attention to tracing queer genealogies of African decolonial world-making across the Caribbean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Mbongeni has collaborated on creative projects with The Other Foundation, The Buffet Foundation, the Institute for Creative Arts, the Weaver Hughes Ensemble, the Block Museum, The Court Theatre, Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, Hunan Opera House and the Artscape Theatre, among others. His recent professional recognitions include the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award and the Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for notable achievements in directing and performance-making.
Jasmin Degeling and Maja Figge: Postmigrant Practices of Infrastructuring Solidarity
In our speculative talk, we examine the conditions and possibilities for solidarity in post-digital society. In a socially tense situation in which segregation is intensifying as are exploitation and inequality, we see an urgent need to reflect on how we might understand solidarity in a contemporary context. We see this theoretical question as an attempt to connect our academic work practically with struggles for solidarity in migration society.
We understand solidarity genealogically; it emerged during industrialization as a principle within capitalist class society, increasingly characterized by social dependency and segregation, which led, for example, to the establishment of compensation insurance and social security (Karakayali 2021). Therefore, historically speaking, solidarity is a principle for building social institutions and infrastructures to communalize differently distributed social dependencies. As we all know, we are currently experiencing a profound crisis in this understanding of social security systems; this advanced welfare crisis is part of a social situation characterized by continued segregation of social publics, which has been described as division or polarization.
From a media studies perspective, we conceive of this situation as post-digital: digital platforms are pushing to become economically, medially, and socially hegemonic infrastructures of socio-media-technical conditions. In the face of this situation, what are adequate and timely practices, institutions, and infrastructures of solidarity? How can infrastructures of solidarity be designed to be resistant? To explore these questions, in our talk, we will sound out the possibility of describing the wave-like Iranian resistance movements and their attempts to work against internet censorship and to build solidarity networks and media publics as post-migrant practices of solidarity.
Jasmin Degeling (Bauhaus University Weimar) works on (digital) fascism and right-wing violence, media of care, media anthropology, gender, queer and affect studies, and cultures of commemoration and politics of memory. Current research projects on diffractive fascism and a post-digital media theory of solidarity.
Maja Figge (ICGP, mdw) works on media theories and aesthetics, gender/queer media studies, aesthetics and politics of transnational and networked moving image cultures, affect theory, memory studies, eco media studies. Current research projects on Black (post-)cinemas and a post-digital media theory of solidarity.
Lea Susemichel: Unbedingte Solidarität
Global erstarken autoritäre, rechte Politiken. Antifeminismus und der Kampf gegen „Wokeness“ sind zu ihren zentralen Elementen avanciert. Angesichts dieser Entwicklungen ist insbesondere feministische Solidarität die Herausforderung der Stunde.
Doch was sind die Möglichkeitsbedingungen von Solidarität? Gibt es eine solidarische Reziprozität trotz Hierarchien der Solidarität, die keine paternalistische Parteinahme ist, sondern auf einer „groundless solidarity“ (Diane Elam) fußt? Wie kann so eine radikale undunbedingteSolidarität unter Ungleichen aussehen, die konfliktiv ist, keine geteilten Erfahrungen und Identitäten voraussetzt und Differenzen sowie Dissonanzen nicht nur zulässt, sondern sogar zur Voraussetzung hat? Die nicht in einer Solidarisierung mit den Gleichen und Ähnlichen besteht, sondern darin, sich mit Menschen zusammen zu schließen, mit denen man gerade nicht die Fabrik und das Milieu, das Geschlecht oder die ethnische Zuschreibung teilt. Und wie lässt sich diese unbedingte Solidarität institutionalisieren und verstetigen? Der Vortrag stellt das Konzept der „unbedingten Solidarität“ vor, die auch im Sinne einer politischen Dringlichkeit unbedingt ist: Wir brauchen mehr solidarische Beziehungen im Kampf für eine (geschlechter-)gerechte Gesellschaft!
Lea Susemichel, geboren und aufgewachsen in Deutschland, studierte Philosophie und Gender Studies an der Universität Wien mit Schwerpunkt feministische Sprachphilosophie. Als Autorin, Journalistin, Lehrbeauftragte und Vortragende arbeitet sie u. a. zu den Themen Identitätspolitik, Solidarität, feministische Theorie & Bewegung, feministische Kunst & Ästhetik sowie emanzipatorische Medienpolitik. Seit 2006 ist sie leitende Redakteurin des feministischen Magazins an.schläge.
jackï job: Choreographing Rebellion
Choreographing Rebellion is an autoethnographic account of jackï job’s thirty-year choreographic practice of resistance. Published by Bloomsbury (UK) in 2026, the book animates the centauresque dance persona, Daai za Lady, as a vehicle for reconstructing identity through ipseity — self-authority understood as relational becoming rather than fixed subjecthood. Extending from Jacques Derrida, job’s ipseity functions as a conduit for communing with alterity and generating solidarity through embodied transformation.
Daai za Lady operates as a gender-queering modality that unsettles colonial and heteropatriarchal taxonomies of identity. It employs psycho-physical methods that refuse singular descriptions of the self, traversing human and animal, masculine and feminine, as well as the sacred and profane. To escape inherited colonial epistemologies and reorganise power and perception, gender is reconfigured through decolonial aesthesis, Vedic resonances, and more-than-human relationalities.
Drawing on Henri Bergson’s theory of interpenetration and deliberately mobilising Butoh principles, the methodology crafts embodiment as plural and interpenetrative.
It engages history as an ontological reconfiguration rather than linear inheritance. It looks at Francis Nyamnjoh’s theories of incompletion and inhabits rupture, continuity, open-ended emergence and contradiction as methodological tools toward reorganising relations of power, perception, and ethics.
Choreographing Rebellion ultimately asks: how might we ethically engage with the difficult, the different, and the strange—queering gendered and embodied relations—so that solidarities do not reproduce colonial violence and its hierarchies? job argues for a choreographic practice
that generates solidarity, reimagines the conditions of coexistence, and persistently crafts ontological renewal.
jackï job is a dancer and choreographer, theatre-maker and director, producer, and academic researcher at the University of Cape Town. Her predominantly independent performance career has been eclectic, with works ranging from experimental solos, to choreographing films and commercials, directing classical operas and theatre productions, as well as hosting television shows. She has created more than 80 original choreographies sincethe start of her independent career in 1994 and collaborated with several multi-disciplinary artists, performing in academic institutions, cultural festivals and theatres in Africa, Asia and Europe. Her ongoing research re-imagines the significance and perception of the body beyond its socio-political and humancentric constructions. She has a particular interest in expanding meanings of personhood and transformation by drawing from indigenous knowledge systems and daily life patterns to develop self-devised performance methodologies and philosophies. The academic translations of her processes relate to literature on feminist decolonial discourse, soma- aesthetics, philosophy, theatre and Butoh. She has been awarded with the David and Elaine Potter Fellowship, the Bunkacho Cultural Fellowship and twice, the National Research Fund’s Thuthuka Grant. She is the pioneer of Butoh on the African continent and a first-generation performer in the line of Ohno Yoshito. She currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town.
Filmic Solidarities: Dialogues for a New Commons Deniz Şimşek
Curated by Christina Stuhlberger & Clarissa Thieme
detours while speaking of monsters
detours while speaking of monsters moves through myth as a living political force, tracing the contours of a 4000-year-old lake monster whose story has survived the erasure of the peoples who carried it — the ancestors of Armenians and Kurds around Lake Van. Şimşek’s film asks what it means that a creature of thunder and serpentine depths outlasts the communities devastated by ethnic cleansing, and what kind of truth only myth can hold. The Mountain Mother, a geological narrator whose voice predates human language, speaks the unspeakable through the land itself — sediment, tremor, snowmelt, blood. In her telling, the monster is never simply vanquished; its heart remains, slowly mineralizing at the lake’s bottom. By siding with the monsterified against those who wielded the slaying as power, the film reclaims mythological narration as a mode of bearing witness — one that moves across generations and bodies, entangling childhood tales with survivor testimony, inherited story with lived atrocity, until the distance between the two collapses entirely. Running through all of this is a more intimate current: the film holds the personal alongside the political, asking where the struggle against erasure begins and whether it can be separated from the erasures we live closest to.
Deniz Şimşek (b.1995, Istanbul) studied film and art in Istanbul and Berlin. Delving into the interplay between socio-political phenomena and personal fragments, Deniz’s films experiment with narrative devices that fracture dominant storytelling conventions, as part of a broader practice to reframe and challenge hegemonic narratives. Her narrators, be they landforms, mythical beings, or autofictional selves, operate in shifting patterns reminiscent of memories and dreams.
Clarissa Thieme is a filmmaker and artist based in Vienna and Berlin. Her films, installations, and performative interventions focus on the fissures between individual memory and its translation into processes of historical objectification. Her latest work explores a living archive as a new commons and vulnerability as an artistic strategy of resistance and solidarity. Thieme co-founded ARchipelago, a site-specific archiving platform in the post- Yugoslav space, and the open-archive initiative Između Nas/Between Us at the Video Arhiv Sarajevo. She is a PhD candidate at the Artistic Research Center (ARC) at the Vienna Film Academy (mdw).
Artist Talk: Wu Tsang with Joshua Wicke
Revisiting their work on Moby Dick or, A Whale in this presentation Wu Tsang and Joshua Wicke return to C.L.R. James desciption of the “motley crew” aboard peqoud as a model of a collective that subverts and resists managerial governance. In James’s reading, the ship becomes more than a vessel of command; it is a site where heterogeneous life exceeds the structures meant to contain it.
Taking this as a point of departure this presentation reflects on theatre practice as an ongoing improvisation and rehearsal that generates informal and ungovernable overflows of sociality beyond its institutionalization.
Joshua Wicke works as dramaturg, curator and researcher in performance, dance, and theatre. Currently, he has been pursuing the question of how residues of structural and interpersonal violence operate within and against the aesthetic. Recent and long-term collaborations include artists and artist groups such as Moved by the Motion, caner teker, Carolina Mendonça, Alex Franz Zehetbauer amongst others. As a dramaturg, he held positions at Schauspielhaus and Gessnerallee in Zürich. Most recently he curated the conversation series Poetics of Refusal, and co-curated the symposium Risking Repetition: Aesthetics of “Survival”. He began a PhD project on an infrastructural critique of dramaturgy in 2025.
Wu Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours into the imaginary. Her projects have been presented at museums, biennials, and film and theater festivals internationally, including the Venice Biennale (2022), Manifesta 15, Whitney Biennial (2012, 2022), SXSW (2012), Holland Festival (2022, 2024). Tsang is a 2018 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and she has won numerous awards including 2016 Guggenheim (Film/Video), 2018 Hugo Boss Prize Nominee, and Rockefeller Foundation. Wu Tsang received a BFA (2004) from the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and an MFA (2010) from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). From 2019-2024 she was a director-in-residence at the Schauspielhaus (City Theatre) Zürich. Tsang is known for her long-term collaborations, notably with Moved the Motion, a performance collective that she co-founded with Tosh Basco in 2013.