After more research and two
seminars with students and faculty in December 2012, the focus of our project
shifted from models of autogestion or self-management derived from Henri
Lefebvre, and from the ways in which communities are “filling in the weak
points” of the social fabric through self-management as the state has pulled
back and created a new “precariate”, or a level of people living in new forms
of precarity and forms of resistance. This aspect of the project had a site-specific
aspect that broadened out from Lüneburg to Hamburg and to the historical and
present-day anti-nuclear protests in Gorleben, Brokdorf, and Wendland. Would it
be possible to find forms of autogestion in anti-gentrification movements and
in the anti-nuclear actions? From this starting point, our research has moved
to the tactics, militant and otherwise, of anti-nuclear protests and the visual
language of protests.
This visual language also considers the press photographs
of the protests (and police actions) in Wendland (with the brief establishment
of the Free Republic of Wendland) and the mass protests at Brokdorf. Alongside
this history of protest and militancy, Lüneburg, and Leuphana Universität, has
a military history which has an obscured and hidden spatial and architectural
language. In contrast to the visibility of the tactics of anti-nuclear
militancy, how can the “invisibility” of the military history of the campus be
represented? And how has the spatiality of the military been obscured, hidden,
and camouflaged?
From this new perspective we
have identified research points that we hope to incorporate into our project
for Kunstraum and in the seminars at Leuphana in early June 2013. See on the right ->