HZT-Research Week
Shooting (20 – 24 January 2025)
The research week is a teaching format in which students from across the HZT engage with a curated topic with guest experts and researchers. The first Research Week in 2022 focused on shielding. The second is dedicated to shooting.
The idea of devoting a week of research to the various forms, aspects and contexts of shooting is not new. It began a long time ago, long before the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Our interest stems from the many artists who have explored the use of guns and/or the effects of shooting in their work, from the many artists who – by making shooting and guns the subject of their art – have reflected on or responded to assassinations, killing sprees, wars or the impact of new technologies on warfare. Also, our interest has been caught by the interconnectedness between shooting with guns and shooting with cameras.
Shooting takes place in different contexts and can be motivated by different reasons – contexts and motivations ranging from meditation, therapy and sport to hunting animals or killing people. Shooting requires not only an understanding of how a piece of equipment works and how to use it. It also requires a shooter to train their body and mind accordingly: training that includes breathing work, rehearsing and repeating specific choreographies, and other exercises that develop the necessary skills.
We are well aware of the challenges that this controversial and sensitive topic will bring about especially right now. At the same time, we hope that the research week may open a space for encountering these very challenges, for exploring questions around shooting, and for dealing with the complex and oftentimes contradictory layers and emotions this topic unfolds.
The five day research week is structured in the two core formats. In morning dialogues artists and experts in the field will share their knowledge, research and practices: Rabih Mroué, Fritz Ofner, Verena Straub, Lygia Lewis & Sandra Noeth, Total Refusal, Khaled Jarrar. The afternoon workshops (led by Rima Najdi, Khaled Jarrar, Hamed Hakim, Janez Janša and Sandra Umathum) are reserved for interactive and participatory formats.
Documentation Research Weeks since 2022
Publication: Shielding - Body-based Studies on Integrity and Protection. Sandra Noeth / Sandra Umathum / Janez Janša (eds.), Transcript Verlag, 2024
The pilot edition of the HZT-Research Week focuses on the idea of Shielding: practices and conceptual approaches in which bodies, intentionally or involuntarily, become shields. Bodies take on an ambivalent and controversial status in the process: on the one hand, they serve as protection or as a buffer against others – other people or symbolic sites – and express resistance. On the other, they become weapons as well as shields when they intervene, on the ground as well as politically, in wars and conflict but also activism. Situated in a broader intellectual context, the focus on shielding connects to various debates in which corporeality and embodiment in current socio-political contexts are re-evaluated. It also follows the question of how body-based research from the performative arts can enter into dialogue with other fields of knowledge and application to help understand the aesthetic, sociopolitical, ethical and legal dimension of the body.
HZT’s Shielding is made up of various public and non-public programs and combines a variety of modes of encounter, including practical training sessions, workshops, lectures and other formats, to address the question of the body as shield on multiple levels: From an aesthetic and dramaturgical perspective: how is shielding trained, rehearsed, embodied and performed? How does it address and create both audience and witness? From a necropolitical perspective: How do practices and concepts of shielding contribute to producing, maintaining or critically reflecting power structures? How are different hierarchies of embodiment, unequally distributed privileges, and different concepts of accountability and responsibility expressed? On an ethical level: how are the value and worthiness of bodies negotiated in shielding? How can we do justice to our own position between fascination, voyeurism and disturbance?
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Programm:
Friday, January 14
15.00–15.30 | Welcome and Introduction
15.30–17.00 | Two lectures & a dialogue 1: Isabell Lorey & Nicola Perugini
18.00–19.30 | Two lectures & a dialogue 2: Banu Bargu & Sandra Noeth
Saturday, January 15
15.00–15.15 | Welcome
15.30–17.00 | Two lectures & a dialogue 3: Frédéric Pouillaude & Žiga Divjak
18.00–19.30 | Two lectures & a dialogue 4: Rana Issa & Sophie Utikal
19.30–20.00 | Wrap Up
In the non-public part of the HZT Research Week on Shielding, Annelie Andre, Diego Agulló, Josephine Findeisen, Hanna Poddig, Liz Rosenfeld and Agata Siniarska worked in workshops, training formats and presentations with the students and team members of all study programs at the HZT.
The HZT Research Week is part of Sandra Noeth's longer-term artistic-theoretical research project on the integrity of the body.