Migration, displacement, and exile: Bard College Berlin’s Research Creation course celebrates its annual concluding conference with an exhibition and lecture

Throughout the semester, students in the cross-campus Research Creation course at Bard College Berlin explored how art-making generates new kinds of knowledge about history, migration, diaspora, and displacement, focusing on the post Second World War continuities as this semester’s theme. Taught by Dr. Marion Detjen in collaboration with Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Columbia) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), students translated their research findings into artistic projects showcased at a final public exhibition.

The closing conference was held on May 10 with a student- exhibition titled “We Threw Open the Doors” and guest lecture by Eyal Weizman, author and Director of Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, titled “The Longue Durée of Genocide,” both focusing on continuities between 1945 and today through historical, spatial, and artistic approaches.

The exhibition featured students’ semester-long work of conducting individual research and creating artistic responses, engaging particularly closely with migratory archives and landscapes. They discovered traces of lives, events, movements, destruction, and resistance, and learned that revisiting history is never the same as experiencing it. The geographies in their art works reached from Kaliningrad/Königsberg to India, from Nazi Berlin to Palestine, and from the island of Vieques to France.

In Weizman’s lecture, he used spatial methodologies and the archives of the landscape to show historical continuities and the protracted nature of genocide in and around Wadi Gaza. Weizman relates the treatment of this region to Art. II c of the Genocide Convention, which defines “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction” as one mode that genocide can operate within. The lecture was responded to by sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck and moderated by Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom.

More information about the Research Creation course and other network collaborative courses can be found here.

Post Date: 05-16-2025