The IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute is dedicated to exhibiting, archiving, and distributing time-based media art. Founded in Düsseldorf in 2006, the institute has had its own video art channel, IMAI Play, since 2021. This focuses on a participatory presentation of videos from the IMAI archive and invites users to put together their own video programs, share them and comment on others.
More info about the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute

Videonale e. V. is a non-profit association based in Bonn, which was founded in 1984 to offer a first platform in Germany for the then still young international video art – making Videonale Bonn one of the earliest festivals for video art worldwide. Since then, the association has dedicated itself to presenting contemporary video art in all its facets, addressing a regional, national and international audience. Every two years, the association organizes “VIDEONALE – Festival for Video and Time-based Arts” with an exhibition presentation and an extensive festival program. Since 2010, the VIDEONALE has had an online video archive with over 300 entries.
More info about the Videonale e. V.
More info about the online video archive
More info about VIDEONALE.scope

Studio Trafique – Institute for the design of theatrical visions of the future is a theater founded in Cologne in 2021 that focuses on contemporary aesthetics. The focus is on developing new forms of theater by combining familiar theatrical aesthetics with film and digital technologies. Studio Trafique is run by Ensemble Trafique with the artistic management team consisting of Anna Marienfeld and Björn Gabriel.

Studio Trafique was awarded the Kölner Kulturpreis für Junge Initiativen in 2022 for its initiative in the digitalisation of the performing arts. Over the past ten years, they have created a diverse program of various productions and have continuously developed further – always in search of appropriate manifestations for their contemporary content. In doing so, they overcome superficial genre boundaries.

Using digital and filmic elements, they extend the conventional representation and impact spaces of performing arts. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Trafique has developed the pioneering format of hybrid live-film theater, in which live character is always the main element: with live direction, live video editing and live sound engineering, every medium always refers to the theatrical situation and creates new experiences for the audience.
More info about Studio Trafique

WEHR51 (under the artistic direction of Andrea Bleikamp and Rosi Ulrich) focuses on the realization of its own concepts and theater texts, which are dedicated to current and socio-politically relevant topics. This is linked to the search for new dramaturgical approaches that lead to unusual performance venues and include immersive art forms. In the artistic debate, the content determines the form. The initial idea and theme define the dramaturgical approach, in which the tools of acting, dance, music, video and others are equally combined and expanded. The result is a diverse program of ‘hybrid’ productions.

WEHR51 sees the audience as part of the production. The aim is not to force the audience to participate or to lecture them, but rather to sensually warm people up, to question the themes and to rethink them.
More info about WEHR51

Interventions at the interfaces of urban and digital public spheres, explorations in Düsseldorf’s urban space.

The philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre called for the “Right to the city” in 1968. The Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and the FFT Düsseldorf (Forum Freies Theater) conducted field research along these lines. In the Re-Imagining Public Life project, they explored the urban environment through research and art.

Cities are changing and with them the public. Construction projects such as the Kö-Bogen II area in Düsseldorf’s city center with the so-called Ingenhove-Tal and the redesign of Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz promise a sustainable “repair” of the urban landscape and urban life. But what forms of the public sphere are taking place here? What role do privatisations, investment, city marketing and design play? What happens to traffic and what is ‘green architecture’? For the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and the FFT Düsseldorf, the Ingenhoven-Tal became a field of experimentation for playful formats. In workshops, an exhibition in the foyer of the FFT, a performative city walk and a table discussion, they explored current trends in urban development and questioned the narratives that accompany urban development interventions and planning. In doing so, they did not follow the (unconscious) logic of optimisation, but re-imagined forms of a different way of living together.
With the opening of an Unbedingten Universität (Unconditional University) in the open air or the city walk Sichtgrün – Die steinernen Täler und grünen Hügel der Stadt with the performer Hauke Heumann, the photographer Jan Lemitz and the dramaturge Moritz Hannemann, they intervened in the everyday structures of the living and working world – playfully, speculatively, exploratively, performatively, also in the sense of cultural hacking, i.e. affirmatively-critically, intervening and changing at the same time.

PROJECT PARTICIPANTS:
Moritz Hannemann, Hauke Heumann, Jan Lemitz, Janna Lichter, Marcel Mücke, Laura Oldörp, Lukas Röber, Anja Vormann und Studierende der HSD Düsseldorf; sowie Kai van Eikels, Alexander Konrad und Wen Wu im Rahmen von Workshops und Klaus Englert, Sebastian Kirsch, Dagmar Pelger, Christoph Schäfer und Laura Strack iin the context of the table talk.

RE-IMAGINING PUBLIC LIFE Talks & Workshops, Social/Urban Movements

The table talk gathers artists, scientists, and protagonists from architecture and urban development to discuss current transformations in the relation between cities and the public sphere.


THE UNCONDITIONAL UNIVERSITY – TRYOUTS

The unconditional university is not necessarily nor exclusively situated within the walls of what we nowadays call a university. It is not necessarily, not exclusively, not exemplarily represented by the figure of the professor. It occurs, it seeks its site, wherever this unconditionality announces itself.” – Jacques Derrida, The Unconditional University

Anja Vormann and students of the design faculty at the Hochschule Düsseldorf experiment with the foundations of their own discipline, between the FFT and urban space. In the context of the demand for a “right to the city” (Henri Lefebvre,) in which the urban society should act as the motor for transformation within urban life, the role of design will be scrutinised and examined. How can designers, employing the artistic means at their disposal, their knowledge and their experience, do things that eschew following the (subconscious) logic of optimisation and consumerism?
It is with this question in mind that we head out: We conduct field research under the open sky, analysing the urban environment we come upon, in the production of which we are involved. The so-called Ingenhoven-Tal valley and the redesigned Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz square will become fields of experimentation for playful formats that are both work as well as teachings. Visitors are encouraged to participate in our courses and to experience the rhetoric power of design in text, imagery, and space in relation to the urbanscapes.

EXPOSED GREEN – THE CITY’S STONY VALLEYS AND GREEN HILLS
URBAN WALK

The 20th century built using exposed concrete, the 21st century builds exposed greens. The Düsseldorf city centre houses Europe’s largest green façade: On the Kö-Bogen II areal, between Schadowstraße, Hofgarten, and Schauspielhaus, a business and office building is situated, and its sides and roof have been planted with roughly 30,000 hornbeams. Trimmed to a uniform height of 1,35 metres, they form a hedge of roughly 8 kilometres in length. This architecture has been hailed as the harbinger of a tendency in urban redevelopment that has been summed up as “from baroque city to Green City” by Klaus Englert, in his recently published “Architekturführer Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Architectural Guide)”.

The Green City of the future is anything but devoid of automobiles – the traffic has been newly regulated, led through tunnels, and it has become invisible now. Instead, the mostly tubed and overbuild Düssel shall be exposed again at many sites, producing a blue-green ring of watercourses and park spaces that connect the city’s cultural hotspots in passing. In a recourse on the historic cityscape, the post-war building “eyesores”, occasionally framed as “Düsseldorf’s second destruction”, will be ironed out. And the Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz redesign transformed an inhospitable transit space into an attractive public square. The city, according to the promise, will be repaired and returned to its citizens – as a habitat that sustainably integrates and connects the needs of humans and nature, of culture and shopping, of climate and urbanism. How coherent are those narratives that complement urban development intervention and planning? While exposed concrete relinquishes the cover-up of the supporting construction, the exposed green does not only engulf the concrete masses used in building, but also the states of ownership and work that mark the emerging cityscape.

Actor and performer Hauke Heumann and photographer and artist Jan Lemitz developed an urban walk that confronts text and imagery with specific locales in urban space. The path to the city’s stony valleys and green hills makes the experience of historic projections perceptible and questions toward current urban development loud. What space is there for urban population in the face of construction processes oscillating between the imitation of nature and investment? And which forms of public life could unfold in this urbanscape?
By and with: Moritz Hannemann, Hauke Heumann, Jan Lemitz. Audioaufnahmen: Simon Nieder. Flyer design: Marian Fitz. Thanks to: Theatermuseum Düsseldorf / Dumont-Lindemann-Archiv, Katrin von Chamier / human voice studio.

The walks took place in July and September 2023.

In the podcast episode, Sophie Emilie Beha talks to project participants Anja and Moritz as well as design students from Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences about how they approached this form of urban design critically, playfully and experimentally in urban walks and workshops.

Founded in 1901 in the southern part of Cologne, the museum was reopened in 2010 as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Kulturen der Welt in a new building in the city center. Around 70,000 items from daily life and rituals and around 100,000 historical photographs from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas are kept there. Based on this primarily historical collection, various perspectives on the shared cultural heritage are opened up, with diverse past, present and future levels of meaning.

The Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) was founded in 1989 and opened in Cologne in 1990. Today, the KHM is a major part of the German art and film school landscape. It represents a project-oriented approach and specifically promotes the interdisciplinary examination of various artistic fields (including photography, fiction, documentary and experimental film, video and light art, camera and image design, experimental computer science, theory, aesthetics and the history of machines, the arts and media).

Ruhrgebieterinnen is a collective of female artists founded in 2021 by Vesela Stanoeva and Elisabeth Drache and specialises in digital performance. In various performative and installation projects, they explore new forms of encounters and differences as well as the potential of diversity.
More info about Ruhrgebieterinnen

MIREVI is the “Mixed Reality and Visualization” working group at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. In an external laboratory near Düsseldorf’s main railway station, a team of scientists, technicians and designers work together with artists on innovative human-technology interfaces that appeal to the whole body.
More info about MIREVI