This Spring 2017 course at Bard College Berlin is a continuation of the Fall seminar In Search of a History: Migration in Germany from World War II to the Present, focusing on students’ individual projects that seek to give visual, verbal, spatial, musical, and general aesthetic and sensory expression to previously collected knowledge of migration history and experience. The projects need not have the ambition of entering the realm or category of “art”: we consider them “notations,” recording our perceptions and thoughts in the modes of articulation that suit us best. First, we will review the historical data, tools, and concepts of migration history that allow us to achieve an analytical distance and conceptualize as well as historicize our material. Subsequently, we will work on a collective visualization project. The major part of the course is dedicated to developing and completing the individual projects and findings solutions for exhibiting them. We will cooperate with a number of renowned artists who will add creative, formal, and practical input and advice to our historical and linguistic framework. The project will be exhibited as part of an international conference on migration history. One panel has been reserved for us to present the projects and to reflect on the relations between migration, research, education, and creativity that we will have uncovered through our work.

Professor: Marion Detjen