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An exhibition (Thu, Jun 30 - Sun, Jul 3) that asks how it is possible to think of world, humanity and justice despite the internal paradoxes of Western Universalism – and how to do so beyond relativism and identity fragmentation.

When the free-floating modernist roof of the Congress Hall collapsed in 1980, a Western symbol of freedom crumbled. The exhibition The Pregnant Oyster – Doubts on Universalism traces cracks and constructions of minor narratives of world after Western Universalism. Taking inspiration from the ambivalent nickname that Berliners gave the building that is the home of HKW since 1989 due to its form, it asks how horizons of a shared world are born out of concrete, incorporated, situated narratives. The oyster as a queering animal that changes its gender at will, occasionally producing precious surprises, fragile and valuable, is a metaphor for this meandering search. This exhibition, conversations and workshops are the result of the research and residency project Minor Universality, which brings together positions across the visual arts, writing and the sonic. The propositions in the exhibition derive from situated forms of doubt and engagements of the dominant through the minor and share an urgency to work with the birth of a world within the ruins of the former West.

With contributions by: Filipa César, Emeka Ogboh, SAVVYZAAR (Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Kelly Krugman) and SAVVY.doc (Sagal Farah), Adania Shibli, Camille de Toledo

More about the exhibition and the programme

The ERC project Minor Universality led by Prof. Markus Messling organised a week of international conferences in cooperation with Prof. Mohamed Kerrou (Université de Tunis El-Manar) and Dr. Leyla Dakhli (CNRS/Centre Marc Bloch) at the Académie tunisienne des sciences, des lettres et des arts (Beït al-Hikma) on the topic of Universalismes, hégémonies et identités and at the Centre des arts vivants de Radès on the topic of Universalisme et Incertitudes; with the participation of Giovanni Levi, Mondher Kilani, Jellal Abdelkafi, Vincenzo Chicchelli, Franck Hofmann, Essedik Jeddi, Faouzi Mahfoudh, Imed Melliti, Sylvie Octobre.

In the meetings, workshops and talks in Tunis, the ERC project involved numerous partners as well as artists from the Artists-in-Residence programme (Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Kelly Krugmann, Adania Shibli) for joint reflections and discussions with Tunisian artists (Hichem Ben Ammar, Mohamed-Ali Berhouma, Aïcha Filali, Slim Gomri, Nadia Jelassi, Mohamed Ben Soltane).

More on the conference topic and programme

Tunisian press

For our sixth conversation in the series “Universalism & … “, the Minor Universality research team speaks with writer and researcher Adania Shibli (Palestine).

Our conversation traces writing, in Shibli’s work, as an experience of learning to live as well as of approaching the unwritten, the stammered, the stuttered. We speak about the modern 19th century novel as a form through and against which to find other, minor, gestures and methods to enter writing as a non-hierarchal, anti-authoritarian form. How can writing be designed by fear, loss, and the unwritten? If literature has been complicit in nation-building and modern formations of identity, can writing also engender a different form of engagement with and for others? If so, what forms will it take?

The interview on YouTube

In this fifth episode of our series, the Minor Universality research team is in conversation with the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, professor at the Bard Graduate Centre, New York, and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he is associated with the Department of European Ethnology. This conversation traverses thinking about globalisation and cosmopolitanism, but asking what happens to understandings of the nation state in an era of its reinstatement. Has the idea of a global life and consciousness been rendered illusory by its increasing challenge from identitarian movements and populist politics? Traversing his own biographical trajectory as a public intellectual, with movements from India to the US and Europe, we discuss the relation of theories of transnationalism with the real experience of émigré intellectual politics. We also discuss the legacy of Arjun Appadurai's own archive and its reinstatement as a local research library, asking what happens to the aftermath of the social life of things, once they move from academic to artistic spheres of valuation. After all, as we notice in a time of increasing standstill and questioning of flows of people and things, and diseases that render frontiers absurd, we also ask what role institutions like the academy or museums play in acting as facilitators or perhaps as immobilisers of such movements. The conversation ends with a fervent plea for a partisan position, a push to act, as academics and public intellectuals, as "mediators, facilitators, and promoters of the ethics of possibility against the ethics of probability”.

The interview on YouTube

For the fourth episode of its series, the Minor Universality research team spoke with the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia University (New York), where he also directs the Institute for African Studies. This conversation reflects on how to engage universality from a decolonial perspective. Reflecting on the inequalities and injustice that persist in the contemporary world, how can communities that find themselves in a struggle for emancipation think the universal and humanity? Can we conceive of a universal that is not exclusive or imperial? Drawing on a philosophy of decolonial thought and translation, Souleymane Bachir Diagne shows how we can rethink the universal from the lateralism induced by translation, as opposed to a "vertical universal", a universal self-proclaimed from a dominant language/culture. So how can we think today about a politics of a humanity in the making; an ethics of human rights that would take into account its own limits without falling into relativism? The demand for reparations, whether symbolic or financial, for the violence and ills inflicted by slavery and colonialism is long-standing. Finally, beyond the possibility of "repairing" or "compensating", should we not start by "addressing the irreparable" as the only starting point for a new common humanity? And what is Europe's place in a world that must learn to build itself and have a common vision?

The interview on YouTube

For the third episode of our series, the Minor Universality research team spoke with sociologist Gisèle Sapiro. This conversation reflects on the political relevance of a sociological quest for objectivity and rationality in an era of alternative facts and identity politics. Building on the Bourdieuian sociological tradition, she surveys the pervasive impact of a thinking across the threshold of a subject-object distinction. Can the habitus operate a cross-cultural analytic for interrogating fields for the concrete production of a minor universality? The emphasis on processes for the production of knowledge leads, eventually, to the relation between Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida, who were close to one another since the Algerian war. Do we have to defend Derrida and deconstruction against the accusation of rendering impossible any notion of truth?

The interview on YouTube

We are excited to have launched our residency programme in collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin with a first digital meeting. Over the course of 2021, the six invited artists will develop idiosyncratic perspectives on narration, curation, and minor universality, leading to an exhibition in Berlin in 2022. For more information on the residency and the fellows, please visit the dedicated project website.

Historian Giovanni Levi is in conversation with the Minor Universality research team about the tradition of the microstoria, which he co-founded in Italy in the 1970s. The historiographic approach of the microstoria, which found a resounding echo first in Europe, and then later in the United States, responded at the time to a crisis of the discipline by proposing to abandon the study of masses and structures, and to place individual actors and concrete narratives at the centre of its inquiry. Looking at ordinary worlds through a microscope, as it were, produced the kind of shift that changed our understanding of History. For this reason, the microstoria has for years been debated within the framework of a global history. What resources does the microstoria offer to rethink universalism?

The interview on YouTube

30.11.2020

New book series: Beyond Universalism. Studies on the Contemporary / Partager l’universel. Études sur le contemporain

The first volume 1769-1989: The Epoch of Universalism / L’époque de l’universalisme, ed. by Franck Hofmann & Markus Messling, has just been published.

2019 witnessed the 30^th anniversary of the German reunification. But the remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with another event of global importance that caught much less attention: the 250^th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s birth. There is an undeniable historical and philosophical dimension to this coincidence. Napoleon’s appearance on the scene of world history seems to embody European universalism (soon thereafter in the form of a ‘modern’ imperial project); whilst scholars such as Francis Fukuyama saw in the events of 1989 its historical fulfilment. Today, we see more clearly that the fall of the Berlin Wall stands for an epistemic earthquake, which generated a world that can no longer be grasped through universal concepts. Here, we deal with the idea of Europe and of its relation to the world itself. Picking up on this contingency of world history with an ironic wink, the volume analyses in retrospect the epoch of European universalism. It focusses on its dialectics, polemically addressing and remembering both 1769 and 1989.

More on the book

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