The Roots We Grow From

As former students from various art universities, we co-initiated the groups Eine Krise Bekommen, KD Stammtisch, and In the Meantime, which form the roots of our current artistic research practice.

As Eine Krise bekommen („in crisis“), Destina Atasayar, Katharina Brenner, Lu Herbst and Lucie Jo Knilli organised artistic exchange formats on institutional exclusions at art academies, student solidarity and learning utopias. In the student-organised seminars Design and Mental Health (2021) and Art University and Mechanisms of Exclusion (2022), they invited speakers from anti-discrimination initiatives. Together with the participants, they created protest formats such as ‘We regret to inform you...’ (2022), a growing installation with rejection letters that display the intransparent exclusions within university application processes. The collective emerged from the collaboration on the essay collection Eine Krise bekommen (2021, UdK Verlag).

In the Meantime (Anna Unterstab, Marie-Theres Böhmker, and Charlotte Perka) explored, from a student perspective, experiences of isolation, competitive pressure, and access barriers within the art university. At its core was the desire to create spaces where vulnerability could be shared—and experienced as empowering. Through various formats such as workshops, a temporary feminist library, and reading circles, we invited others into an exchange and a collective search for caring and solidaristic alternatives to studying together. Thereby, care meant for us the act of shaping the art university through our everyday actions into a more open, appreciative, and less exclusive space.

KD Stammtisch
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