Russia’s devastating war and expansive terror have changed the artistic practice of Ukrainian artists. In general, I am interested in boundaries and transitions in art, in the translation of art into actions with tangible effects. My project explores the experiences of people after combat, of people who were on the front lines and carried the line with their own bodies. They have numerous visible and invisible injuries. Their bodies are mutilated, and they suffer from constant psychological stress. Their wounds, their losses, and their grief have become inscribed in the biography of their resistance, in the structure of their own selves.

In my project, I work alongside war veterans to examine the temporality of the Russian-Ukrainian war as it manifests itself in individual paths to recovery. The coexistence of processes of destruction and reconstruction within these paths reflects the specific character of the abrupt changes caused by the war. How is time revealed through human action, the body, and its transformation? What is written in people’s bodies when they expose themselves to rampant terror? History is etched into missing limbs, into the contraction of combat experience that the body absorbs. The nature of time reveals itself through breaks, losses, pain, renewal, recovery, and restructuring—through the beginning of something new. Abrupt changes disrupt the old order and allow a new one to emerge. The routine of recovery and transformation—its miracles and losses—is expressed in tiny gestures, in sentences, in actions that redefine the familiar roles of one’s own body while adapting to prostheses.

Supervisors: Prof. Kader Attia (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Witt (University of Hamburg)

Supervisors: Prof. Jeanne Faust (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Witt (University of Hamburg)

Cartoon characters and movie characters are constantly involved in our encounters with animals. Consciously or unconsciously, they influence, confuse, and distort our ideas and knowledge about the lives and lifestyles of non-human animals. While the “Bambi effect” describes, among other things, an increased sensitivity towards wild animals and a rejection of hunting in response to cute cartoon characters, productions such as Finding Nemo (2003) and Rascal the Raccoon (1977) had the opposite effect. Affection for the main characters led to a demand for live clownfish and raccoons as pets, which had real consequences for animal groups and the health of entire ecosystems. These concrete, but also less obvious, examples of media-induced popularity of animals and the misconceptions that accompany it form the basis of my artistic research.

“Both scientific and popular thinking tend to conclude that ultimately there are only individual answers to individual questions. What is intelligence? Who possesses it? Where do they fit into our rigid structures and hierarchies of thought and domination? Perhaps—listen and be amazed—the world simply does not work that way.”^[1]

Not only films, but also scientific studies, cosmologies, and “world creation projects” ^[2] shape our relationship with mice, forests, and seeds. Many of these research findings and works of fiction portray the subjectivity of non-human ^[3] life merely as beings subordinate to humans, exploiting their resources, unique abilities, and appearance to instrumentalize them as puppets and props for anthropocentric narratives. This double invisibility further alienates us from the ecological interdependencies that form the basis for collective survival. ^[4] “But awareness of the sensory existence of other life forms does not have to involve grand ideas or actions. How about a visit to the local garden center to smell the plants?” ^[5]

This doctoral project focuses on the medium of animated film and examines the dramaturgical, linguistic, and aesthetic forms of animals as well as the respective media-specific modes of play. Following in the footsteps of popular animal characters, many unexpected encounters, stories, and connections can be found. These dialogues and surprising connections form the framework for a series of cinematic and installation works that bring together the potential and practices of documentary film (observing, listening, recording) and 3D animation (extracting, imagining, embodying). “In order for animals and their capacity for action to become visible in history, it makes sense to ‘give them stories’ and tell their stories” ^[6]. Following Jessica Ullrich and Alexandra Böhm, the project also experiments with the idea of helping animal characters develop a rebellious self through compassionate and responsible storytelling. The associated ambivalent dynamic of anthropomorphism ^[7] and anthropocentrism is accepted as a welcome challenge for artistic research at the margins of rational scientific logic.

[1] James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The search for a Planetary Intelligence, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022.

[2] „Weltgestaltungsprojekte“ beschreiben, wie Menschen und nicht-menschliche Wesen gemeinsam durch fragile, unvorhersehbare und kollaborative Prozesse neue Welten erschaffen, oft inmitten ökologischer und sozialer Krisen. (vgl. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015.

[3] Der Begriff „übermenschliche Welt“ bezieht sich auf eine Denkweise, die darauf abzielt, die Trennung zwischen Mensch und Natur zu überwinden. Er wurde erstmals 1996 von David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World eingeführt. Heute hat der Begriff unter anderem durch James Bridles Ways of Being (siehe Anmerkung 1) an Popularität gewonnen.

[4] Anna Tsings Konzept des „kollaborativen Überlebens” beschreibt, wie verschiedene Spezies, darunter auch der Mensch, durch gegenseitige Abhängigkeiten und Zusammenarbeit in unsicheren, von Zerstörung und Prekarität geprägten Umgebungen neue Lebensmöglichkeiten schaffen, um gemeinsam zu überleben. (vgl. Anmerkung 2)

[5] Timothy Morton, Being Ecological, MIT Press, 2018.

[6] Jessica Ullrich, Alexandra Böhm (Hrsg.), Tierstudien, Neofelis, 16/2019.

[7] „Anthropomorphismus” bezieht sich auf die Vermenschlichung von Tieren zu Zwecken wie Unterhaltung.

Supervisors: Prof. Simon Denny (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Steffen Köhn (University of Aarhus)

My artistic research project examines a growing community of longevity activists whose goal is to overcome the biological limits of human life and defeat death through advanced medical science. These actors—entrepreneurs, biohackers, scientists, venture capitalists—mobilize financial and intellectual resources to fund experimental research projects worldwide. In doing so, they rely on blockchain-based mechanisms for financing, administration, and community building, combining biotechnological ambitions with decentralized technological infrastructures.

Blockchain is not only a financial instrument here, but also an organizational framework for circumventing conventional regulatory structures and accelerating innovation. Since many of the treatments sought by this community—gene editing, anti-aging pharmacology, cryonics, mind uploading—are not legally sanctioned or must undergo lengthy approval processes, the movement is striving for new legal and territorial configurations. These include free private cities, special economic zones, and extraterritorial enclaves where governance is defined by private contracts and market relationships.

The aim is not only to promote biomedical innovations, but also to experiment with alternative social arrangements shaped by libertarian and anarcho-capitalist principles. Methodologically, the project combines participatory field research and observational cinema with an innovative film-within-a-film structure. The protagonists are not only observed, but also asked to help shape a fictional narrative and develop a parallel script that dramatizes their visions of the future. This process is organized by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which serves as both a conceptual and operational infrastructure. The DAO enables participants to collectively propose, vote on, and shape the creative direction by embedding blockchain-based decision-making into the production. This approach explores how decentralized models might function in collaborative artistic contexts and how they mirror the governance experiments within the longevity community.

The finished film is shown using outdated cryptocurrency mining rigs that have been repurposed as media players. Each rig contributes a fragment of the overall video, resulting in fragmented playback, stuttering, and varying image quality. The rigs communicate via a local network and combine all the data processed by the individual devices. This presentation mode illustrates the interplay between speculative technological visions and material infrastructures.

Supervisor: Prof. Adina Pintilie (HFBK Hamburg)

In Praise of the Whip* is an artistic exploration that encompasses film practice, film theory, and social work. It explores possibilities for radically reconfiguring erotic arousal, imagination, and transgression through an aesthetic and political lens. The focus of my research is on the experience of the body as a “surface” inscribed with traces of landscapes, political actions, and intimate wounds. These traces require close examination. They contain more evidence than any archive and more articulated sensations than any confession. This experience is unique to each individual and bound to the mystery of one’s own body. I am fascinated by how radical materiality and physicality can become an image in film. I wonder whether it is possible to create a cinematic space in which the transgressive experience of the body can be located and transformed through the work of the imagination. I wonder how one can bridge the narrative structure of film and erotic desire in its affective, rebellious, unstructured, yet intimate form. As part of my doctoral project, I am investigating how the body changes when confronted with different social, cultural, and political landscapes. I am interested in the experience of a body caught between desire and the impossibility of its realization. One of the main participants in my project, Lertulo (which means “a person who can do anything” in Esperanto), is a non-binary person, a professional contractor, and a model. They have a complex relationship with their body and their desires. Lertulo constructs and transforms their body through interactions with building materials that demand extraordinary physical strength. These materials literally shape Lertulo, as does the political landscape, which plays its own repressive, restrictive role. On the other hand, as an actress and model, Lertulo has a completely different virtual experience that has no material component. For me as a filmmaker, it is an experience to perceive another person in their otherness, in their radical separateness. What does this virtual (cinematic) experience offer Lertulo? And how can it be analyzed within the framework of our collaborative process? I am still in the early stages of my research, which will comprise several parts and interwoven narrative strands. I hope that during the program I will be able to shape my own artistic research methodology and develop it through cinematographic practice.

Supervisors: Prof. Omer Fast (HFBK Hamburg) and Dr. Hagit Keysar (Bezalel Academy Bethlehem)

This project aims to develop a comprehensive investigation of the power dynamics associated with the processes of collecting, archiving, and presenting historical and ethnographic nomadic photographs, which directly or indirectly shape national and colonial consciousness. Exploring historical collections in my birthplace, Palestine-Israel, through the prism of settler colonialism allows me to see hidden stories that haunt our collective memories and our present. A growing number of studies have analyzed the history and present of the State of Israel through the lens of the settler colonialism paradigm: ^[8] In settler-colonial processes, a group of migrants takes control of a space inhabited by an indigenous group and gradually shifts the demographic balance in favor of the settlers through mechanisms of expropriation, expulsion, or elimination. The “logic of elimination” of the indigenous population—i.e., its replacement by settlers and the appropriation of its land—is a crucial component of colonial settler projects aimed at permanent settlement. The subject of this project is the ethnographic photo collection housed in the “Man and His Work Center” of the Eretz Israel Museum. The collection includes photographs of workers, traditional tools, and ethnographic objects, most of which depict indigenous Palestinians—a fact that is not acknowledged in the collection or the exhibits. In this way, the museum and the collection simultaneously contribute to constructing a Zionist narrative of nation-building or “returning to work the land,” while the narratives of the former inhabitants of this land, the Palestinian farm workers, are erased and silenced. I will focus on photography as an object that is open to multiple interpretations—in terms of its subject matter, its materiality, its cataloging, and its status in the museum. I want to explore how photographs created for a single purpose can actually preserve a diversity of stories and cultures. That is, how photography used for the colonial narrative can also tell the indigenous story through a new reading. I propose a multi-layered approach to this investigation. This includes conducting research that critically reads the Man and His Work Center and its collections with the help of colonialist theories, thus addressing the dual narrative of the preservation and eradication of Palestinian agricultural culture. In parallel, I will conduct a documentation project to capture the cataloging process of curators working with unannotated photo boxes. The editing will highlight the discrepancies between the images and the narratives imposed on them and question how archives construct knowledge. In addition, I will employ an artistic practice by recontextualizing the archival photos through a photo-based installation. Finally, although the collection is housed in a Zionist museum, I would like to design an exhibition space that makes the collection accessible to different narratives and researchers, whether officially or as a pirate. Through these strategies, the research aims not only to uncover hidden histories, but also to promote dialogue for reconciliation with the traumas of the past as a means of healing.

[8] Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures, Stanford University Press, 2023.

Supervisors: Prof. Rajkamal Kahlon (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Yvonne Wilhelm (ZHdK)

“(…) these voices are indeed sediments that we should auscultate and excavate, question and overturn, [which] reveal not only the persistence of the past, [but also] its accumulation in a future that begins with us now”—Kristina Rivera Garza, Escrituras Geológicas, 2022 ^[9]

When we understand geology as a form of writing about the earth, we recognize it not as a field of neutral description, but as a mode of inscription—one that organizes material reality, temporal experience, and life on the planet through specific regimes of power and knowledge. As Kathryn Yusoff argues, the classification of matter has historically functioned through geographical dislocation, separating land, place, and personality from their relational entanglements ^[10]. In this sense, the origins of geology (and its consolidation as a colonial and racialized practice) are inextricably linked to a regime of material power that underpins extraction, dispossession, and settler modes of land appropriation. So what are the material writing practices of geology, and how have they contributed to the erasure of other forms of planetary meaning-making? How can we think about the ecological origins of political violence by examining how geology inscribes certain earths and displaces others?

How can we begin to engage with the suppressed relationalities, temporalities, and territorial imaginations that geology has silenced? Drawing on Cristina Rivera Garza’s practice of unlanding, Volumetric Ecophonies is a process of unsettling and unlearning the modern geological imaginary. This is achieved by engaging with the subterranean as a space where silenced voices and marginalized imaginaries persist as sedimented temporalities through the permanence of matter. These are experiences of past and future that offer possibilities for relational forms of coexistence beyond the flat plane of geology. Through work on translocal geographies—particularly between Germany and the so-called “mining corridor” in northern Colombia—the process follows the paths and frictions of coal, copper, and gold. As extensions and wild agents of subterranean relationships, these minerals bear the weight of mining, displacement, and contested ecological life. Volumetric Ecophonies borrows the term ecophonies from the ancient medical practice of auscultation, in which the internal resonances of the body are perceived through the modulation of the voice. The process creates sound-based interfaces that propose listening as a medium for earthly meaning-making and auscultate and activate exchanges with the material, affective, and political formations silenced by extractive regimes. In this way, the engagement shifts from the logic of quantification to modes of resonance that pay attention to and attune to the frictional, porous, and interdependent dynamics through which the subterranean earth resounds.

[9] Cristina Rivera Garza, Escrituras Geológicas, Iberoamericana, 2022, p. 14 [translation by the author].

[10] Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2019, p. 2.

Supervisors: Prof. Rajkamal Kahlon and Prof. Dr. Jesko Fezer (both HFBK Hamburg)

My method begins with the organization of workshops that use negative affects and emotions as a guide to explore and investigate what is often avoided, focusing on minority perspectives, especially from a queer-feminist point of view, while maintaining a common ground. The starting point of the workshop is shame. On an individual level, shame is an affect that prevents people from expressing themselves; on a larger scale, shame mediates between the self and the community. It is an inevitable part of the identification process. In this sense, it can be used as an aesthetic tool for renegotiating consensus. It thus has the potential to reorganize space and redefine what space can contain. The workshops are a response to my personal desire to go beyond the limits of private conversations with friends, which are constrained by limited resources and boundaries. By expanding these private conversations into workshops and collaborating with communities across Germany and beyond, we can uncover new perspectives together. In the workshops, we analyze how power works, work through internalized oppression and cynicism, question conventional notions of difference as divisive or as an excuse for maintaining the status quo, and challenge the idea that the resulting conflict is necessarily very intense and disruptive. By slowing down these conversations, the workshops open up space for allies and aim to restore genuine hope and empowerment. Some workshops are documented to capture the energy of the workshops. This documentation offers a new vision of empowerment—one that recognizes physical experiences and emotions as a starting point for knowledge. It also serves as a tool for reflection, providing another opportunity to process what was discussed in the workshop. Beyond the role of moderator and listener, it creates the position of observer. It also opens up a new space for viewers, where they can become potential participants and contributors. In terms of content, it contributes to the conceptual development of the workshop by highlighting possible discursive fields in which concrete socio-political issues can be addressed. Based on the documentary footage, other media such as 3D animations are added to introduce a subjective level that transforms overlooked sensations into shared knowledge. In general, I am interested in developing an open process and space for thinking and feeling with others, in which reflection is structurally enabled—in which community work can be connected with the personal, the boundary between participatory experience and collaborative experience is blurred, and transformative experience can be communicated and thus enabled.

Supervisors: Prof. Angela Bulloch (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Witt (University of Hamburg)

Rhizoming Wind focuses on the plant Gastrodia elata to tell a story about how knowledge, plants, climate, and bodies intersect. Gastrodia elata is a saprophytic, perennial herb from the orchid family (Orchidaceae) that is characterized by the absence of roots and green leaves and is therefore unable to photosynthesize. Instead, it survives in symbiosis with the fungus Armillaria mellea and depends on the fungal hyphae penetrating rotting wood and providing the nutrients necessary for its survival. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the rhizome of Gastrodia elata has been used for centuries to treat “wind diseases” such as strokes, headaches, and other neurological disorders. Wind is considered the elusive and mobile of the Six Evils, often combining with other elements to cause wind-related diseases. How can we understand and define this more than general “wind” that is present in the body? From a basic TCM perspective, the human body is viewed as an open system that constantly interacts with the external and internal environment. It is considered a black box—it receives inputs and generates outputs—with interactions with the environment forming a complex, dynamic system. The Huangdi Neijing, literally the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor, already mentions the “Five Movements and Six Qi,” a theory that links climate and periodic life cycle phenomena and connects nature, humans, and disease mechanisms—climate, phenology, and syndrome are mutually reinforcing. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of non-hierarchical, interconnected knowledge systems, this study follows the imaginative trajectory of wind through a rhizomatic methodology. It examines how this external force can penetrate the human body and disrupt its internal balance, and how herbal interventions—such as Gastrodia elata—can help dispel it. It also addresses the dynamic balance between the internal (body) and external (climate) environments. Rather than seeking specific targets, treatments, and therapies, how might we center systemic, holistic, or preventive views and mindsets as strategies for averting crises? As Donna Haraway puts it in her book Staying with the Trouble: “It matters what things we use to think other things; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what bonds bond bonds. It matters what stories create worlds, what worlds create stories.”

Supervisors: Prof. Angela Schanelec and Prof. Adina Pintilie (both HFBK Hamburg)

In my research project, I examine the representation and processing of violence against women in moving images, with a particular focus on traumatic experiences in intimate relationships. My goal is to investigate how artistic media can be used to make trauma visible and open up new avenues of communication. I examine how authenticity and reconstruction contribute to trauma processing and what possibilities reenacting real experiences offers for reinterpreting the past. A central concern of my work is to make the physical and psychological effects of violence visible and tangible. I critically examine common notions of healing and physical and mental well-being and question how these concepts can be expanded and rethought in a rapidly changing society. I understand health not only as a medical condition, but as a culturally shaped and complex concept. My interdisciplinary approach combines film practice with theoretical reflection and aims to create artistic spaces in which traumatic experiences can be processed and renegotiated. Through this perspective, I attempt to develop new frameworks that reveal the often hidden traces of violence against women and contribute to a broader understanding of health. In addition, I am interested in how art—especially film—can address social power structures and deeply rooted systems of violence against women. My goal is to open up aesthetic and discursive spaces in which wounds can be named without exploitation and in which healing is understood as an open, multi-layered process. With this research project, I aim to raise awareness of the effects of violence against women while strengthening artistic forms of expression that go beyond mere documentation and have transformative potential.