Sensing Loss – Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Dr. Hilal Alkan (Berlin): Return, stay, back-and-forth: Syncing migrant-time with plant-time

Hilal Alkan has conducted research with migrants from Turkey who settled in Berlin and its surroundings in the last five decades. For about four years, she accompanied them in their gardens, homes and balconies, where they care for plants. These plants play many roles in the lives of migrants: some smell or taste like home, others are material connections to the places and the people they left behind. Some are like friends who accompany them, others are witnesses to life-changing events. Migrants’ relations with plants change over time, also affected by where they stand in their transnational trajectories at that moment. However, their relationships with plants also shape and become the expression of how they relate to their pasts, live the present and imagine their futures. Plant roots, offshoots, branches and flowers help them emplace themselves, expand, relate, return or stay, both metaphorically and quite materially.

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Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

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The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.