From the Cosmos to the Commons: Symposium

22 Jun, 2025

As part of the inaugural Stadtkuratorin Hamburg initiative, join us for an accompanying symposium on 22 June 2025 at Warburg-Haus, Hamburg. 12:00-17:30. Co-Curated with Joanna Warsza, presenting on Planetary Perspectives.

With: José Luis Chicoma, Uwe Fleckner, Gastón Gurlekian, Sujatro Ghosh, Shahira Issa, KITE, Raqs Media Collective, Bill Sherman, artists and the public.

Open and free to All.
Registration is requested. Please contact us at info@stadtkuratorin-hamburg.de
Please note that the symposium takes place in English without translation.

On the occasion of the first public art exhibition by Hamburg City Curator, which takes place at the Stadtpark and in the Planetarium Hamburg, and includes the recreation of Aby Warburg’s Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy, the symposium explores the everlasting human impulse to look up to the sky, in order to make sense of our place on Earth. In a mixture of readings, performances, theory and culinary experiments, we will explore how art mediates various meanings of planetarity, in political, scientific and mythological terms. We traverse the entanglements between a grain of sand, the bacteria in our gut, rare earth minerals inside our phones and the history of Islamic astrology and astronomy. These various inputs enable the imagination of planetary publicness, as a vista of orientation beyond Earthly extraction and exploitation.