Conceived as an online platform for plurivocal and multiperspectival dialogue, the perpetual seminar hosts meetings/discussions/presentations/screenings/readings which seek to highlight patches of planetary entanglements (Tsing and Mbembe) and experiment with meeting digitally. The seminar aims at exploring the meanings and politics of the planetary in artistic practices, critical heritage studies and epistemologies. Using the metaphor of the patchwork to build/stitch networks between seemingly distant case studies and stories from around the globe, the seminar seeks to blur and overcome academic, national and continental boundaries and divides between the arts and academia.

Stressing the sociality of academic/artistic work to form ideas of care & study, the seminar will bring together diverse fields such as art history, contemporary art, and architecture, archaeology, critical heritage studies, museum studies, ecology, history, linguistics, literature, politics, philosophy & more. The seminar will take shape as a patchwork: an open-ended assemblage without predefined topic to find overlaps, linkages and seams between the patches of knowledge.

These include case studies of connectivity and resistance, the visual and material culture of colonialism, legacies of diverse colonial empires and coloniality, decolonization, restitution and repair, issues of accessibility, preservation, and conservation, engaging communities in museum spaces and other modes of display, and “new relational ethics” (Sarr/Savoy), architecture and the built environment, narratives and counter-narratives, and issues of memory, intersections between cultural and natural heritage, and human and-more-than-human relations.

The seminar aims at strengthening and building networks, while acknowledging the patchiness of the world. It will encourage associative thinking, knowledge in motion, and horizontal knowledge production triggering imagination and story-telling.

In a time of increasing shifts of encounters towards the digital realm, the seminar will interrogate old paradigms by critically re-thinking the past, present, and possible futures of meeting digitally. It will critically explore the meanings of digital dialogue and world assemblies, while at the same time putting them into practice and asking: how do we meet digitally as planetary agents? It tries to be not just another seminar, but rather acknowledge the land patches that are affected by us meeting digitally as well and therefore critically reflect on and demonstrate the radical consequences that a practical implementation of the paradigm shift towards a planetary perspective/thinking could bring. The seminar tries to find answers to the question of how our increasingly networked world brings violence but also opens up possibilities for new spaces of sharing/study/care. It approaches knowledge production and the digital with a P2P ethic.