TransExil focuses for the first time on networks between exiles of different origins and local artists, writers and intellectuals in Mexico from the 1920s to the 1950s. The research group is based on the thesis that Mexico became a laboratory of national, i.e. political and cultural reconstitution during this period, in which exiles played a significant role. In particular, it examines the diverse artistic activities and productions that characterized this field. Mexico is understood as an exemplary space of contact and as a hub of further ramified networks, and Mexican reform efforts had an inspiring effect on the activities of exiles from fascist-ruled Europe, but also from dictatorships in Ibero-America and the Caribbean.

Within this framework, TP4 examines the connections and mutual influences of anthropología, indigenism and local materialities in Mexico, including from the pre-Columbian period, in the aesthetic work and everyday practice of the exiles under the conditions of the "diasporic space" (Brah 2003) of exile with regard to the negotiation and re-conceptualisation of aesthetics and community along the three research axes of networks, articulations and revisions. The focus is on Hannes Meyer and Lena Meyer-Bergner from the Bauhaus, who came to Mexico for the first time in 1938 and where they stayed from 1939 onwards, and Anni and Josef Albers (Bauhaus, then Black Mountain College), who migrated to the USA in 1933 and regularly visited Mexico from the late 1930s until the 1950s. In addition, two female artists from the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) are of special interest, namely the Afro-American graphic artist and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett and the photographer Mariana Yampolsky. TP4 examines these questions from the perspective of the aesthetic practice of the exiles mentioned. In the encounters of the exiles from different national contexts with the transcultural reality of Mexico, antropología is a central node of Mexican exile research, as it connects the scientific discourse and the political agenda of indigenism as well as (its) aesthetic practice with recourse to the pre-Columbian period. An important question here is the understanding of indigeneity that flows into the re-conceptualisation of community and aesthetics. Three privileged, empirically concrete spaces in the construction and negotiation of community and thus contact zones were the school, the workshop and the collection. These are linked in different ways to the "diasporic space" of TransExile. It was in these spaces that the interactions between the exiles and representatives of antropología/indigenism, mediated by local materialities, and the re-conceptualisation of aesthetics and community took place. In an interdisciplinary collaboration between cultural anthropology/Anthropology of the Americas (Altamerikanistik) and art history, local materialities are examined through archival work, ego networks of the actors are reconstructed in order to be able to work out revised conceptualisations, imaginations and practices regarding community and aesthetics in TransExile.