IMPACT25. Countercrafts: On Practices of Resistance, Repair and Reworlding

Wenn künstlerische Praxis sich in gesellschaftliche Realitäten einschreibt, entfaltet sie ihre besondere Stärke: sie ist immer sowohl Teil der Gegenwart, als auch utopische Kraft, die in die Welt des Vorstellbaren greift.

In Zeiten wachsender Ungleichheit, verengter Diskurse und autoritärer Angriffe auf demokratische Errungenschaften braucht es Orte, an denen Gegenstrategien trainiert, Affekte verhandelt und komplexe Perspektiven sichtbar werden. Kunst öffnet diese Resonanzräume für Praktiken des Widerstands, der Heilung und der Umgestaltung der Welt, um dominante Erzählungen in Frage zu stellen und eigene Vorstellungen von Zugehörigkeit und Zukunft zu stärken.

Wie wird Kunst auch als Werkzeug nutzbar, das man selbst in die Hand nehmen kann? Welche Modelle widerständiger Praxis gibt es und können mit anderen geteilt werden? Lassen sich Brücken schlagen zwischen Orten, Ressourcen und bestehenden Infrastrukturen, um diese neu miteinander zu verknüpfen?

IMPACT25 versteht sich als transdisziplinäres Symposium für Strategien der Zukunftsbewältigung. Hier begegnen sich Praktiken und Entwürfe aus der Kunst, den Wissenschaften, der Architektur, dem Stadtraum und anderen Forschungsfeldern.

Die diesjährige Edition entwickelt sich in zwei Phasen: in den ersten beiden Tagen als öffentlicher Auftakt u.a. mit Kurzpräsentationen der eingeladenen Projekte, in den darauffolgenden zwei Tagen als internes Austauschforum.

+++ Die Kurzpräsentationen werden auf Englisch gehalten! +++

Öffentliches Programm

Freitag, 17.10.

17:30-20:00 Uhr Assembly I – Stitching possible futures

21:00-22:15 UhrFilmscreening - ›Come La Notte‹ von Liryc Dela Cruz

Im AnschlussQ&A mit Liryc Dela Cruz & Il Mio Filippino Collectivo

Samstag, 18.10.

16:00-18:00 Uhr Assembly II - Urban fictions

19:00-21:00 Uhr Assembly III – Land, water, world making

21:00-22:00 UhrVideoinstallation & Performance – ›The Bug is On Fire‹ von Albert Garcia mit Michael Li, Emilie Choi und Keng U Lao

Im AnschlussQ&A mit Albert Garcia, Michael Li, Emilie Choi und Keng U Lao

WEITERE INFOS ZU DEM PROGRAMM

Fr, 17.10 / 17:30 - 20:00 Uhr

Assembly I – Stitching possible futures

© Hala Georges

Hala Georges' presentation explores how ancient Semitic scripts – specifically Phoenician and Syriac – can be reimagined as acts of visual resistance and speculative repair. Rather than treating these scripts as static remnants of the past, her work engages them as living systems – glyphs that carry both cultural memory and unrealized potential. Through experimental type design, she translate these forms into new visual propositions, asking: How can lost scripts become new maps for cultural resistance?

More about Hala Georges

© Rediet Haddis Yalew

YAL is a body of work that explores how cultural memory and resistance are held in aesthetic rituals and daily objects. The project is shaped around three sub-collections – Cargo, Kins and Sheret – and uses textile, film, and spatial curation to tell stories of how visual languages travel through trade, migration and generational adaptation. Rediet Yalew’s talk will explore how the project takes forms that are often considered soft or ornamental, and reads them as acts of care, identity-making and political refusal. She will reflect on how YAL draws from Ethiopian traditions while also responding to global patterns shaped by colonization, displacement, and creative autonomy.

More about Rediet Yalew

Foto: Xuanyu Han / Getty Images

In a world structured by disposability, speed and extraction, repair offers not only resistance, but a vision of transition. Sam Bennett’s contribution will share insights from An Apple a Day (AAAD), a trans-disciplinary, intergenerational collective exploring how visible mending can confront dominant narratives of aging, care and value. AAAD includes artists, doctors, designers, chronic illness advocates and textile workers who gather monthly to practice care through slowness, stitchwork and shared reflection.

More about Sam Bennett

© Iz Paehr

Iz Paehr’s spoken and tactile contribution to the assembly is about disabled technologies of touch. The project challenges the ableist norms of Virtual Reality by drawing on disabled community knowledge, asking how movement, touch, stimming and other sensory practices can create portals into haptic virtual spaces. Iz Paehr is building custom controllers that respond to vibration, pressure and temperature to open pathways into multi-sensorial access to archival materials.

More about Iz Paehr

© Ananya Jain

Rubina’s contribution will explore stitching as a powerful form of feminist resistance that centers marginalised voices, especially those of women, through an accessible and intimate medium. Stitching is not only a craft but a language of care, repair, and connection. It creates a space where vulnerability becomes strength, allowing individuals and communities to heal from trauma and imagine new, hopeful realities beyond systems of oppression. She will share insights from her ongoing projects such as Rafunaama (Darning Archive), Se(w)cular Stitches, Stitching Futures, and Rafooghar (House of mending) which use stitching as a tool for building solidarity, fostering feminist care, and nurturing long-term systemic change.

More about Rubina Singh

© Afrikadiva

Orakle Ngoy will share her experience as a multidisciplinary Congolese artist engaged in combating gender-based violence, particularly within a context marked by armed conflicts and systemic oppression. She will demonstrate how her artistic practices create resonant spaces for marginalized female voices, especially women survivors of sexual violence in the DRC. She will also discuss the founding of the Afrika Diva collective and the Yambi City festival, which promote the empowerment of female artists and the visibility of feminist struggles in a frequently hostile environment.

More about Orakle Ngoy

Fr, 17.10 / 21:00 - 22:15 Uhr

Filmscreening

© Liryc Dela Cruz

After years of separation, three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy, reunite in their older sister Lilia’s inherited villa. As the night deepens, their long-awaited reunion stirs old memories and unspoken grievances. The air is thick with the weight of what has been left unsaid over time, as the siblings navigate the delicate distance that has grown between them. In the stillness of the villa, they wrestle with an unnameable ache, their shared history unfolding in fragments, revealing the quiet yet profound marks of absence, longing, and fractured connection.

With Tess Magallanes, Jenny Guno Llanto, Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr. Regie Liryc Dela Cruz Screenplay Liryc Dela Cruz Cinematography Liryc Dela Cruz Editing Liryc Dela Cruz Sound Design Antonio Giannantonio Production Design Liryc Dela Cruz Producer Liryc Dela Cruz Executive Producers Liryc Dela Cruz, Leonardo Birindelli, Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr., Jenny Llanto Caringal, Tess Magallanes, Saro Vallejo Co-Producers Leonardo Birindelli, Gutierrez Mangansakan II, Moira Lang, Evelyn Vargas-Knaebel Produced by Pelircula Co-Produced by Il Mio Filippino Collective, Ozono Studio, Reckless Natarjan Pictures

More about Liryc Dela Cruz & Il Mio Filippino Collective

SA, 18.10

16:00 - 18:00 Uhr

Assembly II - Urban fictions

© Felix Krell

Düschenhof is a community-led project on the rurban edge of Essen, exploring collective living, regenerative work and transformative learning. The transdisciplinary collective is acquiring land to create a space rooted in care, solidarity and ecological responsibility. It experiments with horizontal decision-making, shared governance and a range of activities from infrastructure building to cultural exchange, aiming to foster resilience and mutual support. As participants at IMPACT25, they seek to share their processes, questions, and contradictions while connecting with others navigating similar transitions.

More about Laetitia Lüke

© HAAU

How can we unlearn infrastructures that impose control and instead build through slowness, care, repair, and shared time? Drawing from interdisciplinary theories, case studies, and ongoing in-situ experimentations, Angela Lee's project explores how infrastructures – designed for control, speed, and extraction – can be challenged. Walking in the urban fabric can become a form of resistance to homogenized experiences, a means to repair damage caused by extractive infrastructures, and a way to attune to invisible systems that sustain us – human and non-human. The presentation draws on a transdisciplinary research tracing the layered histories of the Mid-Levels Escalator in Hong Kong – among the longest outdoor systems globally.

More about Angela Lee

© Harvey Auste Vasquez

Harvey Vasquez’ project examines how speculative fiction and participatory curation serve as critical interventions to reframe the societal role of architecture. Grounded in Manila, a city deeply impacted by climate vulnerability, economic inequality and colonial history, this project uses storytelling and participatory workshops as tools to empower communities to actively imagine and shape alternative futures. Through this presentation, he aims to highlight the transformative potential of speculative architecture in fostering equitable, adaptive futures that confront climate change, social injustice and economic disparity, while ensuring that technological innovation remains inclusive and beneficial to all.

More about Harvey Vasquez

© Chris Tegho

Chris Tegho will present recent site-responsive projects that explore how overlooked urban spaces, such as alley edges, empty lots or sidewalk cracks, can be transformed into playgrounds using local stories and play. The presentation will center on the idea that play is our inherent way of navigating, resisting and re-imagining complex realities. It is our way, as children and adults, to make sense of our world, of our embodied presence in this world. It is also our way to claim care and resist society’s codes of behavior, hierarchies and rigid roles.

More about Chris Tegho

© Shabaan Khokar

In Soft Ground, Suz and Sara Ibrahim propose softness, both as a material logic and an archival method, as a way of engaging with cultural loss. Beginning from the fragment rather than the whole, they explore how preservation can move beyond replication toward forms of reassembly that are open, adaptive, and ongoing.

Through two parallel studies, Nimrud, the ancient Assyrian city intentionally destroyed by ISIS, and “XO,” a design experiment in material responsiveness, they examine how instability can become a generative condition. Their work situates preservation as a practice of care, transformation, and relation, sustaining not fixed forms but evolving systems of meaning.

More about Sara & Suz Ibrahim

SA, 18.10.

19:00 - 21:00 Uhr

Assembly III - Land, water, world making

© Farah Alkhoury

Sites of post-militarization are shaped indelibly by visible destruction and the more pervasive yet invisible toxicity embedded in soil, water and air for decades after war is declared to be over. Farah Alkhoury’s presentation narrates the proliferation of depleted-uranium dust, chemical run-off and sonic-warfare residue across interconnected sites: weapon testing in Vieques, Puerto Rico; military deployment in Iraqi cities; storage and chemical transformation in Portsmouth, Ohio. In her research, she explores how repair opens a molecular archive of polluted water, soil and air, revealing that official clean-ups are arenas of colonial negotiation rather than endpoints.

More about Farah Alkhoury

© Notre Dame University (Media)

In her presentation, Atang L. S. Arnold will explore her curatorial and artistic practice to amplify voices often left at the margins of global art discourse. In her work she is connecting traditional knowledge systems, cultural heritage and community-led creative practice, framed by the lived realities of the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site increasingly threatened by drought, changing ecosystems, and human-wildlife conflict. Through exhibitions, residencies and up-cycling projects, she addresses how local knowledge, particularly women’s narratives, can inform creative responses to environmental and social challenges. These practices serve not only as aesthetic expressions but as forms of cultural preservation, economic empowerment and environmental activism.

More about Atang Arnold

© Mina Nasr, Lamis Haggag and Rania El Helw

Mina Nasr’s presentation focuses on two projects both aimed to open discussions about how ecological justice is connected to cultural survival and the possibilities of imagining more just and balanced futures. ›The Book of Gates‹ investigates barriers that restrict natural flow. ›Cooking Sunshine‹ is an art collective that focuses on social engagement, exploring the relationship between food, land, and community. Mina Nasr will connect to the questions: How do we imagine care beyond crisis? How do we navigate borders and gates that fragment ecologies and communities? How can artistic practice reveal hidden entanglements between migration, environmental justice and water sovereignty?

More about Mina Nasr

© Emilie Choi

Emilie Choi’s study examines how sensing technology, media infrastructure, artistic practices and extractive processes converge to give rise to the concept of the »technical ocean«. Focusing on the Southern China region and its affiliated areas, including Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and Taiwan, the research explores the ocean as a »digital environment« – a concept originating from Giuliana Bruno’s notion of »environmentality«. This framework aims to broaden the ontological understanding of the ocean, shifting from a cinematic space to various scale of volumetric mediation. It further invites the key inquiry of this study: When the ocean is inscribed as a digital environment, how does it evoke new sociotechnical imaginaries concerning human-nature-technology relations, encompassing notions of borders and proximity, biopower of control and capitalism?

More about Emilie Choi

Sa, 18.10.

21:00-22:00 Uhr

Videoinstallation & Performance

© Ken U Lao

Fireflies flicker in the dark, tiny pulses of light breaking through the night – here, then gone. Their glow is a quiet rebellion, a fleeting proof of life in landscapes that often forget them. The Bug is On Fire stitches the stories of the flickering, who exists in-between - sometimes reappearing, sometimes not.Like them, I trace the delicate choreography of presence and erasure, where bodies - human and non-human - persist in the margins, resisting disappearance. Following their light through Macao, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, it mirrors those who move unseen, whose stories vanish with every wave of urban development. Through movement, sound, images, documents, and light.