We had closed our eyes, as instructed, counted slowly and when we opened them again, the building appeared slightly out of phase with itself. “Ready or not, here we come,” we whispered into the seemingly empty halls.

Nothing had changed in any obvious way. The corridor extended where it was supposed to, doors aligned with doors, light with light. And yet, the names on the signs no longer performed the task we expected of them. They did not point; they hovered. They suggested functions without confirming them, as if the rooms had entered a period of provisional reassignment, fallen out of time yet exact replicas of one another. 

We moved forward not because we expected to find anyone, but because staying still inside a space that no longer fully coincided with its own map felt like a risk. Somewhere, behind walls or floors, circulation continued—air, data, people, electricity—systems passing through one another without necessarily meeting. The game, we realised, had quietly altered its terms. What began as hiding had turned into navigating, and what had been seeking into calibrating: learning how much attention a space requires before it starts to rearrange itself.   

When considering Hallenbau A,¹ the transformation from an ordnance factory to an art school did not erase earlier spatial regimes; it reorganised them. Paths designed for the transport, storage, and coordination of ammunition continue to choreograph movement, even when their original purpose has been reallocated.² Their conversions do not simply replace one program with another, instead, they produce hybrid spaces in which incompatible temporalities and intentions collide. Within such environments, hiding and seeking are not merely individual actions, but responses to infrastructural arrangements. Visibility is distributed unevenly; access is mediated through permissions, protocols, and interfaces. Some movements register, others dissolve into background processes. What appears as neutral circulation often follows deeply asymmetrical routes.

This becomes particularly evident when attention shifts from spectacular acts of surveillance to the quieter operations of infrastructure. As Céline Condorelli suggests, infrastructure is rarely noticed precisely because it functions: it forms the material ground on which other systems operate. Here, concealment is not primarily produced by secrecy, but by scale and normalisation—by the fact that what sustains everyday life is structured to stay out of view. In their speculative contract—vertrag xy—Hanna Franke and Josephine Scheu aim to unveil and negotiate the hidden care and reproductive work within collective work relationships, that just like infrastructure, allow for those relationships to thrive while remaining largely unrecognised. They use the contract as a tool to create empowering strategies for those practices.

Yet concealment is not only imposed; it can also be tactically produced. Practices of mimicry, masking, obfuscation, and deception can be observed in many aspects of human and as well as non-human life. One instance of this is the concept of camouflage which is paradoxical in nature, in that it involves hiding in plain sight, rendering an object invisible despite its presence. It is a deliberate decision to withhold information and to devise methods of maintaining its secrecy for various reasons. The French term for “disguise” became popular in many different languages during World War I, when the camouflage pattern was developed. From this point on, many variations of the pattern emerged for the concealment of people, vehicles, weapons, and architectural structures in the context of war while artists played a pivotal role in this. This visual lineage is taken up in Charlott Eifler’s work Fantômes. Here, historical references are revealed and subsequently transformed into the development of garments deployed within European museum interiors. Through patterns that allow bodies to blend into display architectures of vitrines, wall textures, and artefacts, the logic of camouflage is appropriated and deliberately inverted. Rather than aiming at passive disappearance, these garments function as a speculative device for the unnoticed return of objects looted, sold under pressure, or extracted in colonial contexts, while foregrounding questions of ownership, visibility, and institutional display.

While the initial development of the camouflage pattern was intended as a means against the newly invented technique of aerial reconnaissance in the early twentieth century, technological advances since brought about new techniques of both—detection and concealment of visual and as well asnon-visual signals. This is especially relevant in the context of surveillance and automatic image recognition through AI where practices of seeking have become increasingly automated. Nina Franz traces how military imaging, once centered on optical identification and the fantasy of an all-seeing eye, has shifted toward closed circuits of data processing and algorithmic targeting. What is sought no longer manifests as a visual representation and what becomes actionable may never enter the field of human perception at all. Such modes of operation not only shape contemporary practices of surveillance and control, but also influence which technological histories become visible and which remain marginal. José-Carlos Mariátegui points to how the iconic status of projects like Cybersyn has obscured a broader and more heterogeneous history of cybernetics in Latin America—one that was deeply entangled with local political struggles and social imaginaries. Recovering these epistemological contributions does not simply add missing chapters, but complicates dominant narratives of technological progress and challenges assumptions about where technological knowledge is produced and whose futures it serves.

Regimes of visibility which operate through representation also extend into material landscapes of commemoration. With ffountain, Vera Gärtner examines how public space in Karlsruhe remembers selectively: through street names, monuments, and sculptural bodies that reproduce deeply entrenched gendered, racialised, ableist, classist, and colonial hierarchies and narratives. By rearranging, overwriting, and repurposing existing forms rather than replacing them, the work intervenes in the mechanics of remembrance itself, exposing how visibility in the urban landscape is organised through persistent exclusions. Alongside these investigations, the seminar Amongst Ghosts: Queerying Bauhaus approaches hiding and seeking as archival and affective practices. By tracing obscured queer legacies within Bauhaus histories the seminar asks how objects, spaces, and pedagogical models might still carry traces of unacknowledged lives and desires—and what it means to work with histories that persist less as facts than as atmospheres, rumors, and gaps. 

Across these contexts, hiding and seeking appear less as opposing gestures than as mutually constitutive processes. Detection generates new forms of camouflage; exposure produces new demands for opacity. 

While, in the opening scene, we set out to search—our senses attuned to the architectural conditions and layered histories of the building that hosts teaching and experimentation in art, design, theory, infrastructures, and communities—we encountered something stirring. Believe it or not, in one place we found the commandment of neutrality. Pale, it lay there, wedged into the elevator door, blocking the way. We found it, and we are still examining it from all sides. In the German game of hide and seek “Verstecken”, finding is absent; there is only hiding.

For this reason, this issue seeks, among other things, to engage with the tension between the hyper-local—UMBAU being situated within a German art school that was once an ammunition factory—and its entanglement with the globalised: Germany’s expanding arms trade and its ongoing complicity in genocide and warfare. We want to use this platform to open necessary discourses that tend to move more slowly, or remain constrained, within state-funded institutions and embrace the manifold voices that inhabit this building. 

—What happens when the seeker’s gaze turns back on itself?

Footnotes

1. Hallenbau A is the name of the building that hosts the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, as well as ZKM Karlsruhe and Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe. Built between 1915 and 1918 in commission by the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken AG (German Arms and Ammunition Factories Inc.), it remained a ammunition factory until the end of World War II. ↑

2. This history which haunts the building as a lingering presence and which was addressed in the exhibition Munitionsfabrik – Ausstellung zur Geschichte eines ungeheuren Raums at HfG in 2022. ↑