After three semesters of deserted hallways, abandoned atriums, empty studios and lecture halls, this fall, students and staff alike have finally been able to return in person to HfG Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Together, they will again inhabit its spaces and regenerate the large industrial building made of reinforced concrete and glass through their encounters, discussions, and the making and interaction with objects and knowledge.

The HfG uses its characteristic, dual atrium, open plan space for multiple functions: it is at once an entrance and a meeting place, a space for exhibitions and assemblies, for staged and random encounters. During the COVID-19 pandemic all of this came to a halt. While teaching, lectures, and school organization “went online” and into the digital realm, many other essential aspects of student life fell by the wayside. All too quickly, only a few weeks into the pandemic in spring 2020, it became clear how essential it was for learning and teaching, but also for the organization of university politics—including the expression of dissent—to be able to gather physically. In other words, we became painfully aware of the importance of our physical bodies meeting offline for their activation as political bodies.

The challenges which the new pandemic reality presented—from screen fatigue to the gradual extension of the learning/working day into an almost 24/7 state of online availability—rapidly became evident, especially as universities constitute political “bodies” themselves. Questions of inclusion and exclusion, of who creates, learns, disseminates, and teaches what types of knowledge under what type of conditions, have frequently turned universities into febrile hotbeds for dissent. Time after time, they have become sites that amplify the criticism of a younger generation toward political issues within society at large. Despite being a liberal democratic invention, generations of students have used universities as a physical meeting space to not only discuss (critical) theory, but as an incubator for the organization of political dissent, with the 1968 protests, which gained global momentum, constituting just one prominent example.

The global pandemic revealed how poorly the daily coming together of people and their activities in the HfG translates into digital spaces. UMBAU, HfG Karlsruhe's Journal is a contemporary document, and the title of our inaugural issue, Political Bodies, has hence grown out of our recognition of the structural problems inherent to “making a school go online,” evolving from a broader discussion with students and staff alike. Some of the preliminary results of these conversations can be read in this issue; although these should only be regarded as a starting point.

Political Bodies contests the idea that a body is ever neutral. The common ground of all contributions in this issue is a commitment to conceiving of every body as inherently political. This starts from where and under what circumstances we are born, and especially concerns the ways in which as individuals we are enabled, permitted, or disciplined in our relations to society and the world. Under the rubric “Political Bodies,” we seek to capture the range of meanings caught up in both the political and in bodies, and, especially, their various interdependencies, relations, formations, and constellations. One question that this issue aims to address is thus how the political becomes visible, palpable, or even potent. From the more familiar situations of many bodies joining together to form the larger body of a protest march, as in the photographs of the Belarusian demonstrations (Violetta Savchitz, Yauhen Attsetski and Carolina Paliakowa), to the revelation, in the contribution from the cultural theorist Ana Teixeira Pinto, of whose bodies are conceived of as “universal” and who are excluded from this designation. And on the other hand, it also questions the very notion of embodiment as something belonging exclusively to the human. This refers to a perspective that takes many kinds of human and non-human bodies into consideration, a multiverse of bodies that are involved in what Donna Haraway terms “worlding.” As Daisy Hildyard describes, these entangled human–world relations often only surface as abstract data. Considerations on the complex nature of bodies thus include the complex entanglement of the HfG as an institutional body with its location of a former munition factory.

After a five-year long provisional phase, HfG Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design moved into the former munition factory (Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabrik AG, later Industrie-Werke Karlsruhe AG) in 1997 together with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien). Built between 1915 and 1918, the Hallenbau (industrial building) not only housed arms production but was also turned into a site of forced labor by the Nazis during World War II. Only in the 1970s was the production of the (then) renamed company (Industrie-Werke Karlsruhe Augsburg AG/IWKA) relocated, at which point the halls, which cover a total of 16,500 m², and grounds became an industrial wasteland. In the 1980s, artists reclaimed the space for alternative cultural usage, until a large-scale renovation funded by the State of Baden-Württemberg then re-appropriated the landmarked industrial building to turn it into an institution for art and education in 1993.

Its characteristic Hallenbau connects HfG to this historical dimension, and brings to the fore that no moment in time can be regarded as ahistorical. Against this backdrop, Political Bodies touches upon the severe moments of structural crises that the global pandemic has exacerbated; from issues of democratic representation to the very (corpo-)real challenges of the twenty-first century, such as climate change, migration, and the current surge of right-wing politics. It is clear that the current, pandemic situation is as much an expression of a political and social crisis as it is a global health crisis, as feminist writer Silvia Federici outlined in April this year in an online lecture under the title “COVID-19, capitalism, and social reproduction in crisis.” We see this vividly borne out in the Roundtable discussion Doing Body Politics hosted by Hanne König & Antje Gera.

With the commencement of the winter semester 2021, our real bodies once more enliven the many spaces of the HfG and thus turn it into a place of learning together—with and from each other, and often collectively—and the building returns to being a place of both conviviality and lived political dissent. UMBAU is a new format of outreach and a means of transferring and communicating some of the ongoing – sometimes controversial – key debates at HfG into the digital realm to make it accessible to a wider public. By inviting both members of HfG Karlsruhe, as well as associated professors and educators to contribute their insights into current topics, in formats spanning from in-depth essays and discussions to more peripheral notes, as well as artistic and design contributions, UMBAU sets out to become a discursive platform for reflecting and entangling the various bodies of our University.

UMBAU issue 1 "political bodies", Dec 2021 - Dec 2022. Editorial Staff:  Paolo Caffoni, Charlotte Eiffler, Isabelle Konrad, Jule Köpke, Livia Lazzarini, George MacBeth, Johanna Schäfer, Ebba Fransén Waldhör, Katharina Weinstock.