• Thu 14 07 2022 / 7 pm •
The pictograms in the Potosí Archive and the Cologne Progressives

with ANDREAS SIEKMANN and MAX JORGE HINDERER CRUZ

The Decolonial Studies Program (DSP) deepens the contents and topics of the exhibition Potosí Principle – Archive in an accompanying seminar. Forms of (neo-)colonial exploitation, labor disputes in art, and forms of resistance against capitalist-induced environmental destruction will be discussed. Guest lectures and readings, among others by the curators Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann as well as the artists Elvira Espejo Ayca, Stefan Mörsch and others, complement the seminar.

The Potosí Archive is structured by pictograms. They translate the central questions of the archive into pictorial narratives and are present throughout the archive to explain complex contexts or to give a visual dedication to the artists. This visual practice refers to the Cologne Progressives, an anarcho-syndicalist group of artists from the 1920s and 30s who developed pictograms and showed solidarity with the early Soviet Republic, the German soviet revolutions, and the Spanish struggle for freedom, but remained critical of state-fixated communism.

What is fascinating about the Cologne Progressive’s principle of representation is the graphic transparency of the motifs - designed from basic geometric shapes, cuts, color and surface inversions, as if their constructedness itself indicates that they are always reversible arguments in a political narrative. In this representation, the subject is part of, rather than the author of, a dialectical, historical movement.

In the last session of the DSP Seminar, Andreas Siekmann will give insights into his work shown in the Potosí Principle - Archive.

Thu 14 07 2022 | 19:00
Academyspace, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
In German and English language
Participation is free of charge
Registration is not required

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