Insights into research: Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE)

Europe's major task for the future is to reshape its relationship with the world. In our time, which is characterised by irreparable social and ecological damage, common perspectives for the future are essentially gained from reparative processes. The Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) is dedicated to the thesis that cultural practices have a central social function in this regard and to the task of understanding, contextualising and analysing them.

Understanding cultural reparation practices

How can the tension between the irreparability of the destruction of life and the need to shape the future be culturally experienced and turned into something new? How do cultural reparation processes change our perception of the world, self-conceptions and ways of life? CURE gets to the bottom of these questions - together with fellows from all over the world.
The centre is a transdisciplinary Institute for Advanced Study at which renowned international guests from science and culture work together with a team of 14 to develop a theory of cultural reparation practices and processes. The long-term aim is to develop a comprehensive socio-political understanding of individual and collective reparation issues in a globalised world. Such knowledge is of fundamental importance for future coexistence in the face of existentially threatening and irreparable damage.

CURE has started its work

Since the opening of the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation at Saarland University on 12 April 2024, research has been in full swing: workshops, lectures, working groups and public cultural events have characterised the first few months of cooperation within the Centre. Currently, important joint tasks include planning the first annual conference on theories of reparation and the scientific and artistic preparation of the exhibition The True Size of Africa, which will open on 8 November 2024 at the UNESCO World Heritage Site at the Völklingen Ironworks. It is also the festive, public launch event of CURE with the participation of federal and state politicians. A comprehensive exhibition catalogue on the art of reparation is also being produced together with the Director General of the World Cultural Heritage Site, Dr Ralf Beil.

Up to twelve international fellows

CURE provides researchers from the cultural sciences with new scope for research. The academic and artistic projects of the fellows who have been visiting the Centre since April deal with issues such as reparations in Namibia (Memory Biwa) or the consequences of colonialism and war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the question of how this irreparable damage can be dealt with artistically (Géraldine Tobe Mutumande). Another project explores archives of knowledge in Guinea that were thought to be lost and ways of reintroducing the social, political and cultural heritage they contain into public discourse (Elara Bertho). Another project examines films in which the aesthetics of resistance in Hong Kong play a decisive role (Tammy Lai Ming Ho). And finally, there is the issue of the restitution of books as war booty in Europe (Marcel Lepper).

The twelve new fellows, who will be guests at CURE for a year from October, come from countries including Iran and Lebanon, Uganda and Haiti, Mexico and the USA, Bosnia and Germany. Their projects will deal with African reconciliation practices, violated feelings of justice in literature and the ecological reorganisation of devastated border areas. They will also address the question of how war damage in Ukraine can be repaired or how life is possible after the genocide in Rwanda.

Artistic research

The Centre regularly hosts artists in residence who take part in artistic research on cultural reparation processes. This summer, it is the Algerian-Francophone artist Zineb Sedira, who designed the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, among others, and whose works deal with the history of Algeria and Mediterranean internationalism at the end of the 1960s. In winter, the Togolese-French writer Kossi Efoui will come to the Kolleg with new novel and theatre projects.