From July 25 to 27, the mid-term conference “Contesting Place – Practices of (Un)Doing” took place in Eichstätt, preceded by a guided tour through the city as a pre-conference activity. The conference focused on the conflictuality of place by exploring how places are de-stabilised, dis-located, and de-identified. A central guiding question was: How are places undone – and in that very undoing, re-articulated?
The aim was to open a space for dialogue between (artistic) researchers from a range of disciplines and fields of practice, including sociology, literary and postcolonial studies, architecture, law, media and cultural studies, ecology, activism, and filmmaking.
The programme opened with a keynote by our Mercator Fellow Rumya Putcha, entitled “Ecologies of Yoga, Somatic Orientalism and Imaginations of India”. It explored how colonial visual archives reveal unexpected connections between dancing women and yogis. Rumya, a dancer, musician, and ethnographer, introduced the concept of “somatic orientalism” – how certain smells, sounds, and sights carry deep cultural associations that locate us in imagined times and places. Her research focused on “The People of India,” an eight-volume photographic collection from 1868-1875 that claimed to document “native castes and tribes.” She demonstrated how colonial categorization systems were arbitrary and inconsistent, with the same photograph labelled “snake charmer” in one album and “yogi” in another. Terms like “yogi,” “fakir,” and “ascetic” were used interchangeably based on visual markers rather than actual religious practice. Rumya argued that dancing women and yogis, both figures living outside conventional patriarchal structures, shared more commonalities than colonial archives acknowledged. Her work reveals how these orientalist visual tropes were later adopted by Western performers, showing how colonial-era classifications continue to shape contemporary understandings of yoga, dance, and Indian culture. She emphasized examining “bodily history” – focusing on actual practitioners rather than sanitized textual traditions.’
The keynote was followed by five panels that approached the Un_Doing of place from different angles:
In Un_Belonging, the panellists examined Arab women’s writing, Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera, and Brandenburgian reception facilities. Their discussions raised questions such as: Can one ever be at home? Or is home always a form of homecoming – conflictual, liminal, and suspended between having and not having a home? How is home political?
In Un_Identifying, the panellists discussed diasporic literature and everyday practices shaped by surveillance. They focused on tensions between affirming and challenging place-based identities, asking: How can identity be understood as a process of becoming? In what ways do ambivalent and multiple identities unsettle place?
The panel Un_Human directed our attention to various supra-human scales, asking: What might constitute the human today? And how might we begin to undo the boundaries that define the human as such? What stories does the sea, do mythscapes and hairscapes tell us?
In Un_Structuring, the panellists focused on urban structure planning in the cities of Milton Keynes and Shenzhen, anti-extractivist protest in the European Union, anti-monuments in Mexico City and Sicily, and protests in Istanbul’s Validebağ Grove. They explored both the construction and dismantling of infrastructures, asking: What counts as resistance when conventional protest is impossible, and the public sphere itself is a domain of violence?
In the final panel, Un_Imagining, the panellists examined how place is (un)done through spatial and temporal ruptures in literary utopias and through artistic engagements with displacement and emplacement, thirdspaces, and war sites.
Beyond the official programme, participants engaged in lively discussions and formed new connections. We thank all presenters and everyone involved in organizing the conference for their valuable contributions.