21.06.25 ART CRITIQUE AS MIDWIFERY OF A SHIFTING IN CONSCIOUSNESS

This symposium explores transitional states like grief, healing,  and collective re-imagination and their relation to art critique. It asks how the spiritual, aesthetic, and political labor of art—attending to pain, mapping intergenerational trauma, and tracing fragile architectures of care—intertwines with the urgency to reform the language that articulates such work.

Examining notions of art critique after linear media, the symposium positions critique as a metabolism of rupture, a form of listening otherwise. Art critique becomes a midwifery of consciousness: holding space for what has yet to come into language, for the unformed and the ungraspable.

In the context of Berlin, Stav Yeini’s sonic architecture, drawing from perinatal care, a practice of critique that insists on witnessing as an act of solidarity rather than mere observation and deep listening, provides a holding environment where critique becomes a co-present witnessing of what struggles toward form. Yeini’s work sets the tone for critique as a practice of presence, not authority.

Issa Amro brings a vital perspective shaped by years of protecting civic infrastructures in Hebron, emphasizing how political realities can be addressed without exploitation and the accumulation of moral capital. In collaboration with Barbara Debeuckelaere, he works with mothers from Hebron to create posters from photographs they produced together, directing all proceeds to support families in Tel Rumeida—transforming acts of witnessing into concrete aid.

These are modes of engagement where critique becomes a shared ritual for relearning how to speak, witness, and listen—across difference and through rupture. Drawing from feminist and decolonial thought, the conversations in this symposium privilege porousness over certainty. Critique thus becomes not merely analysis but a gesture of reciprocity.

Together with participating members of the AICA Germany, this symposium links critique with the unconscious, waves of trauma, and connections that resist consensus, creating space for coexistence. Here, art critique is reimagined as an infrastructure for gathering, metabolizing pain, and sustaining critical joy—a practice of being present without possessing.

Curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo, member of AICA Germany, a publisher and founder of Arts of the Working Class. Kindly supported by Atelier Gardens and the Institute for Film and Performance Expanded. Everyone is welcome to join, but to secure a seat, RSVP: distro@artsoftheworkingclass.org

Schedule

11 am
Opening Remarks & Sound Intervention
We  begin by attuning. A sonic field welcomes participants into a shared sensorial threshold, opening the boundary between public and inner space. This ritual opening—designed by Stav Yeini—invites the body to  become a listening organ, preparing for a mode of thinking-feeling grounded in attentiveness, permeability, and care.

12 pm
Conversation with Issa Amro and Barbara Debeuckelaere
In this conversation, visual activism meets testimonial care. The presence of Issa Amro at this moment of intensified violence in Israel-Palestine offers a rare and urgent opportunity to hear from someone living and  organizing under occupation, firmly advocating for nonviolent resistance. Together with artist and researcher Barbara Debeuckelaere, they reflect on the conditions under which images—and those who bear witness to them—circulate. The discussion touches on the body as an archive, photography as a form of situated knowledge, and the poetics of humanity unfolding as an inquiry into how critique can inhabit  political realities without reproducing their destruction drive.

1 pm
AICA Panel I — Writing about Art as Healing Process
With Will Furtado, Kristian Vistrup Madsen and Ruth Noack
This panel asks how art writing can act as a vessel for psychic and social repair. From AWC’s embodied topographies of place and inheritance, to  Will Furtado’s editorial practice at the intersection of diaspora, queerness, and curatorial intervention, to Kristian Vistrup Madsen’s meditative prose on intimacy and institutional critique—each writer  foregrounds vulnerability as method. Writing, here, is not a performance of knowledge, but a form of listening through language.

2 pm
Lunch Break
An interlude to digest, to connect. A sound installation by Stav Yeini subtly continues the work of tuning—through frequencies that bypass the rational and speak directly to the nervous system.

3 pm
AICA Panel II — Art Writing as Mycological Communication
With Stav Yeini, Julieta Aranda and Stanton Taylor
What might criticism learn from mycelium? This panel gathers artists whose  practices operate at the threshold of the seen and the sensed—where performance, pedagogy, and publication model alternative systems of  knowledge transmission. Stav Yeini’s somatic sound practice redefines birth and border as sonic conditions. Stanton Taylor engages embodiment through movement, tracing the collective unconscious of dance as an insurgent technology. Julieta Aranda works across conceptual platforms  and infrastructures of circulation to interrupt capitalist time.  Together, they reflect on how critique, like fungus, can move horizontally: dissolving hierarchy, feeding from decay, sustaining underground networks of solidarity and meaning.

4 pm
Closing Remarks and Concert
A collective exhale. The day closes with a musical offering by Stav Yeini that threads affective resonances into rhythm, opening space for non-verbal continuity, as well as assembled notes by Amelie Jakubek, Liad Kantorowicz, and Mohammad Salemy.

5 pm
End of Symposium

Participants 

Issa Amro is a  nominee for the Nobel prize for peace, Holder of the Franco-German Human  Rights Award and State of Law Prize 2024. He focuses on advocating for  nonviolent resistance and collective action against systemic oppression.

Julieta Aranda creates conceptual work that navigates the intersections of time, speculative infrastructure, and  alternative systems of circulation.

Barbara Debeuckelaere weaves memory studies and political testimony into visual narratives that reflect on post-colonial histories and intergenerational trauma.

Will Furtado examines decolonial ecologies and queer futurities through writing and curatorial practice.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer whose reflective prose navigates themes of incarceration, intimacy, and artistic practice from his base in Berlin.

Ruth Noack grounds her curatorial and art historical work in feminist thought and critical theory, centering marginalized narratives.

Maria Inés Plaza Lazo is an editor, curator, and publisher whose work focuses on experimental publishing, curating and critical theory.

Stanton Taylor investigates embodiment and collective memory through art and writing.

Stav Yeini is a musician who draws from ritual and perinatal practices to explore embodied knowledge as a resource for collective healing.

AICA Deutschland e.V. is the German section of the Paris-based International Association of Art Critics (AICA), which today counts 65 national sections and one open section with a total of more than 5,000 members in 95 countries. The globally active association was founded in 1948/1949.