Agenda

“Learning With” Workshop Series | On Finding a Centrifugal Force
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll in dialogue with Wietske Maas

Monday, April 20, 2026, 10.00–13.00
Aula Biral, Malcanton Marcorà
Dorsoduro 3484/D, Calle Contarini, 30123 Venezia

How can collectivity be produced? What kind of force does collectivity generate, and under what conditions? The centrifugal offers a working figure, an outward-moving energy that redistributes what enclosure had concentrated. This workshop takes that figure seriously as both political description and methodological problem.

Speaking from the experience of working with the Repatriates Collective and the Tide of Returns exhibition, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll reflects on the methodologies of long-term collaborative work with communities in the process of receiving repatriations from European museums.
The return of an object does not resolve the question of whose knowledge of it counts—it opens that question.
The seizure that made return necessary also destroyed the oral, ceremonial, and ecological practices through which that knowledge had been held.
This seminar asks how storytelling can carry that knowledge, and what it means to live the care that transmission requires.
That question is also a feminist methodological one: about who works with whom, who carries what weight, and whether collective labor can transform the extractive logics that structure so much academic and artistic practice.

Against the manospheric nationalism and border enforcement that produce ignorance as political infrastructure, Carroll's practice proposes a counter-practice: knowledge forms moving through bodies, relationships, and the minor registers that institutional enclosure cannot easily reach.
In dialogue with Wietske Maas, the session asks whether politicized friendship, as a form of epistemic commoning, constitutes one of those forms—keeping knowledge circulating as living practice across the fractures that repatriation is still, unevenly, trying to repair.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an artist and historian, currently leading the ERC project repatriates.org. She is Professor of History at the Central European University Vienna and Honorary Professor and Chair of Global Art at the University of Birmingham and is the author of five books including The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Mexico and Europe (2022). Her installations and films have been shown internationally at contemporary art and film festival venues at the Venice, Marrakech, and Sharjah Biennales, ZKM and Manifesta.

Wietske Maas is a curator, independent researcher, editor, and occasional artist whose work grapples with art’s capacity to contribute to transformative social-ecological imaginaries.
She was a curator at BAK, basis for actuele kunst, Utrecht and European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam.
She has convened exhibitions, extensive discursive programming and publishing projects.

Recent edited anthologies include Fragments of Repair (with Kader Attia and Maria Hlavajova, Jap Sam Books, 2025), Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (with Maria Hlavajova, MIT Press, 2020), among others.

“Learning With” is an experimental workshop series and the primary methodology of the Radical Epistemologies cluster at NICHE.

Registration: antonia.friedman@unive.it