UdK-TORCH seed funded projects, 2025-26

We are delighted to announce the projects funded as part of the UdK-TORCH partnership.

The University of Oxford and the Berlin University of the Arts invited researchers, artists and designers to participate in the Oxford–UdK Berlin Partnership in Arts and Humanities. The partnership is an effort to strengthen the ties both between the two institutions and between artistic and academic disciplines, and recently offered seed funding to facilitate interdisciplinary research projects.

We're pleased to announce the awarded projects below.

Was gibt’s da zu lachen ? / A Comic Twist on Memory?

Oxford: Dr Katharina Friege
Berlin: Prof. Enrico Stolzenburg

This project uses theatre to think critically about the postwar era in Germany and Austria in new ways. To what extent did playwrights, actors, and audiences process or suppress the consequences of Nazism and World War II in the space of theatre? More specifically, we explore the role played by humour in war-related plays from 1945 to 1961.

In mid-October, we are hosting a theatre workshop in Berlin that will bring together students and researchers from both Oxford and the Universität der Künste. At this workshop, we will explore three to four plays from the period named above. Our selection criteria for these plays consider the theatrical merits of the piece, its historical relevance, and its originality in the context of postwar theatre. The two-day workshop will be an opportunity to read, discuss, perform small scenes, and delve into different characters. At the end, we will collectively choose a play the group feels to be most suitable for a full-scale theatre production. In choosing this play, the central guiding questions are: What makes it relevant to our society today? What, if anything, makes it funny? How can we translate both its relevance and its humour onto the stage?

The long-term hope for this creative collaboration is to stage the chosen war-related German-language comedy and in doing so, to draw attention to humour as part of a wider postwar context and culture, something that has not only been understudied but also underperformed.

Can the fake help us identify the real?

Oxford: Prof. Patricia Kingori
Berlin: Prof. Christiane Kühl

Building Visions: Theology and Architecture in Deep Time

Oxford: Dr. Tim Middleton
Berlin: Prof. Dr. Susanne Hauser

How do we imagine the built environment in the long-term future? Which concepts and disciplinary self-understandings underpin these visions? How do we conceive time and how do we imagine and also plan built structures for millennia to come? And how do theologies and religions inform, or even constrain, our architectural anticipations of the future?

This project seeks to explore the double meaning contained in its title. On the one hand, we are interested in visions of buildings—the practical details associated with the architecture of the future. On the other hand, we also want to explore how visions are built—what worldviews, political assumptions, and social imaginaries lie behind specific suggestions of how things might be. The aim is to explore novel interdisciplinary thinking at the intersection of theology and architecture, and we are particularly interested in investigating how both theologians and architects envision built environments in deep time.

The project involves an initial workshop in Oxford (June 2025) to share literatures, read across disciplines, and generate ideas, followed by a second workshop in Berlin (October 2025), including a public engagement event where students from UdK will be invited to build their own visions or “sketches”—in textual, audiovisual, or material form.

Forms of Attention: Mapping the everyday in Oxford and Berlin

Oxford: Prof. Patrick McGuinness
Berlin: Prof. Dr. Dirk Hohnsträter

Dwelling across scales

Oxford: Prof. Alan Grafen
Berlin: Prof. Timothée Ingen-Housz

Dropping In and Out

Oxford: Dr. Jessica Goodman
Berlin: Prof. Mathilde ter Hejne

Dropping In and Out brings authors from a variety of backgrounds, generations and disciplines to explore how different historical and geographical contexts shape the ways in which the artistic legacies of women and non-binary people are conceived and experienced, as well as how we, as living authors today, can help recover the works and impact of those who came before us. Aiming to address gaps in the genealogical narratives of feminist producers and foster reciprocal solidarity across time and space as a form of alternative fieldwork, we will research the erasures of women artists’ work and interrogate the significance of feminist perspectives in artistic production.

Combining archive materials with newly produced texts and artworks, this interdisciplinary project uses interviews and (impossible) conversations with past figures as experimental materials for collective and individual artistic production. Participants will uncover and reconnect with neglected or forgotten artistic practices and voices, creating a contemporary aesthetic or poetic response inspired by an earlier text or artwork by a female or non-binary individual. In parallel, theoretical responses will evaluate the gaps of knowledge in artistic practice through a feminist or decolonial lens.

Intersectional Bias in AI: Composing Cyborgs – Per/Forming Critique

Oxford: Prof. Christine Gerrard
Berlin: Prof. Gesche Joost

Bias in AI is emerging as a major threat. Our project explores the ways in which digital systems automate and reinforce histories of intersectional exclusion. We will be using practice-based artistic research methods to explore and disrupt these systems and develop alternative narratives. A preliminary interdisciplinary workshop will help us to prototype a series of critical design experiments using techno-feminism and female writing. This includes training an alternative dataset by ‘feeding’ the AI system sources from feminist and postcolonial literature, and applying concepts of language and writing styles from female writing and glitch feminism. As an alternative ‘voice’ and overall narration to current generative AI systems, the text generation software will be applied to generate experimental writing, and to produce a performance – an interactive more-than-human theatre play that dissolves the human/machine and audience/acting boundaries.