December 3, 2025–January 22, 2026, 6:30pm
Hamburg 20457
Germany
The Center for Spatial Cosmology (CSC) is a newly founded transdisciplinary platform that links art, architecture, and anthropology. It is anchored in the Professorship of Experimental Creation led by Michael Hirschbichler at HafenCity University Hamburg.
To launch its public program, the Center for Spatial Cosmology cordially invites you to the Spatial Cosmology Assembly—a four-part series on how cosmologies and spaces shape one another in times of ecological crisis, technological transformation, and social fragmentation.
Rather than fixing a single theme, the Assembly invites questions, methods, stories, and perspectives as contributions to what “spatial cosmology” can be or become. “Assembly” here is understood as both practice and setting: a shared encounter where knowledge is not delivered but formed together, and where positions remain open and responsive to the space and those present. Each act is conceived as a situated constellation in which artistic, scholarly, and everyday forms of knowledge meet on equal footing through conversations, lectures, screenings, and visual, sonic, or performative propositions.
The first act (December 3, Kunstverein in Hamburg) with Jörg Dünne, Etienne Turpin, and Mia Yu asks how cosmological concepts and narrative traditions orient imaginaries, ethics, and design, and how these inscriptions become tangible in buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures.
The second act (December 11, Kunsthaus Hamburg) with Silvia Franceschini, Morad Montazami, and Joanna Warsza turns to terrestrial spaces as ecological, social, and political terrains, foregrounding extractive frontiers, contested territories, and curatorial and artistic practices that negotiate resources, belonging, and possible futures.
The third act (December 18, HCU Hamburg) presents the film Cosmographies directed by Juan Francisco Salazar, followed by a conversation with the director. “Cosmographies” refers to the writing and storytelling of the cosmos. Filmed in collaboration with communities in the Lickanantay Territory in the Salar de Atacama, on unceded lands in Australia, and in Aotearoa New Zealand, the work offers a careful, situated approach to living cosmographic relations.
The fourth act (January 22, Hamburger Kunsthalle) with Monica Narula/Raqs Media Collective, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Michael Taussig weaves these threads together, focusing on the entanglement of cosmic imaginaries and terrestrial struggles. It proposes space as a dynamic network of material as well as immaterial relations and asks how spatial cosmologies might be reconfigured—and re-practiced—amid planetary transformations.
Organized by the Center for Spatial Cosmology (CSC) at HafenCity University Hamburg. Team: Michael Hirschbichler, Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux, Can Grothmann, Ali Al-Saadi, Rosa Cors. The project is supported by Hamburg Innovation.
