wild recuperations - Dissident Stories from the GDR and pOstdeut

Dissident practices and sociabilities of the late GDR unfolded in a present that was largely detached from any utopian future. Their traces are alive in the memory of those involved in the cultural and political underground at the time and in numerous materials and documents held in archives and collections. This book is the result of a transdisciplinary research process that brought artists, researchers, writers, curators, archivists, activists, and multiple interlocutors together at the Archive of the GDR Opposition in Berlin. The materials gathered there draw a complex picture of individual and collective life worlds that deviated from repressive social norms and of the environmental, feminist, and grass-roots democratic practices and radical proposals that took shape in response to the promise and failures of state socialism. wild recuperations follows a shared desire to bring these experiences and environments from below into a meaningful dialogue with the present. Drawing on current artistic and political forms of working with archives and memory, the book gathers a plurality of approaches from and across critical post-socialist, queer*feminist, Black, post-migrant, and intersectional perspectives. The positions from which histories are experienced, desired, and told – their situatedness in bodies, languages, and ecologies – are part of each story. District * School without Center is a queer feminist art space and cultural center in Berlin. Since 2009 District co-develops and hosts artistic research and practice, trans*disciplinary cultural work, critical education, and emancipatory knowledge and theory production. Our work comes alive in collaborative formats and is based on the trans*local promiscuity and solidarity of diverse practitioners and initiatives, communities and ecologies.