CURE out and about with Christiane Solte-Gresser
WHEN
WHERE
University of Innsbruck
LANGUAGE
GERMAN
PROGRAMME
On 8 June 2026, Christiane Solte-Gresser, director of CURE, will deliver a lecture titled “Working on and with the Irreparable: Reparative Thinking in Literary and Cultural Studies”. The lecture explores how cultural practices engage with irreparable damage caused by wars, genocides, trauma, bodily injury, global warming, or species extinction. How do cultural practices – of performance, narration, exhibition, or filmmaking – relate to other forms of reparation, such as demands for political recognition, legal redress, compensation payments, or technical repair? And how might such practices, by working through the past, open horizons for living on – ideally to create a shared future?
These theoretical questions are intended to spur discussion about the need for an epistemic reorientation within literary and cultural studies. They will be explored through concrete examples drawn from work at the Käte Hamburger Centre CURE. The lecture considers a range of literary and artistic attempts to address the immense harms done by colonialism and the severe, ongoing violence it has left behind in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In doing so, it also raises the broader question of how Europe’s relationship to the world might be rethought and shaped in a reparative way.
