Critical Inroads: Toward a “European-African Bauhaus”

This paper takes as its departure point a 2021 recorded Digital Life Design conference with Swiss curator and artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Malian writer, film director and cultural theorist Manthia Diawara and German author, producer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge. One of the leading intellectual voices in Germany, Kluge turned to the discussion of the need for a New European Bauhaus for this century. He specified that a new Bauhaus should not be so rational and geometric as the historic Bauhaus. Rather, Kluge made an appeal for a “European-African Bauhaus”. Rebuilding our lives, for Kluge, does not only imply the architectural structures of houses or landscapes, but also our inner faculties: our thinking, our emotions, our souls. Cooperation, for Kluge is key in the coming together of all the arts from distinct socio-cultural paradigms. Furthermore, what is needed, according to Manthia Diawara, are new forms of aesthetics, specifically an aesthetics of solidarity to address the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene. Addressing Kluge’s and Diawara’s critical contributions, this paper seeks to open up further inroads and new imaginaries. How to sustain the critical stance advocated here in the conception of a new Bauhaus, all the while attending to its inclusiveness?