The focus is on the present. CAMPUS GEGENWART at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts (HMDK) is a place where interdisciplinary artistic working methods can be explored and transdisciplinary performance can be tested. It invites participants to collectively engage with the (im)possibilities of a critical contemporary artistic practice—one whose thinking and actions cannot be separated from social questions, that builds bridges between disciplines, and invents new forms of collaboration.

 

At the heart of the work at CAMPUS GEGENWART lies a critical examination of contemporary artistic production: Where does musical and performative artistic practice stand today? How does it relate to the world around it? How do the individual disciplines relate to one another—what connects them, what separates them? What topics can a contemporary discipline of aesthetics address? How do we talk about current artistic production? What are its themes, its questions, its methods? Who currently takes part in the discourse? Who negotiates most loudly, whose whisper can we still just hear, and which silence speaks for itself?

As an interdisciplinary research center, CAMPUS GEGENWART is a place of networking and reflection—between practice and theory and between the arts. At HMDK it opens up theoretical and artistic spaces of freedom in which all faculties represented at the university can meet and exchange ideas. Cross-disciplinary practical and collective student projects are supported just as much as a shared theoretical discourse.

Beyond HMDK, CAMPUS GEGENWART forms an interface between the university and other art institutions in Stuttgart—the State Academy of Fine Arts, the Merz Academy, and the University of Stuttgart. Exchange takes place equally in teaching, artistic work, research, and the public sphere: courses at the different institutions can be attended reciprocally, shared artistic research and publication projects are developed together, and joint public events create visible networking within the urban space.

 

With the master’s program »Theory and Practice of Experimental Performance,« CAMPUS GEGENWART additionally experiments with a transdisciplinary performance and educational practice that challenges all disciplines equally and individually supports students from diverse educational backgrounds, becoming a place for artistic experiments and playful encounters. The courses offered by CAMPUS GEGENWART are therefore open to students from all disciplines at the university. They invite participants to go beyond the boundaries of their own field in artistic practice, to engage in collective and alternative working processes, and to embrace fundamental reflections on music and art, society and the present.

 

Research at CAMPUS GEGENWART builds on this approach and focuses primarily on questions of artistic interdisciplinarity, transitions, and in-between phenomena. Current issues within individual disciplines are central, as are broader thematic complexes at the intersection of theory and practice—such as the political in art, different approaches to artistic research, theories of collectivity, engagement with decolonial and neo-materialist discourses in artistic practice, artificial intelligence, and, more generally, the development of a concept of performance that does justice to contemporary developments and challenges.