“The Voice of Things Becomes the Voice of the Charcoal Speaking”

About

Discover artistic charcoal’s production, material agency, and the site-specific, performative potential of drawing on paper and beyond. The course includes a meeting at frontviews/HAUNT and Florian Wüst’s film lecture on the cultural history of coal.

This workshop offers an experimental approach to charcoal as an artistic medium and invites participants to explore the interplay of material research, resourceawareness, and artistic gesture. Starting from the self-production of charcoal - wood transformed through pyrolysis into almost pure carbon - we rediscover one ofhumanity’s oldest drawing materials as a living, resistant matter between permanence and fragility.

Linked to the Summer University theme ENOUGH, the workshop asks what “enough” means in relation to material use, artistic choices, and ecological responsibility. How can deliberate reduction open new intensity? In a time shaped by overuse of resources, global fires, and CO2 emissions, working with charcoal gains aesthetic, ecological, and political urgency.

Practical phases - charring wood, drawing, trace-making, and material exploration - are combined with shared reflections on sustainability, material ethics, and artistic responsibility. Limitation is approached not as restriction but as a starting point for focused work, quiet gestures, and powerful reduction.

Inspired by Francis Ponge’s "Le parti pris des choses" the workshop turns toward the“speaking” of things: their surfaces, their language, their quiet autonomy. Charcoal becomes not just a tool but a speaking material that carries its history, smell, and color into hands and onto walls. It is trace-bearer, witness, medium, and symbol of transformation and finitude.

The aim is to understand charcoal not only as medium but as attitude: a form of “vibrant matter” (Jane Bennett) that initiates dialogue with space, time, and body. Berlin’s urban landscape will be included through site-specific interventions such as collecting wood to char, mark-making, and performative trace-work with the city’s trees.

Within this Summer University format, Florian Wüst, Berlin-based filmmaker and artist, will present a curated selection of films exploring the topic of coal and history of energy

Course leader

Ulrike Mohr

Fee info