Collapse and Recovery

About power, censorship and a change of perspective.
Or: What is behind the word threatening anyway?
A conclusion from the documenta controversy about Stephan Balkenhol by students at the Institute for Catholic Theology at the University of Kassel.

"Collapse and Recovery - Abbrüche, Umbrüche, Aufbrüche in der Theologiegeschichte" (Collapses, upheavals, departures in the history of theology) was the title of a seminar held from April to July at the Institute for Catholic Theology at the University of Kassel, in reference to  documenta 13 . Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Johanna Rahner and Erik Müller-Zähringer, ten students dealt with crises and changes in the church from late antiquity and the Middle Ages, through nominalism and the Reformation, to modernity. Especially the Enlightenment and the two Vatican Councils, with their central importance for the development of the Church, became the focus of the seminar. In subsequent student project sessions, a deepening of selected topics of the history of theology as well as a preoccupation with the documenta 13 and the exhibition by Stephan Balkenhol took place. After various failed ideas and projects that were supposed to express our protest against the censorship attempt, what finally remained was: the idea, the failure, the protest, a newspaper article and a group dynamic process that was characterized by collapses and recovers... [more]