On Monday, 12 October 2026, Dr. Zoran Erić, Prof. Mischa Kuball and Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter will give a guest lecture on the topic “‘if walls could tell’ – Methoden von Teilhabe und Partizipation”. The lecture will take place from 4.15 pm to 6.30 pm at the Philosophikum (Domplatz 23, 48143 Münster), Room 201.
In their talk, they will present the “if walls could tell” project. As part of the project, white walls were placed in public spaces in various cities, giving citizens the opportunity to exercise their right to publicly comment on the issues that concern them.
The organisers also draw on the 1925 novel “Manhattan Transfer” by the American writer John Dos Passos; a novel that was as new, innovative and surprising as the city of New York itself. The reader picks up on trivial details which they can piece together into a new story themselves, as the author merely hints at them. Press reports also play an important role in Dos Passos’s work. The author uses exclusively authentic news material, thereby creating a fusion of “actual” reality and fictional reality. The lives of the individual characters appear just as “insignificant” as the press reports. They appear, are of importance for a brief moment, and then fade back into oblivion.
In the concept of if walls could tell, the transient, almost dystopian shift in location, with all its inscriptions, is concentrated on the trail of the “imprint” on the walls; thus the socio-political expression appears as a mark, carved in, present; after the museum walls have been placed in a central square – positioned to record the traces – the walls return to the museum to preserve the evidence or indeed to continue the inscription in a different context. This project therefore also explores the interactions between society and the museum, between polis and cultural actors.
Speakers:
Prof. Mischa Kuball has been working in the public and institutional sphere since 1977. From 2007 onwards Kuball has been a professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, and from 2006 to 2008 professor of media art at Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM, Karlsruhe. Since 2015 he has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, Düsseldorf. Since August 2026, he has been a visiting professor in ‘public art / design curating’ at the University of Wuppertal.
Dr. Zoran Erić is an independent curator and Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His research fields include art theory, museology, human geography, urban sociology, and political ecology. He curated and co-curated numerous projects in different countries. He serves on the scientific board of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest, and the advisory board of the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) Valencia.
Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter is a Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, UK, where she also directs the PhD in “Practice in Curating” programme. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she initiated the Curating Degree Zero Archive and was a curator at Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated various symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts. Richter is Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief of OnCurating.org, and recently founded the OnCurating Academy Berlin.