Critical Art Installations
I. “Erasing Erasures = Splintering Archives” --
A Critical-Art Installation
opening: 13:15 p.m. - 02. July 2026
“Erasing Erasures = Splintering Archives” is the first of the two components of our conference’s critical/creative installation, which emerges from a critical erasure workshop—inspired by Tracy K. Smith’s erasure poem “Declaration,” led by Mahshid Mayar, and hosted by Violet Stathopoulou as part of her Creative Writing course+club in the English and American Studies program. The workshop invited students to engage erasure as a practice of sense-making through redaction, fragmentation, and cross-generic transduction as a re-reading of the US Declaration of Independence and of the Declaration of Sentiments in 2025/6.
The resulting installation reckons, through erasure, with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption in 1776, commemorated this July. Each piece reworks either of these historical documents through erasure, interrogating the authority and finality of founding documents. The reflection essays that accompany the works record each artist’s individual aesthetic and political choices within broader debates over the nature of founding documents and our readerly-writerly relationship to them. Together, the works approach (re-)reading as a twofold practice of critical proximity and rupture, one that traces the fractures internal to the very coherence of “pre-texts.”
II. “ Collaborative Art Installation "Making Sense of America"
ongoing installation
When: 2. & 3. July 2026
"Making Sense of America: Conversations on Matters and Methods" extends its critical/creative vision through a second, collaborative installation that is co-conceived by Philipp Leonhardt and Mahshid Mayar: Contributing to the installation in real-time, each participant brings material traces into their presentation and then contributes them to a shared, evolving collection that remains accessible throughout the conference. These traces do not merely illustrate arguments that each talk maintains. Rather, they (re-)configure those arguments, foregrounding matter as integral to method in making sense of America in the present.
Throughout the conference, the participants are invited to multisensory encounters with the processes of sense-making—engagements that exceed the textual and the discursive. Together, we hear, see, touch, press against, smell, and even taste these contributions, inhabiting interpretation as an embodied, relational practice. Knowledge thus emerges not only through speaking, listening, and note-taking, but through contact with and exposure to materials that both anchor and unsettle how “America” comes to and departs from matter.