Artistic and Scholarly Achievements from our Alumni Network

The Günther Uecker Institute | Institute for Environment & Design supports scholars and artists as they accomplish their projects. We seek to promote work focused on innovation in a variety of fields. We find it especially exciting when the networks that result from these projects become manifest and have a lasting impact. Or when our alumni continue to develop new projects after their stipends have come to an end, bringing forward and expanding both their activities and our own. 

Nick Böhnke was co-editor of the publication You Look – Everywhere: Studies on the Early Actions of Wolf Vostell. The volume is concerned with the early actions of Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell and highlights central aspects of his experimental oeuvre. Klaus Gereon Beuckers and Nick Böhnke (eds.), Sehen Sie – überall: Studien zu den frühen Aktionen von Wolf Vostell, Universitätsverlag Kiel | Kiel University Publishing, Kiel 2025. https://macau.uni-kiel.de/receive/macau_mods_00005494

Isa Fontbona completed an artistic residency in the chapels of the former Sant Agustí monastery in Barcelona in the fall of 2025. In this extraordinary, historical context, she created a performance that reflects on the social rhythms and acceleration processes of our present day, linking them to a phase of her own personal life and the history of the location—once a monastery, later a prison for Romani women. https://www.materic.org/en/performance-art-with-isa-fontbona-and-rita-noutel/
At the same time, Isa Fontbona is in the final stages of publishing her dissertation as a book, whose title, roughly translated from the Catalan, is Flexing Muscles: Gender Ambiguity in Bodybuilding between Athletic Practice and Artistic Research. In addition, her scholarly article “Bodybuilding: The Muscular Body as Political Artifact. A Critical-Creative Approach to the Body in Capitalist Societies” has been accepted for publication in the journal Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest.

Daniel Wolter has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Just Transition Centerat Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg since 2025, looking into the issue of fair and sustainable transformation in society and the economy. The Just Transition Center is engaged in interdisciplinary research and innovative approaches to just transition processes that transfer scientific findings into socially relevant solutions. You can find out more about the center at https://jtc.uni-halle.de/

Marie Götze presented an artistic work in the fall of 2025 that deals with urban legacies: “Many remnants floated down the Mtkwari (Kura) River through Tbilisi until they became entangled in the flora on the riverbank during high tide and became contaminants. During the time of transition, the Days of the Dead and the rich harvest, some of these remnants were recovered through the process of urban trashure mining, cleaned, and further processed during the Herbs & Trash for Nerds Festival (10/2025) to become material for the habitat and habitus of the reborn.” This was a cooperation with Anastasiia Kriazhevskaia, Josh Nadeau, and the Herbs for Nerds Collective.

Xiao Xiao published several works at the intersection of art, philosophy, and art history in 2024 and 2025. These include the volume Three Hundred Mountains, Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld/Berlin 2024; as well as the dialogue “The Art Historical View from an Intercultural and Phenomenological Perspective,” written with Eva Koethen, published in Letting Things Be: Husserl and Heidegger, part of a series published by the Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft (volume 16, Verlag Karl Alber, Baden-Baden 2025). In addition, Xiao Xiao published a book review of Hans-Dieter Mutschler’s “Philosophy for Artists: The Emotional-Aesthetic Basis of Our Basic Concepts” in Philosophie erzählt (vol. 16, Verlag Karl Alber 2024) in the journal Aufklärung und Kritik, published by the Society for Critical Philosophy Nuremberg (2025).

We congratulate all of our alumni on these diverse artistic and scholarly accomplishments!