Kuratiert und moderiert von Christiane Voss, Christoph Menke, Fulvia Modica, Lars Dreiucker

There are so many ways to hear the word “nature.” An incomplete list:
Nature, some say, is what appears, as a given world of entities and potentials; it encompasses all organic, inorganic and non-organic things, as well as the more elusive currents, atmospheres, virtualities, intensities. 
Nature, some say, is a primordial or mythical unity, or an expression of God(s) or Gaia.
Nature, some say, indexes the sites of relentless exploitation and ecological collapse produced by global capitalism. 
Nature, some say, shows itself to be profoundly relationally and accessible only through mediations; we can encounter it only through perception, intuition, imagination, and various kinds of aesthetic and techno-scientific entanglements. 
Nature, some say, is an illusionary projection of representational systems or a useful/violent fiction. 
Nature, some say, is no more than a term of contrast – the other to humanity, culture, technology, civilization, meaning. 
Some say we have reached the end of “nature,” the final erosion of the value of the concept.
The Bauhaus - Johns Hopkins Summer Lab on Comparative Thought for its inaugural year of 2025, wonders whether the “nature” can or should be dispensed with. Is there something valuable about the chronically over- or under-determined figure of nature? Can it teach us anew about ourselves and our existential entanglements? What concepts and images and narratives and performances can today mark and illuminate contemporary experiences of the vitalities, necessities, creativity, violence, beauty, porosity, and inexactitude of the more-than-human world? What do and could we want to know about “nature” on an intuitive, imaginative, and experiential level? Can processes of naturalization and denaturalisation be engaged in ways that lead beyond the logics of capitalism, colonialism, anthropocentrism? 
Our hypothesis is that thinking “nature” is everything but outdated. The 2025 Bauhaus – Johns Hopkins Summer Lab on Comparative Thought will convene faculty and doctoral students who seek affirmative, idiosyncratic, and yet non-naïve, speculative approaches that might help us respond to the political, theoretical, aesthetic, pragmatic, and epistemic challenges facing the interdisciplinary humanities today.

Conveners: 
Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University); Christiane Voss (Bauhaus University Weimar); Lorenz Engell (Bauhaus University Weimar)
Participants (among others):
Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Jennifer Culbert, Astrid-Deuber Mankowsky, Lorenz Engell, Kathrin Pahl, Jörg Paulus, Christiane Voss