Annual Theme 2021
Infrastructure

The provenance of the electricity for the modern light fixtures in the Bauhaus Building was of little interest to Bauhaus designers in 1926. Yet the traces of the exploitation of resources, which was the background to modern comfort, are still present in the landscape around Dessau today. The structural legacies of Bauhaus modernism are an ideal starting point for critically questioning the connection between modernism and infrastructure. Today, supply networks and infrastructures are challenged worldwide, while at the same time the associated exploitation of nature as a silent, seemingly infinitely available resource is under massive criticism.

Thus, we understand the theme of Infrastructure, which is so closely interwoven with the modern legacy of the Bauhaus, as a call and invitation to work together with partners on contributions to a critical reflection on the complicated infrastructural interconnections of planetary proportions that make everyday life so vulnerable in the 21st century.