Panel: Strategies for dealing with the past

Annekatrin Klepsch has been the Deputy Mayor for Culture, Research and Tourism in the state capital of Dresden since 2015. Her areas of responsibility include: The Culture, Research and Tourism Division, the Office for Culture and Monument Protection, the City of Dresden Museums, the City Archives, the Heinrich Schütz Conservatory, the Municipal Libraries and the Research Department.

Robert Badura studied classical philology Latin and geography as well as history at the TU Dresden. From 2018 to 2019, he worked on the preparation of the exhibition “Allerwärts. Herrnhut in the World of Tobacco” at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) and on the provenance project on Nazi-looted property at the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) Dresden. Since 2018 he has been working at the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore/Cultural Anthropology (ISGV) and since 2021 on the project “History of use of the area of the Festspielhaus Hellerau 1933-1993”.

Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Wagner (born in 1961) is a cultural manager, curator, academic and author. After working at Theater Koblenz and Bühnen Köln, he was a music consultant in the City of Cologne’s Department of Culture. Between 2006 and 2017, he was Head of Department for Music and Performing Arts at the Kunststiftung NRW. In 2018, he took over the management of the office for Nuremberg’s bid for the title of European Capital of Culture 2025; since August 2021, he has been head of the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds staff unit in the Mayor of Nuremberg’s department, where he is responsible for the development of the Zeppelin Field and Zeppelin Tribune learning and meeting place and the transformation of the Congress Hall into a place of arts and cultures, among other things.

Nadine Jessen works as a dramaturge and curator at Kampnagel. She has initiated numerous long-term processes and projects there, such as MIGRANTPOLITAN, an action space for, by and with refugees, and the project “Forced Labor and Resistance – Augmented Reality Application on the History of the Kampnagel Site”. Together with Sirwan Ali, she founded the collective “Agents of History”, which produces digital contributions to a multidirectional culture of remembrance (projects: “Statues of Resistance – an anti-colonial parkour” ; Decolonial Gaze App: An immersive, digital tool for understanding coloniality and creating new forms of remembrance culture.

Sirwan Ali is a creative digital developer and has been working as a digitizer at Kampnagel since the 2020/21 season. Sirwan developed the “K to go” app, which attracted Kampnagel audiences to the theater despite the lockdown. Sirwan is currently leading the reappraisal project “Forced Labor and Resistance – Augmented Reality Application on the History of the Kampnagel Site” and is programming the app and the online archive. Together with Nadine Jessen, he founded the collective “Agents of History”, which produces digital contributions to a multidirectional culture of remembrance (projects: “Statues of Resistance – an anti-colonial parkour”; Decolonial Gaze App: an immersive, digital tool for understanding coloniality and creating new forms of remembrance culture).

Dr. Frauke Wetzel is a cultural researcher, historian of Eastern Europe and cultural manager. She worked at HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts Dresden. Since 2020, Frauke Wetzel has been working at the ASA-FF association in Chemnitz for the model program neue unentd_ckte narrative and advises cultural productions on political approaches and diversity development.