Possession is more than having something at one‘s disposal. Possession is also persecution, an affliction and a salvaging of people, things and territories. This conference follows the traces of possession in spaces, bodies and relationships. We inquire into the good and bad spirits that ownership spawns and the feedback that develops between possession and obsession. Possession appears in different forms: as private property, as personal and intimate objects that bring us a feeling of security, or as a means of appropriation. Private property draws boundaries and excludes many from their means of survival, their living space and their capacity for participation. Personal objects, on the other hand, may be unsellable, but are nevertheless painful when stripped from »their« person. Gifts, relics or keepsakes become part of people and carry traces of affects and histories. Sometimes, we no longer have access to these—other times, we are unable to resist their pull. Claims of possession accompany violence and expansion, whether in the form of bodily violence or in the act of taking possession of life and land. Sometimes possession even appears trivial, in the countless anonymous objects that accumulate in our daily lives. At the center of this conference are questions of ownership and persecution, access and refuge. New approaches from cultural studies and cultural anthropology—on hauntology, new animism, Freud's uncanny, fetish, new materialism or nature cultures open up pathways to think about possession and the reciprocal obsession between things and humans.

Concept: Andreas Gehrlach (ifk Wien), Andreas Streinzer (Universität Wien)

Participants: Alice von Bieberstein (Berlin), Judith Bovensiepen (Wien), Isabel Bredenbröker (Bremen), Iketina Danso (Wien), Çağla Gillis (Linz/Istanbul), Gabu Heindl (Wien), Cari Maier (Wien), Stephan Pühringer (Linz), Olga Shcheblykina (Linz/Wien), Victor Strazzeri (Ljubljana), Samo Tomšič (Dresden), Sinthujan Varatharajah (Berlin)

Supported by Stadt Wien

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Program

Wednesday, 25 March 2026
14:00 Welcome and Introduction: Andreas Gehrlach and Andreas Streinzer
14:30 Stephan Pühringer: The Opaque Parallel-World of the Oligarchic Wealth Elite. On the Political Economy of Wealth Concentration in Austria
16:00 Isabel Bredenbröker: Haunted by »Cultural Possessions«. Contested Ownership and Uncanny Agencies in Colonial Collections
17:00 Judith Bovensiepen: Empty Lands

Thursday, 26 March 2026
10:00 Victor Strazzeri: Things Possessed. On the Object-Subjects of Reification
11:00 Samo Tomšič: Ressentiment Between Property and Expropriation
14:00 Andreas Gehrlach: Stufen des Eigentums
15:00 Alice von Bieberstein: Finance as Ghosting Machine. Dispossession, Liquidation and the Afterlives of the Armenian Genocid
17:00 Çağla Gillis: Block E, No. 5: An Exploration of Being Held by a Place. (Film Screening and Talk with Andreas Gehrlach)
18:00 Sinthujan Varatharajah: Possessing Belonging. Statelessness and the Material Logic of the Nation-State

Friday, 27 March 2026
10:00 Cari Maier: Ein flüchtiges Selbst. Sorge zwischen Eigentum und Enteignung
11:00 Gabu Heindl: Vom gewaltvollen Leerstehen-Machen zum machtvollen InstandBesetzen. Eigentumsbegriffe zur Leerstandskritik
12:00 Olga Shcheblykina: Things I Tried to Keep. (Artist Talk with Julia Boog-Kaminski)
14:00 Iketina Danso: Zweifelhafte Vergnügungen. Reframing Colonial Histories in Vienna Leopoldstadt

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THE CONFERENCE WILL BE HYBRID

To participate via Zoom, you need to register for the meeting with your name and email address. The Zoom link will then be emailed to you immediately. You can register for the individual days via the following links:

Wednesday, 25 MARCH 2026

Thursday, 26 MARCH 2026

Friday, 27 MARCH 2026

To participate in person, no registration is currently required.