Situated in Transit: Documentary Poetics in Times of Extinction

At a time of ecological breakdown, proliferating crises, and deepening political division, how might art open new ways of perceiving and responding to the world? In an age of “planetary civil war” (Hito Steyerl), this lecture explores how contemporary artists and filmmakers engage extinction through shifts in scale, perspective, and framing. Focusing on works by Werner Herzog, Ursula Biemann, and Pınar Öğrenci, it asks how aesthetic practices move between European contexts as well as other sites of knowledge production, the local and the planetary, the human and the more-than-human, without losing sight of situated histories and lived experience. Tracing such dynamic frame adjustments, the lecture examines how poetic modes in documentary film and contemporary art unsettle rigid oppositions between human and nature and expose entanglements that dominant crisis narratives often obscure. It argues that these practices cultivate forms of attention that invite response, implication, and collaboration by rendering hidden relations newly perceptible. Situated in Transit names a way of seeing that is at once grounded and mobile—one that helps us, in Donna Haraway’s terms, “stay with the trouble” by remaining attentive to the contradictions, interdependencies, and fragilities of life on a damaged planet.

Deniz Göktürk, Ph.D. Freie Universität Berlin, professor of German / Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley, works on cultural and media studies with a focus on moving images, multilingual literature, and theories of migration, social interaction, and aesthetic practice in a global horizon. Publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture, translations from Turkish literature, and co-edited volumes: The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002, expanded 2nd edition 2019); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007); Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (2011); Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (Routledge 2010); Komik der Integration: Grenzpraktiken der Gemeinschaft (2019). Her book Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders is forthcoming from De Gruyter. She is working on a new project on Documentary Poetics and has been been co-curating the film series Documentary Voices at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in conjunction with her course on Documentary Forms. She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the Berkeley German Department’s electronic journal.

Paul Nolte, Freie Universität Berlin, will moderate the event. He is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and chair of the Berlin Program’s Academic Advisory Committee. 

The German Studies Association (GSA) is the Berlin Program's cooperation partner and co-sponsor.

IMAGE CREDITS: Resisting Forest, installation view from Matters of Art Biennial, Prag, 2024, courtesy of Pınar Öğrenci.

DATE & TIME: June 24, 2026, 16-18 h followed by a reception 18-19  h
LOCATION: FU Berlin, Ehrenbergstr. 26/28, 14195 Berlin, Room 009
REGISTRATION: Please register for the in-person event by June 15 via email bprogram@zedat.fu-berlin.de
LANGUAGE: The lecture will be in English; the discussion in English & German
CONSENT:  By attending, you consent the possibility of appearing in our publicity materials.