Pleasure and Freedom. Aspects of Epicurean Art of Living

The lecture explores the tension between pleasure and freedom in Epicurean philosophy. Though both are commonly regarded as desirable goods, their unchecked pursuit often undermines human flourishing. Excessive desire leads not to fulfilment but to dependence; unbounded freedom negates itself. At the heart of Epicurus’ ethics lies a concept of happiness grounded in physical well-being, mental tranquillity (ataraxia), and rational self-regulation. Freedom is thus redefined as autonomy through conscious self-limitation. Epicurus’ calculus of pleasures helps distinguish between natural and empty desires. The talk further highlights the social and ethical dimensions of Epicureanism – especially friendship, justice, and mutual care. In the end, it is not the pursuit of pleasure but the mastery of desire and lust that grants true freedom – and with it, a well-lived and genuinely pleasant life.

• Wolfgang Rother, born in 1955, studied Protestant theology, philosophy and German language and literature in Marburg, Tübingen and Zurich. After completing his doctorate in 1980, he worked as a research fellow at the Philosophy Department of the University of Zurich, as a grammar school teacher and as the director of a publishing house for humanities and cultural studies (Schwabe, Basel). He obtained his habilitation in 2004 and taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Zurich until 2020. His work and research focus on ancient and modern philosophy, in particular the Italian and German Enlightenment, German idealism, existential philosophy and critical theory. He is also interested in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of criminal law, hedonism and the philosophy of education.

PhD-Candidate, Konstfack Stockholm, Sweden

Embracing Resistance
Embracing resistance is essential; simply going with the flow is not an option. Resistance shapes muscles, sharpens the mind and allows unexpected solutions to mature. On Thursday, 30 October, Christoph Zellweger will talk about his artistic perspectives and what he sees as the necessity of facing resistance – always in context of creative processes – and beyond.
The Swiss jewellery artist will report on 35 years of interdisciplinary, critical and experimental practice. He will present his latest work, which was recently shown in the context of a pharmacy museum in Lisbon, as well as earlier works and installations, and elaborate on how he explores the factual, fictional, socio-political and ethical dimensions of his themes. As an artist, designer and researcher, Christoph experiences ‘making’ as a playful and intuitive form of thinking aloud. For him, it is essential and a true privilege to defy reality time and time again, thereby gaining insight into both dystopian and desirable alternatives.

• Christoph Zellweger is a Swiss artist-maker and researcher who received his MA in 1993 from the RCA London. Through body-related objects, he explores cultural metamorphoses that take place under and on the skin. He reflects on the realities of life that surround him, often critically addressing changes triggered by social and technological upheavals. His engagement with the artificial, the constructed world of objects, bodies and identities also implies to reflect on the essential human activity of “making”, of designing the world. 
  Zellweger is an engaged educator who has taught in Europes’ most influential institutions in the field of contemporary jewellery. He worked at Sheffield Hallam University in England for 32 years, 22 of them as a research professor. He currently holds a professorship on the Master's programme in Design/EcoSocial Design at the Hochschule Lucerne. Zellweger's works can be found in galleries, museums and public collections in China, in North America and in Europe. His work received awards in England, Belgium and Germany and was honoured three times with the Swiss Design Award.

Open Endings: The Art of Not-Knowing What You‘re Looking For.

What happens when designers stop knowing what they‘re looking for? When there‘s no brief? When experiments lead in directions nobody planned? This lecture explores the joy of open-ended experimentation – that special moment when curiosity becomes more important than control. Yet open-ended research doesn‘t mean being planless. Through projects from design research, it becomes visible how rigorous documentation and curated analysis make the unpredictable productive: AI systems that become stubborn collaborators, biological materials that develop their own logic, or the simple drawing that changes direction while emerging.
Between the “already-known,“ the “known-not-known,“ and the completely “unknown,“ new forms of knowledge emerge. A counter-proposal to classical research concepts that understands serendipity as a cultivatable method. 

• Simon Maris is Professor for AI and Sustainability at the Campus of Art and Design, Trier University of Applied Sciences. Since his studies in architecture, he has been working at the intersections of technology, society, ecology and design. He leads KINDLAB (Laboratory for AI and Sustainability in Design) within the KITeGG consortium, which integrates AI into design education across five German universities. His current research focuses on AI as design material.

In search of resonance in a precarious world - On material relational quality and the struggle for concrete experience in times of transformation. 
Things influence relationships: They break, they are easy to throw away, some seems to be alive and we keep our distance from others. Their materiality shapes how we relate to them, what we can do with them and what they do to us. Their nature determines how we can experience ourselves and the world. To question this material relational quality becomes even more precious in the face of ecological crisis and digitalization, because both transformations are threating the possibility of enabling, liveable and valuable relations with and within the material world.
The presentation shows that seeking resonant relationships with the material world entails a direct exposure to its concrete experience—and, often, to alienation rather than resonance. By various examples it will be illustrated how things shape the possibilities of relating to the world, and how such conditioned relations can be approached reflexively. It will be demonstrated that an inhibiting relational quality contributes to the precarization of concrete experience, and that resonance in a transforming material world is frequently characterized by the experience of ambivalence.

• Dr. Martin Repohl is a sociologist with a focus on the possibility of world relationship in a transforming material world. He studied political science, sociology and social theory in Jena and Leipzig and completed his doctorate at the Max Weber Centre in Erfurt. Currently working as project coordinator at the UNESCO Chair at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and member of the postdoc network "Junges Zif" at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University. Main research interests: Relational Sociology and relational qualities (beyond the human); Theory of Society, Theorizing and Phenomenology (esp. with Hans Blumenberg); Sociology of Transformation; Materiality, Environment, Sustainability; Practices of planetary habitability; Qualitative research methods.

Objects of Desire and Embodied Pleasures. Rethinking the Fetish After Modernity.
In modern cultural theory, the concept of the fetish has gained an unfavorable reputation. Prominently discussed by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, who both declared it an indication of misrecognition for different reasons, it models excessive pleasure which not only aesthetic theory in the idealistic tradition of Immanuel Kant was eager to dismiss. As a critical lens, however, fetishism proved crucial to Laura Mulvey’s famous analysis of scopic regimes in androcentric cultures and concomitant visual pleasures. Set against the backdrop of a cultural history in colonial expansion and appropriation, this lecture explores artistic articulations of the fetish that address its sensational economies through material vocabularies of the erotic. The case studies propose an understanding of pleasure that is inextricably linked to the socially situated body as both its fundamental condition and determining instance.

• Susanne Huber works as a researcher for art history and art theory at the University of Bremen. Ongoing fields of interest include organic formalism in photography at the beginning of the 20th century, fetishistic and fetishizing practices as well as negotiations of value in art and visual cultures since the 1970s. She is a co-editor of the book series “Oyster. Feminist and Queer Approaches to Arts, Cultures, and Genders” (De Gruyter) and author of the book Vom Konsum des Begehrens Appropriation Art, Sex Wars und ein postmoderner Bilderstreit (Berlin/Boston 2022). Her writing has been published in journals and magazines such as Texte zur Kunst, 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, Kritische Berichte, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, and various edited volumes.

• 9 October 2025 - Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Rother: Pleasure and Freedom. Aspects of Epicurean Art of Living
• 16 October 2025 - lambert M.A.: TBA
• 30 October 2025 - Prof. Christoph Zellweger: Embracing Resistance
• 20 November 2025 - Prof. Simon Maris: ​​​​​​​Open Endings: The Art of Not-Knowing What You‘re Looking For
• 11 December 2025 - Dr. Martin Repohl: In search of resonance in a precarious world - On material relational quality and the struggle for concrete experience in times of transformation. 
• 22 January 2026 - Dr. Susanne Huber: Objects of Desire and Embodied Pleasures. Rethinking the Fetish After Modernity.