This elective course explores the poetics and politics of absence in urban space. Through a transdisciplinary lens that bridges architecture, art, and critical theory, we investigate how cities carry, conceal, and erase memory—and how walking can become a practice of resistance, remembrance, and re-imagination.

The course proposes the city as both a stage and a palimpsest: where layers of history, trauma, desire, and forgetting are inscribed and overwritten. Using walking as a spatial and embodied methodology, students will engage in site-specific explorations, uncovering gaps, voids, and silences in the urban fabric of Munich and beyond. We will focus on the architectures of erasure: lost buildings, displaced communities, unmarked sites of memory, and urban blind spots.

Alongside critical inquiry, the course invites irony, play, and poetic intervention as modes for navigating the city. We will study how humor, mischief, and playful misdirection can become artistic tools—disrupting habitual perceptions, reframing dominant narratives, and revealing the absurdities embedded in systems of control. In this way, we treat playfulness as a method of deep attention, subversion, and reenchantment. 

We will extend our inquiries to the realm of virtual worlds. What is the relationship between urban public space and digital space? How might digital environments—augmented, virtual, or networked—be used to surface questions of absence, longing, and contested visibility in the city? While urban space is marked by physical barriers, access restrictions, and the weight of historical inscription, digital spaces appear more fluid—allowing for mobility, anonymity, and disembodiment. Yet both are deeply political, shaped by architectures of surveillance, exclusion, and algorithmic bias.

We will explore how digital platforms can mirror, amplify, or subvert the spatial injustices of the built environment—while also offering tools for intervention, storytelling, and collective memory. In both domains, we examine how bodies are marked, othered, or erased, and how marginalized communities fight for presence and agency.

Can experiences in one space provoke shifts in the other? What forms of cross-pollination—between digital poetics and physical resistance—can emerge? As the boundaries between the physical and the virtual dissolve, we ask ourselves: What can play teach us about disobedience? How can we rewrite a system? How can we hack our notions of ‘normality’? We thus consider how digital play can become a methodology of critical engagement employing ludic strategies, speculative narration, or performative interventions. To reclaim urban space, we invite you to take back digital worlds as well, using them not as an escape from reality but as means to reimagine the physical world.

Through fieldwork, sound recordings, mapping, performative walks, and artistic documentation, students will create their own responses to absence—be it through speculative design, narrative cartography, spatial interventions, or ephemeral installations.

We will read and discuss theoretical and artistic works by thinkers and practitioners such as Henri Lefebvre, Francesco Careri, Steven Cohen, Rebecca Solnit, Guy Debord, Jane Rendell, Tim Ingold, and others. Collective walks and participatory formats will support a shared vocabulary for a critical art practice.