Could we be able to put ourselves on the table, and be willing to be broken and remade?

Hsiung Ping-Chen from the Chinese University of Hongkong put this question to the audience of the symposium Positioning the Humanities in the 2020s, held by the Volkswagen Foundation in Hanover, Germany, 10-12 September 2019.

We, the group behind the 25Humans initiative, were in attendance. We had, in fact, never met before the conference and found, in the aftermath of it, that we wanted to continue building on what it had started. Hence, 25Humans was born. To learn more, read our Mission Statement which is a first baseline mapping out our visions and goals: for the humanities, for humanity, for a global future in academia and beyond.

More information will be added to the website as it becomes available.

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“I am in your clay.“

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay. […]

Kuan Tao-Sheng (1262–1319),
transl. by Kenneth Rexroth