Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS)Waseda University

WIAS and our partner institute, ZUKO (Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz, Germany), have been implementing a bilateral exchange program to foster research collaboration. Here is the first report from Assistant Professor PACHCIAREK Pawel, the fourth WIAS researcher to utilize the program and who is currently staying at ZUKO. In this article, he presents his motivation for this program, research activities and daily experiences there so far.

ZUKO and WIAS Network Research Visits program report AY 2026, vol. 1 (Assistant Professor PACHCIAREK Pawel)

PACHCIAREK, Pawel

Research Theme and Background of the Visit

Since April 2026, I have been staying at the University of Konstanz through the research exchange program between the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study and the Zukunftskolleg. The stay gives me time to develop my current project on Yayoi Kusama’s literary works in relation to performance, protest, and socially engaged art.

One point of departure for the visit was the WIAS–Zukunftskolleg joint workshop held in 2025. The discussions there made clear that my research, which moves between Japanese literature, contemporary art history, gender studies, and performance studies, could benefit from being discussed in an interdisciplinary environment such as the Zukunftskolleg.

My current research reads Kusama’s literary works not as supplements to her visual art, but as practices with their own aesthetic and political logic. I am particularly interested in how the strategies of her New York-period performances, anti-war happenings, and feminist or queer interventions are reformulated in her later novels and poetry.

Rather than comparing literature and performance as separate fields, I focus on the transfer of forms between them: body into voice, gesture into narration, event into text. In Kusama’s writing, repetition, fragmentation, self-erasure, and unstable narration are not only stylistic devices. They operate as forms through which subjectivity, gender, and authority are destabilized. During my stay in Konstanz, I have been developing these questions toward an article on Kusama’s literature as a form of textual resistance.

Research and Life in Konstanz

At the University of Konstanz, I have been working mainly on the structure of the article, close readings of Kusama’s texts, and the theoretical frame connecting literature, performance, and protest aesthetics. Having my own office has made it possible to work regularly and to organize the materials for the next stage of the project.

The conversations at the Zukunftskolleg and across the university have also been useful because they require me to reformulate the project for scholars who do not necessarily share the assumptions of Japanese studies or contemporary art history. This has helped clarify which parts of the argument are specific to Kusama, and which may contribute to broader debates on performance, literature, and political form.

The university itself is also a distinctive place. Its architecture is complex, and even after several weeks it is still possible to take a wrong turn and end up in a different part of the building than expected. This is probably one of the most concrete everyday experiences of the campus.

Konstanz has also been a change of rhythm. For more than ten years, my academic and curatorial work has been based mainly in Japan, so spending three months in Europe is different from a short conference trip. The city is compact, close to Lake Constance and the Swiss border, and the surrounding landscape is very present in daily life. I live only a few minutes from the lake, and with the beginning of warmer weather, people have already started swimming.

The proximity of Switzerland has also made it possible to visit nearby cities and mountain areas during the stay. These short movements between Germany and Switzerland are part of the local context of Konstanz and give the stay a very different spatial frame from my usual life in Tokyo or Osaka.

Activities During the Stay and Next Steps

In addition to my work in Konstanz, I have made short research trips during the stay. In Brussels, I visited exhibitions and observed current institutional contexts of contemporary art in Europe. I also attended the pre-opening of the Venice Biennale, which was particularly relevant to my research on art, public space, and protest.

At this year’s Biennale, the political conditions around the exhibition were as significant as the exhibitions themselves. Questions concerning participation, exclusion, state representation, Russia, Palestine, genocide, artwashing, and whitewashing were not marginal to the event. They formed part of the institutional and discursive frame through which the Biennale had to be read.

For my research on Kusama’s anti-war performances and public interventions of the 1960s, this context was important not as a direct comparison, but as a reminder of how international exhibitions continue to organize visibility, legitimacy, and political pressure. It helped me think more precisely about the relation between protest and institution, especially when protest appears not outside the art field, but inside or around its most prestigious formats.

Through the stay, the structure of my article on Kusama’s literature and performance has become more precise. The central argument is that her literary works should not be read as secondary explanations of her performances, but as another medium in which performative strategies continue. The next step is to develop this argument through close analysis of selected texts, especially in relation to repetition, voice, and the politics of unstable narration.

The WIAS–Zukunftskolleg exchange has therefore been important as a working period: it has provided time, institutional distance, and a different intellectual setting in which to sharpen the project before turning it into a publishable text.