Unwetter are Dorothee Albrecht, Philipp Ekardt, Benno Gammerl, Clemens Krauss, Ulrike Solbrig, Jole Wilcke, Christine Wolfe and Elena Zanichelli, a group of international artists, activists and theorists working together at non-academic knowledge production. The catalyst for their work was the one year long Ideas Lab and Thinking and Doing Documenta, Sarat Maharaj offered as part of his guest professorship tenure at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2001 and 2002.
The basic format of Unwetter is the Discursive Picnic which connects different contexts into an ongoing process of reciprocal exchange. The group offer invitations to a both physical and intellectual picnic that functions as a potluck , where each participant can be both guest and host at the same time. They arrive, unpack the Unwetter-Thermobox , where ideas are kept cool, they exchange, alter, repack and move on in different directions, to meet somewhere again.
Discursive Picnics have been staged in many places including Kassel (2002) at the last Documenta, at various venues in Berlin, and at the Liverpool Biennale in 2004.