(Corinne Diserens)
Taking as a basis the invention of narratives and embracing artistic transdisciplinary experimentations within a web of historical resonances or coincidences, the course investigates and interweaves various proposals: artworks, environments, films, performances, exhibitions, public interventions, writings, and more. The course is conceived as a space hospitable to the vitality of artistic and intellectual life and to a widened intelligibility of the artistic stakes that the present of art inherits. It constitutes a site, where artefacts, archives, models, textual or visual essays, documents of fragile or ambiguous status, biographical elements, collective investigations, and case studies are articulated in new productions—both in forms and discursive configurations. In doing so, the course aims to verify that, if art questions and inspires thought, it always does so from a present. In other words, from this heterochrony, this conflict of times, of which any present consists, it is the role of artistic practices to activate it so as to address and share it. We will explore notions of gesture, translation, appropriation, genealogy, heterogeneity, subjectivization, the intolerable, and the pleasurable to foster the invention of an unpredictable common at a time of universal privatization of the human and nonhuman Earth.
(Nina Emge & Catherine Facerias)
Based on collaboration, this course is designed as a research perimeter for the students. Each session will combine theoretical input on the urban environment and various methods on how listening can be actively practiced and translated into an artistic language. The theoretical input will examine the making and unmaking of the city, with a specific focus on what it takes for an urban space to become a shared and livable environment. Relying on practical illustrations and field work, this part of the course will investigate relatable contrasts, such as abled/disabled, alone/crowd, demolition/rehabilitation, theme words like ‘accident,’ ‘birds,’ ‘light,’ and more problematic combinations like “climate change city” or “refugee city”. Accompanied by practical examples of artist's work and, more specifically, tools that are relevant in the production of art, it will be discussed and examined whether they are still beneficial for today's art production and can thus actively be integrated into practice.
(Heiner Franzen)
The seminar focuses on drawing exercises that build on one another, with which the students can try out a wide variety of forms of drawing, and develop them further according to their inclinations. We examine drawing equally as a free and project-related process, highlighting the advantages of manual drawing in the run-up to digital processes, and look at forms of drawing in a wide variety of genres. The course is about a playful acquisition of skills, not dissimilar to what happens when one learns how to write or speak ones'- mother tongue. In the way that language and thought processes overlap, so do those of drawing and imagination. Every shape we produce feeds back into our perception and changes our view of our surroundings. The aim of the lessons is to recombine physical processes, such as sight, tactility, memory and movement, as elements of drawing with the help of experiments and exercises, thus creating a wide variety of approaches to drawing.
(Sam Ghantous)
How else might we gather? This semester we will pursue reflections, interventions, errors and imaginaries concerned with our lives shared in common. Students will develop artistic approaches that will play with the entanglements between digital media and physical spaces, both of which claim to facilitate togetherness and that we experience daily. Can we complicate the supposed boundaries between the online and offline; the public and private? And what does this mean for a sense of togetherness? How do we relate and form bonds amidst cultures of capturing our lives and interactions as data and its outward transmission? Students will develop artistic works that engage with such pressing contemporary conditions, their longer histories and possible futures. We will explore and challenge a range of mediums from the physical to the digital, from the situational to the objectified, to develop a unique language for and about “hanging out”.
(Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira)
No one can get out of their skin. This popular saying expresses the fact that every person has a skin. Each skin is, therefore, unique. It is non-transferable. Acting as a record, it details individual and collective memory aspects. Still, the skin could be considered when one takes some artistic actions and architectural works. Going beyond the biological notion of skin, this course exposes how several artists invent skins for spaces. Combining Art, Literature, Performance and Architecture, the students will have a panorama of real and invented skins and they will develop written proposals for their projects. At the end of the course, the students will be able to write short statements and to compose texts, using collage or material in various media.
(Nicole L'Huillier)
This course invites students into a dynamic space of exploration, using the notion of the Rehearsal Room as both a metaphor and methodology for fostering resonance, relationality, and collective emergence. Crossing porous boundaries between disciplines, the Rehearsal Room becomes a play ground for intuition, improvisation, and dialogue, where instruments—musical, conceptual, technological, or relational—serve as tools for creating shared languages and shaping a community in motion. This is not a place of fixed outcomes but a place to put ideas into practice. Through iterative processes, trial-and-error, call-&-response and collaborative jam sessions, students will embrace ambiguity, polyphony, and reciprocity, transforming this space into an instrument of interaction and navigation. Emphasizing transdisciplinary practices, imagination, speculation, and (science-) fiction, the course encourages opening questions, enabling multiple perspectives, and cultivating a shared vibrational sensibility to reimagine the construction of shared realities. By engaging in the creation of collective artworks, participants will cultivate a common vibrational sensibility, assembling and reassembling territories of playful exchange and experimentation.
(Sara Masüger)
The course “Sculpture and Space” invites students to approach utopian spaces. Together we see and discuss sculptural positions, spaces of imagination, spaces of thought and their material presence in space and time. The students develop independent projects, assert, associate and recognize criteria that develop from the work itself. In the process of creating an artistic work, an idea as well as a condition can serve as a starting point. As soon as the material comes into play, we encounter deviations and resistance, which become groundbreaking as mistakes or potential. The result is a dance, a rhythm, a choreography of seeing, in which we move and orient ourselves together.
(Monica Narula)
'Canopy' is a series of flow sessions —through conversations and collective thinking—to hear the present. These are moments and places reflecting how we are moved as communities and groups. They rupture settled rhythms. Associative claims are the new ground of art-making and bring in “gathering” as a core dimension. The course invites participants to an investigative and shared micro-ecology of the fermentation of time.
'Canopy' draws its name and disposition from practices of gathering, in joy, togetherness, and anger, that the world has witnessed and is witnessing in varying intensities over the last decade. It finds its form in the colorful tent canopies (shamianas) that mark places like Delhi in India.These gathering situations become occasions when people, often strangers, have met face to face, sang, have had conversations into the night, and asserted their claims to space and time by being together. These are frames to gather under, and for us to gather symbolically as well. Art, common life, contestations, poetry, conversation, songs and silence—all these, and more, will animate this coursing. Artists are part of gatherings, and gatherings transform many into artists.