Here you will find an archive of the first projects that were launched with a view to the Summer School in July/August 2022.
Universities of Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa - a collaborative project
Exploring socio-dynamic behaviour/s and its connectedness to waste reclaimers
Project intention
This Project considers the expanded socio-political/economic relationships between waste reclaimers and urban communities and secondly, insight into the realities of waste reclaimer lives. The intention is to highlight the marginalized lives of waste reclaimers because of the work that they perform but to also focus on the important role that they play in waste management.
Aims and objectives
The aim of this project is to engage the 4th year Fine Art students in an awareness of the socio-dynamics available outside their studio spaces and to critique these dynamics in a pre-recorded lecture discussion. The content of this discussion will be based on students' semi-structured interviews with waste reclaimers that will be digitally recorded.
These interviews will provide reclaimers an opportunity to narrate their daily activities and their lives. This lecture will be an integral part of the larger Project for documenta fifteen.
A tangible outcome will be a visual art exhibition that will be presented at the documenta fifteen summer school. The exhibition will consist of student photographs, 2-dimensional work on paper and installed artworks made with waste material. The exhibition will also include artworks by professional artists: Diane Victor, Avi Sooful, Gordon Froud and Kim Berman alongside the student work. The focus of the exhibition will be on the use of waste material as artmaking material and/or captured reclaimer narratives and broader discussions on those connected to the waste industry.
The students at the University of Johannesburg will design and make a ‘safety’ garment for the waste collector as protective clothing during their daily task. The prototype for this has not yet been decided as students will have to interact with their participants to finalise a garment. The academic year will only begin in the 3rd week of February 2022, this is when students will be inducted into this project.
Libre Academie des Beaux-arts (LABA) Douala, Cameroon
TRAJECTORIES OF RELATIONSHIP TO ART
Approaches to artistic training and education in Cameroon are built in the immediacy of a context of wasteland. This context of influences, a fertile ground for all forms of experimentation, has favored an understanding of art that is more focused on the technical function. Artistic training and education have essentially defined their objectives as the development of manual skills in the construction of the forms of the works and have left the suggestive dimension to the margin. The predominance of this essentially formal relationship to art strongly excludes art from practices that participate in a multifaceted way in the development of society. This exclusion is not by design, the mechanisms of experience in relation to art are weak and yet art sources are a record of what people see, think, imagine and believe in a society.
Our project explores the trajectories of relationship to art and aims to give priority to teachers, students, artists and researchers to develop on these relationships trajectories experiences, of artists practice inherent in collective memory. The practical experience of the project also aims to encourage the development of innovative training, education and artistic practice schemes built on the contact zones of the trajectories of the relationship to art (individual, society, nation, world). Three main aspects characterize our approach:
- Cultivate, active critical sensitivity (the pictorial experience of collective memory)
- Developing skills- (the artistic experience of the concept of collective memory)
- Build theoretical models of apprehending collective memory through the practical experience of creating works of art.
Methodology
- Select/ finalize the analysis of a set of images on the theme of collective memory (student/ researchers/ artists etc.).
- Submit the images (themes) to the expression/ discussion and reflection of a group of art students/ participants- (seminar- workshop led by student researchers).
- Submit the ideas raised from the discussion to an artistic creation experience-workshop for the production of works (group of student artists).
- Restitution: Diary of trajectories of relationship to art + exhibition of works.
Attendees/ Participants: Research students in art history; young artists and visual arts students, art teachers, art history researchers.
Context: LABA Douala and APHA Section of the Department of Arts and Archaeology of the University of Yaoundé 1
Technical University of Kenya, Nairobi - University of Applied Science, Augsburg
Students from the Technical University of Kenya and the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg are working together to create a game about cooperation and the sharing of resources in Nairobi.
Game concept
Concept of the board game: The board game shall depict an aspect of life in Nairobi through the lense of game design. During a workshop in November 2021, the students have created an early prototype that concerned itself with the daily business of hawkers of Nairobi. In this prototype, players pick different roles such as hawkers, kanjos and other locals, each with their own goals for the game, and try to achieve these goals by gathering and trading resources.
While it is possible for any players to win on their own, during the process of play the game eventually reveals that the »best« way to win is to cooperate – achieving the own goal, while working with others to help them achieve theirs – thereby imparting the value of shared victory.
Process
With the help of game designer Thomas Fackler, the students now develop this game idea, while also finding different paths and exploring new possibilities. The process encompasses both biweekly online-meetings to enable the international cooperation, as well as a prototyping workshop at the Technical University of Kenya in April. The prototype will then be further developed and presented at the EVC Summer School in Kassel (July 29th - August 5th) and played and discussed with the EVC partners there. Based on these discussions the game will be reflected on and yet further developed between the Summer School and the final congress in Augsburg in October 2022.
Project coordinators: Prof. Dr. Doris Binger, Dr. Mary Claire Kidenda, Thomas Fackler
Augsburg University
For the summerschool we intend to realize different small projects with the general aim to diversify the understanding of art and art education in different cultural contexts. We aim at a mutual dialogue between all the collaborators to foster an understanding of and an appreciation for perspectives that differ from one’s own point of view. To realize this, we are on the one hand focusing a practical and on the other hand on a theoretical approach.
Building on the experience concerning mediation practices and educational concepts of the participating project partners in different international contexts we will delve into new ways of understanding methods of art education together. This is to point out different mediation processes and artistic practices concerning normative goals such as difference, diversity, social coherence, identity, etc. between the contexts of politics, education and 'visual arts'/ visual culture.
Theoretical perspectives
- Branching paths of mediation: can mediation structures and strategies be established primarily by art history and less by art education? To answer this question, the definition of anthropologically based topics will be discussed: Birth/Death - Nature/Environment - Storytelling/Passing on, etc. Although the topics are understood as fixed points of reference, they nevertheless allow to think of many new connections between cultural experiences. (Christiane Schmidt-Maiwald/ Nicola Pauli)
- Reflections on art education and teaching based on transdisciplinary approaches: Based on a language-sensitive textual critique in contrast to educational policy statements and curricular approaches (authorships, hierarchies, taxonomies ...) the following questions according to the motto "Whose Education?" will be discussed:
- What are differences and similarities of art education in diverse contexts?
- How can a mutual dialogue about specific local ideas of art and art education be shaped?
- How can a didactic selection of artifacts in mediation be established? (Johannes Kirschenmann)
Artistic practices and Art Education in Higher Education – University level
- Artistic practice between the disparate fields of sustainability and consumption: In this project individual and collective, local and global dynamics will be researched through the artistic practice of art students. By focusing on specific materials and their aesthetic qualities artworks will be created that show cultural practices, identities and memories. As fragments of individual, social and cultural realities, objects are sometimes transferred into other temporal, spatial, material and cultural contexts. Those objects intensify interdependencies, reevaluations and ambivalences, which are investigated and analyzed in analogue and digital artistic processes and become resonant objects of discourse and dialogue (Anja Schönau)
- Confrontation/ comparison of artistic ways to deal with the theme “collective memories” in higher Art Education. Artistic projects are developed with students in Augsburg, based on the cooperation with students from Cameroon, to implement artistic-practical concepts during the project in regular dialogue (online), and will also take up impulses from the counterpart and its content, visual language or craft expressions and reflect the different approaches. The two lecturers accompanying the project will also enter an artistic as well as theoretical dialogue about their mediation work with the students (Markus Schlee).
Art Education in schools and extracurricular institutions
- My Image, Your Image. Ways of mediation in Art Education with 7–10-year-old children concerning reflections in extracurricular contexts. Children from Jinan, China, and Augsburg, Germany, receive and produce art from Western European and Chinese culture. Works from classical modernism, the 19th century, the early modern period, as well as traditional Chinese paintings and contemporary art from both cultures are included as models. The teachers are in constant exchange about mediation concepts: Which works of art should be worked with and why? What should the children learn and experience about visual cultures? (Zhang Ming and Katharina Linsel).
- How can terms related to ‚lumbung calling‘ be used in Art Education at school as an interesting theme? Students in schools and at universities are collecting images on certain topics in Mexico and in Germany, for example concerning generosity, humor, local anchoring, independence, regeneration, transparency, and frugality. The images can be used in workshops as an occasion for a creative discussion of content, in the process of which texts, images, films could be created that show how these images continue to have an effect. Are analogies drawn? Are certain impulses taken up? Does one continue a pictorial idea? Can a story be told about the image? Can the images be understood or misunderstood? How can I formulate or express something about the subject? At the end, results could be collected in a digital exhibition. Pictures could be sent back and a pictorial exchange could be created (Bettina Keck).
Project coordinators: Prof. Dr. Constanze Kirchner, Nicola Pauli