“Architecture and urban planning is for people, and people have to have a say in it. People have to learn how and therefore, architecture should be taught in school already.”
Joost Meuwissen in conversation with Milica Tomić, February 2016.
The students of the course “Artistic Practice” of the IZK – Institute of Contemporary Art invite the public to take part in their learning and working environments by actively creating different settings within the HDA. The exhibition will be a spatial dislocation and a temporal cut of the process in which learning becomes knowledge, from the constraints of the university to the public.
The research-exhibition consists of ideas, protocols and objects that emerged out of questioning independent spaces of learning and working together, the hierarchy of the traditional classroom, and the ubiquity of photography. It is an attempt to create an exhibition through an open learning environment fostering socialization of subjugated knowledges through various forms of public engagement such as discussions, parties, performances, reading groups, and workshops.
In this exhibition, students present the “Zeichensaal” as a platform with great potential to speak to the people outside of the university, not only to professional experts, architecture faculty members and institute leaders: Is architecture matter of all? How can we bring this into practice together?
The Zeichensaal is as an existing model of free space community structure, an environment for communication and socialization of knowledge among the students. “We want to reveal the spirit of the Zeichensaal into the exhibition space by inviting people of Graz to HDA to create and build their own working space and spend some time together with architecture students by testing and challenging this as a common learning environment. This exhibition will be a great opportunity to bring a wide range of people and disciplines to meet, talk, interact, inspire each other, or just be for themselves in a room full of people. We claim the HDA space as a Zeichensaal, a place we can learn about our society, its needs and to challenge architecture to become a matter of all." This sets a context for topics inquired in Artistic Practice courses and gives room to the Unlearning Classroom and the Photo Club.
The Unlearning Classroom posed the questions of who is allowed to take part in education and who is deciding what is to be taught, thus challenging the students to reconsider their own learning methods and behaviours. Encouraged to initiate self-designed learning processes, different groups and imaginary schools emerged, as the Sculpture group, the School of Pandas, the Department of Planned Chaos and of Street Art. Particularly, the MARS School brought a greater challenge: to (un)learn architecture together with the children of the Krones Hort. “The children taught us how free, creative, critical, active, joyful, immersive and intensive one “school hour” could be.” Through these acts of unlearning and re-imagination, the classroom is reclaimed as an active space for horizontal forms of knowledge exchange.
In the image saturated world, as the one we live in, it is easy to take photography and the production of image for granted. Therefore, the Photo Club claims that it is crucial to ask “What is photography?”. Probing this question by using the very medium of photography itself, instead of definite answers, further questions emerged. They made the inquiry more precise – the creation of each photo becomes a decision, not a habit. In this exhibition, the Photo Club sets up a discursive working moment to return to the knowledges of photography, i.e. its implications in object-subject relations, in the powers to reveal what is hidden and vice versa, in the contributions to the construction of (tourist) imagination, and in its intricacies as technological media.
Participants:
What do we talk about when we say ZEICHENSAAL? - Milica Tomić
Medina Azdemovic, Dennis Baumgartner, Alexander Blacher, Raphael Danzer, Fehim Durakovic, Lena Ehmann, Gauk Elshani, Albert Esati, Michaela Freri, Kathrin Gangl, Andrea Gherman, Anna Goger, Renata Gomes, Norma Großmann, Karin Hiebaum, Matthias Hölbling, Florian Hofreither, Elvis Icanovic, Bettina Jenner, Simon Kaiser, Ibrahim Halil Kayaokay, Emirhan Kilic, Mendi Kocis, Franziska Kunze, Daniel Laggner, Aleksandra Legat, Viktoria Lehner, Stefanie Lieskonig, Andela Martinovic, Maria Matthäus, Kristian Pöhm, Florian Pommer, Michael Fleischhacker, Klavdija Prosenjak, Julia Rausch, Mariham Rezk, Soleine Romero, Helena Ruzicka, Mario Salchenegger, Lisa Schertler, Leon Scheufler, Emonda Shefiku, Milan Susic, Thomas Széll, Léa Tagliaferro, Fatmir Voci, , Lilian Youssef.
Unlearning Classroom - Daniela Brasil
Melissa Bacher, Solene Chalvet, Daniel Cutler, Ahmad Darkhabani, Martin Dietrich, Andreas Eder-Halbedl, Irnes Fatkic, Susanne Grundner, Mathias Haas, Arijana Imsirovic, Stephan Joeris, Janja Katan, Eszter Krisztina Katona, Bibiana Kienreich, Franciska Kozul, Sophie Langthaler, Aron Mader, Jasmina Mehinagic, Viktoria Mild, Jaroslav Neupauer, David Rehbichler, Sarah Reichmann, Julian Roiser, Inmaculada Sánchez García, Maria Katharina Slawitsch, Peter Vörös, Thomas Vorraber, Armin Sebastian Zepic, Nihad Catakovic, Janika Natalie Döhr, Donia Elmenshawi, Melina Fromm, Tina Hirschmugl, Julian Lança-Gil, Angela Lehner, Adem Ljubijankic, Philipp Mayr, Marie-Theres Schwaighofer, Hannes Stockklauser, Ina Susic, Katharina Theocharis, Gabriel Wiedemann, Leonie Wrighton.
MARS School
Children: Elisabeth, Helene, Livi, Lilli, Lilly, Jakob, Joshua, Freyja, Maxi, Marlene, Noah, Oskar, Patrick, Samuel, Valentin, Valentin, Yannic.
Guests: Ursula Fürst, Thomas Karner (Krones Hort) Christian Meixner, Patricia Wess (Studio Magic)
Was wir tun? – the Photoclub - Dubravka Sekulić
Sarah Maria Andrejek, Uranbayar Basbayar, Tina Berzak, Jakob Bock, Uyanga Boldbaatar, Felix Dokonal, Jovana Dusanic, Markus Goje, Daniel Heregger, Ahmet-Ali Karaboya, Thomas Lienhart, Adam Lis, Carmen Márquez Troya, Selma Mehic, Sonja Nedic, Silvia Novak, Stefanie Obermayer, Hannes Petautschnig, Gregor Rothschedl, Daniel Schatteiner, Carina Angelika Schatz, Lisa-Maria Schilles, Dániel Schindler, Eva Spörk, Marco Alexander Tretnjak, Sandra Wenzl, Sandra Zach.
Assistance: Dzana Ajanovic, Jakob Gigler, Otto Kaltner, Anto Petrusic, Philipp Sattler, Marco Wenegger.
