Kunst og Fellesskapets Rom (Art and Common Space) brings together art and architecture students in an experimental forum aimed at rethinking issues of public space. The course consists of lectures, sketch projects (student work produced spontaneously in a single day and presented the following day), longer workshops, events, study trips and discussion seminars. All of the lectures and many of the projects have been open for public attendance. Each semester has been organized around loose themes. Over the past three years these have included `spatial processes`, `politics and space`, `time`, `collaborations`, `senses and spaces`, and `creative journeys`.
The concept `public space` comes to us under many guises and names, for instance `social`, `communal` and `third` space. This variety indicates that there is in fact a lively debate going on around the concept. Art and Common Space is a part of this discourse born out of dissatisfaction with traditional categories and definitions. Kunst og Fellesskapets Rom has attempted to create a pause, an experimental space counter to this linear and divisive way of thinking and working.
Students participating in the programme are encouraged to extend themselves beyond their comfort zone: to experiment with and share ideas outside of their training and expertise. Invited lecturers from all over the world from the fields of art, science, architecture, art history and philosophy introduce radically new and unusual approaches to common space for discussion in the agora-like forum that is Kunst Arken, Art and Common Space’s home at the Art Academy (KIT). At the same time students take the opportunity to offer up and translate aspects of their own studio or project practices for collaborative work and discussion. The atmosphere is a productive blend of the consensual and the agonistic. At the heart of the programme is the impulse to re-invent common space from an academic, practical, but also an everyday or `common` perspective. Equally important is the programme’s emphasis on unusual and highly creative approaches to issues of public space. Art and Common Space offers a space for thinking, and for spontaneous and creative re-making and re-fashioning of the very idea of public space.
Autumn Semester 2012
Theme: Situations of the Everyday and Translations of Popular Culture
The `everyday,` (everyday life, quotidien) is a discourse that was conceptualized between c.1960 and 1980 by four key thinkers: Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec. It continued as a key interest area further afield in Europe and America after the translation of texts into English during the 1990's, particularly in the field of cultural studies with its interest in popular culture. What has become especially relevant in a globalized world is how the popular culture of older developed nations translates into and is so influential in other cultures.
The goal of the course is to interrogate the relevance of the `everyday` and popular culture in the production or experience of common or public space, to examine how art and architecture might create situations of everyday community and encounter, and themselves be constituted by it.
Imaginative art and architectural/planning practices deriving from the everyday have been key in reconceptualizing public/private space.The programme will bring theories and practices of the everyday up-to-date and consider its relevance today: it aims to contextualize the everyday in relation to the specific art and architectural conditions and possibilities pertaining in the 21st century.
One of its key interests was in modes/arts of inhabiting the city and found particular inspiration in the liberating, embodied subjective practices and spaces of street-life, leisure, the home and spaces of encounter such as markets, sports, arts and shopping arena. Theorizations of the everyday placed particular emphasis on urban spaces, rhythms, objects and practices. The work of Certeau and Perec turned the discourse from a political-social project into one of creativity. Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus and the Situationist International all drew upon theories and practices of the everyday. Among those who have been associated with the everyday we find artists Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Calle, Kristian Boltanski and Francis Alys; architects Peter Eisenmann and Rem Koolhaas; and film makers Yasukiro Ozu, Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave.
The contexts in which it might be said to be operating include: urbanization/urban planning; new architectures of `being-in-the-world and community; performative artistic and literary practices; popular culture; micropolitics/biopower; activism (e.g. street protest movements/collective participation); counter-cartography; mobilities (displaced/liberated nomadic working practices); process thinking.
Topics to be covered will include:-
Theorization of the everyday
Creativity and poetry within the everyday
La journée - the rhythm of the day
Situationism/psycho-geography
The grammar of urban street planning/performance
Architectures of viewing in the everyday from flaneurie to the metro and other transports.
Architectures of encounter
Chronique - stories of the city
The cinema of the everyday
Street life
Art and street protest
market cultures
Storytelling
Melodrama (soap operas and telenovelas) and their cultural influence
The carnivalesque
Aesthetics of necessity/the everyday in times of economic crisis
The everyday in relation to social networking
Outcomes
A project that runs throughout the semester, exhibition at end of semester derived from the study trip.
Further Information/Practicalities
Credits
Art and Common Space has two components that must be taken together:-
i. The core programme (prosjekteringsemne) 15 points
ii. Theory (Kunnskapsemne) 7.5 points
Teachers:-
Maaretta Jaukkuri (curator and writer)
Anne-Karin Furunes (artist-architect)
Dr Simon Harvey (visual cultural theorist)
Artist and architect guest lecturers, some of whom also run workshops. Guest lecturers from other disciplines.
Participants:-
10-12 architecture students
10-12 art students
Students must attend lectures and participate in sketch projects, workshops, longer projects and exhibitions.
Collaborative partners:-
Projected collaborations with Goldsmiths, (University of London); MIT (Boston); INCA residency Detroit.
Study trip:-
Workshop at HIAP (Helsinki International Artists' Programme), or at INCA artists' residency, Detroit.
Travel cost contributions:-
Art and Common Space provides up to 1500kr. for travel and also accommodation costs and some transport costs at desitination.
Location/times
Where: Laboratorium `Kunst Arken,` Kunstakademiet i Trondheim (opp. Solsiden), Inherredsveien 7.
When: Thursday lectures 1000-1300, Friday discussion/project work 1000-1300.
Occasional longer workshops, either 3 days or one week.
All teaching is in English.