Practice is what happens every day without much notice — the exercises we return to, the repetitions we don't register as repetition, the rehearsals that never quite arrive at a final performance. A practice course asks for a shift in attention: away from treating repetition as the price paid for a finished result, and toward treating it as where the real work happens. Each return carries duration with it — what was noticed last time, what went wrong, what surprised — so that doing something with consistency is never doing the same thing twice. Practice, done with attention, finds difference inside repetition.
This discipline doesn't belong to one form. It can be practiced through writing as much as through gathering, through drawing as much as through sound, through the body as much as through the image — each medium offers its own material to work with, and its own things to notice within it. Some things can only be known by making them — not thought through first and then carried out, but discovered in the doing itself, in the resistance and surprise of the making of a work. Practice, in this sense, is a way of knowing and not only a way of producing. The practice courses on offer this semester take up this idea through varied material and distinct artistic approaches, each asking for the same underlying commitment: not only to carry out a plan but to build a capacity.
In the second year Bachelor, each course runs across a full semester in a small group, with one teacher and one sustained question. By the end of the semester the works will be presented in a final exhibition.
(Catherine Facerias)
Our streets, our squares, our façades and buildings abound in art. Commissioned or informal, art inscribes itself in the city as a welcoming stance, an ornament, a provider of bodily stimulation, a statement, as well as a producer of value. In addition to examining those actual features, this course will pointedly focus on art as a measuring tool, as an indicator of human-made structure, as a compelling source of social comment and of possible communal bonding.Drawing on case studies, participants will be invited to reflect on their own relationship to “art in the city,” and asked to put the urban environment to the artistic test.
(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 explores sonic spaces and energetic architectures through a transdisciplinary approach to sound, art, listening, sensing, and spatial experience. Together, we will navigate fuzzy territories, invisible architectures, and immaterial worlds—oscillatory structures that shape our shared environments, relational dynamics, and perceptions of reality.
By probing these resonant fields, we will explore acoustic phenomena and trembling languages through artistic and theoretical frameworks as well as hands-on experimentation. Guided by the poetics and politics of listening, embodied experimentation, and the creation of a collective artwork, the course will approach sounds and other vibrations as strong material forces for constructing sonic spaces, shaky situations, and other forms of fuzzy architectures.*
*Fuzzy Architectures gently disarm clarity by trembling and diffusing rigid structural walls and lines, letting vibrational forces oscillate and soften concrete boundaries to open resonant modes of relating, sensing, and imagining; to make space for energetic and immaterial ways of building our worlds.
(Monica Narula)
Gathering is not an event that happens once. It is a practice — repeated, refined, remembered, passed on. This course draws from practices of gathering that the world has witnessed and continues to witness in varying intensities — in joy, togetherness, and anger.
Sometimes gathering finds its form in temporary architectures: the colorful tent canopies, shamianas, that mark places like Delhi. These structures create thresholds and enclosures without walls. They hold space open rather than bound it. Under their shade, people meet face to face and assert their claims to space and time through being together. The canopy becomes both shelter and signal — a spatial claim that gathering, and a generation of affect, is happening here.
This course brings together traces and anticipations of gestures, stances, forms of thought, affect, and language that stem from artistic practices and from the million inhalations and exhalations that mark journeys. It attends to how space is made through assembly — how a gathering produces its own architecture, its own acoustics, its own climate.
Gathering as practice means learning to hold space together, to create conditions for encounter, to build structures (material and social) that can shelter many. The course invites participants into this shared practice of attention and assembly.
(Nina Emge)
How do we listen to our surroundings, and how can what we hear be reflected in artistic practice? Guided by the teachings of Pauline Oliveros, the Female:pressure index, and examples from international artists, we navigate the social fabric. Open-source tools, literature and discussion, as well as exploring the city’s art and culture scene, help us understand the context we are in and how we can engage with it in our own practice.
Specifically, each week we reflect on specific aspects of artistic creation. We begin with positioning and our own self-understanding, working from the inside out. It is important to me that we discuss critical theory, postcolonial approaches and class-conscious reflection in a supportive classroom environment and integrate these into our working methods
To make this effective, the focus is on group work, presentations, listening exercises and lively dialogue. This enables each person to develop the skills to create their own artworks.
Using the theoretical tools and techniques they have learnt, as well as through exchanges with professional artists and institutions, students will develop their own vocabulary, enabling them to navigate the context of contemporary art and create their own works.
(Bignia Wehrli)
(Lantian Xie)
Slow motion. stochastic motion. To move. To be moved. Think about all the different ways motion is known. As spacetime, as transformation, as carrier of information, as material flow, as free association. Think of all the different kinds of stuff people do to control the basic fact of things moving.
Thinking through art, physics, & philosophy, this seminar emphasizes discourse as a sociality of thought in motion, through which we develop techniques and instruments to make moves—connections, jumps, turns, and spins with our ideas and materials.