Notes to Future Students — Directors Ludwig Engel & Julian Schubert in conversation with Public Sandberg

STUDIO FOR IMMEDIATE SPACES

Course

Studio for Immediate Spaces is a two-year Master’s programme on space-related practices. It questions how politics, ecology, society, technology, and economy manifest in space. Asking how they play out in reality also defines different possibilities of how to come together, how to manage work, leisure, resources, and commons in a time of ecological collapse and social divide. Through site-specific works, location-based installations, situated research, and context-driven scenography the course participants explore spatially engaging strategies beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Space is both a theoretical entity and a real thing—continuously informing one another. Thus the aim of the programme is to explore possibilities to work in space and to find means to act on it. Therefore the Studio looks for ways to deepen the understanding of, and knowledge about, space and guide the course participants toward critical positions that positively and productively engage with the world around them.

The Studio is set up as a post-disciplinary laboratory for testing ideas that have relevance for how we live today and how we could live tomorrow beyond the disciplines of art, design, and architecture—disciplines that continue to fail to bring about change, as they stay trapped in their inherent logics and economic systems. The question of “how to live together” serves as a guiding principle for the course’s approach. The practices developed during the course are informed by contemporary discourse on space, yet they foster independence and criticality and push for an execution on the scale of one to one, to directly engage with a given context. As artistic positions they inform the discourse of spatial practices; as design positions they propose alternative solutions with artistic means.

The Studio for Immediate Spaces invites “undisciplinary spatialists” who prefer the collective effort of making space over the alleged-ingenious gestures of the individual master. It aims to develop practices that are informed by an uncompromised and autonomous perspective in a time when critical spatial experts are so direly needed to proactively and productively shape a ecologically healthy, socially just, and beautiful world.

Instagram: @immediatespaces