Spinning Triangles:
Ignition of a school of design.
berlin

On the occassion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, SAVVY Contemporary seeks to challenge and act against the inherent, neocolonial power structures in design practices, theory and teaching with its project SPINNING TRIANGLES. It takes up the founding moment of the Bauhaus one hundred years ago and starts from its reality as a school of design to reverse and reshape it.

After the first chapters of SPINNING TRIANGLES in Dessau, Berlin and Kinshasa, the project opens the doors at SAVVY Contemporary for a four-weeks summer “school”. 

First and foremost, the Bauhaus was a school of design. It aimed to educate a new generation of designers, makers and thinkers that would face the challenges of their “now”. SPINNING TRIANGLES takes up this founding moment of 1919, not in order to repeat it but to twist it: we will create a “school” of design that has what it takes to tackle the challenges of our “now”, and might, precisely by this, turn into an “un-school”. This school will not be developed by the geopolitical West, but through the accelerated movement between three deeply interwoven places – Germany, D.R. Congo, China – and will confuse their prescribed roles as idea provider, raw material supplier and champion of production.

The first spinning of this long-term project has taken place in Germany (Dessau and Berlin), and accelerated into its second spinning in Kinshasa, the capital of a country without which our smartphone-modernity, creative economy and data collecting mania is unthinkable but which also bears the highest costs: the past twenty years alone have amassed six million corpses caused by the ruthless mining of minerals and its associated conflicts – official numbers that can be deemed as cautious estimations.

Here, an exchange platform for knowledge transfer between several actors from the “Global South” was initiated. During a series of workshops and a four day symposium, participants debated status quos, questioned solutions, talked about successes, failures, ideas, possibilities and impossibilities, while moving between presentations, walks, discussions, music and performances. Several workshops initiated further dialogues, where social and political climates, conditions of “now,” the creation for the everyday as well as existing educational formats were not only thought about but also acted upon through practice. In discussion rounds, a viable concept for a school of design was debated and questioned. This speculative frame created a space in which some assumptions were clear: Such a school would not be temporal, but would last and be lived. It would be created for the context in which it emerges (Kinshasa) but would consider its furthering in other geographies, leading to the third spinning.

In this third reversal, the “school” that might as well be called an “un-school,” activates itself in Berlin at SAVVY Contemporary–The Laboratory of Form-Ideas. From 22.07. until 18.08.2019, we make space for a “school” of design, moving along the entanglements between modernity and coloniality, questioning their repercussions for “world-making,” its obvious and less obvious masterplans. By exploring methods and practices alongside these discussions, 40 participants as well as five invited guests from Kinshasa (Lema Diandandila, Grace Mujinga, Orakle Ngoy, Jean Jacques Tankwey and Nada Tshibuabua) will progressively give form to this “school.” Together, forms of co-living and co-creating will be negotiated, and thus new conceptions of global reality proposed.

The infrastructure of studios and workshops in Berlin-Wedding and around SAVVY Contemporary serve as a cooperative base for the participants. Every week, public lectures, or in its widest sense “contributions” are held by thinkers, practicing artists and designers like Arjun Appadurai, Olani Ewunnet, Henri Kalama, Kristina Leko, Dominique Malaquais, Lorenzo Sandoval, and many others. The “school”’s participants will open and activate Van Bo Le-Mentzel’s Wohnmaschine as a space and platform for public engagement. 

At the end of this long process of collective reflecting and making, the “school” will finally open its doors to the public — allowing the public to engage with the works and works-in-progress.

In the fourth reversing movement, we will host a symposium and workshops in Hong Kong, together with the art space Para Site — taking up and furthering the discussions emerging in this long-term process, shifting perspectives for design practices and discourses within another, specific context.