Programme description
Within Common Ground in the first year of your studies, you join a mixed group that stays together throughout, working with students from every department in the academy. You come to recognise your own working methods, to articulate what you contribute to a collective process, and to take responsibility for a project you have shaped together.
Programme structure
The Common Ground programme has two types of classes and is divided into four blocks:
All students gather together in the auditorium. In the first block, teachers from each department present the lenses through which their discipline reads the world: material, narrative, relational, sensory. In the third block you explore theoretical concepts and take part in conversations on collaborative practice, collective responsibility, engagement and social impact.
A small group, with the same tutor and the same peers, for the duration of the year. This is where the work is made. You develop collective projects together and reflect on your role within collaborative processes.
The year opens outward. Four departmental lectures introduce four ways of reading the world — material, narrative, relational, sensory — and you begin to gather: images, objects, fragments, things overheard. What you collect here becomes the raw material for the next block.
In your CONVERT group you turn what has been gathered into a collective publication. Questions of form, sequence and authorship are settled jointly, and you learn what it costs to bring a shared object into being.
The attention turns outward again. Common Ground Week opens the block, followed by a lecture series that situates artistic practice within wider contexts: social, historical, political. You are asked to consider not only how you work, but how you position yourself within a wider context.
Working from a collective research question, you and your group develop a concept, organise and realise a collaborative project, and present it publicly.
Common Ground Week
Once a year the timetable is suspended for a full week. Common Ground Week brings the entire first year together for five consecutive days of making, working and exchange, apart from the ordinary rhythm of the academy.
The week follows a single continuous thread, developed collectively and concluding in a shared presentation. Each day focuses on one aspect of the creative process, which you explore through a series of focused assignments.
The REFLECT book
On the first day you receive a REFLECT book. It is yours: to write in, to draw in, to collect documentation in, and to reflect on the process. It is where the year accumulates — what was attempted, what changed your mind, what you would approach differently.
Some of it you bring into conversation with your teacher and your group, and use at the assessments. Mostly, though, you use it to develop a practice of reflection: a necessary skill for every artist and designer.
Vragen?
Contact
Voor vragen over Common Ground neem contact op met commons@kabk.nl.