Collaboration Week
The KABK Collaboration Week brings all 1st year KABK students together to participate in collaborative, interdisciplinary workshops.
Through lots of experimentation, dialogue and curiosity you will
- develop and exchange methods for organising collaborative art projects.
- discover that interdisciplinary making offers the doors to new ways of creating, thinking, seeing, and presenting that are not possible in a single discipline.
- By the end of the week, you will have made new friends, built an interdisciplinary community, and have lots of new creative ideas in the pocket!
Why Collaboration Week?
The Collaboration Week departs from the principle of making together. The week fundamentally questions the normative ways of making, learning and relating. It offers an alternative to the autonomous practice.
How might we all depend on others to tackle the worlds most pressing issues? And how can our skills, interests and talents be organised in such a way as to produce work that isn’t possible alone.
The collaboration weeks is about exploring spaces in between disciplines, together. Artistic practices are traditionally thought of as individual endeavours, but not during the collaboration week. During this week, we ask students to position themselves in relation to other students and disciplines.
How do we listen, give feedback and work together?
Current technological, environmental and political disruptions also call for collective participation in society. During the collaboration week, we dive into a methodology of making together and making public. Everyone will bring to the table their disciplinary perspectives that we will intertwine to come up with new interdisciplinary viewpoints on the world.
Where can we build unexpected alliances and how can we connect with other ways of making and thinking?
What starts initially from rather political motivations of building coalitions, may also form into making community. Together, students of all disciplines will work together in a chosen workshop. They will create new work and might even create new mediums entirely.
Learning Goals
The learning goals of the Collaboration Week are all about making, in different facets of the word and act. It should also be noted that not every student is expected to excel at each of these aspects of the week. Knowledge and skill sharing is encouraged just as much as doing everything together. So, it would be entirely appropriate if some students are more active in the making process, others for example working to organise and care for the group.
Making together in a collaborative way is the core of the week. Students’ individual practices don’t disappear entirely but are channelled in a different way. Students learn how to bring their individual interests and skills towards a contribution to the group. Students should be exposed to the opportunities that exist in making together, and be inspired by artistic collaborations and collectives from the past and the present. Time, resources, knowledge, skills: everything can and should be shared to benefit the collective.
- Gain tools to co-develop work from a place of curiosity, openness, and trust
- Learn how to be interdependent, and to benefit from each other’s experiences
- Gain tools for offering and receiving support and peer-to-peer feedback
- Learn how to define a shared artistic vision and goal, and identify your own role in this process
With making together, comes making interdisciplinary. As with the individual practices, the disciplines don’t disappear either, but students learn how to build dialogues and connections between them. Interdisciplinary making can take many forms. Students may choose to complement each-others disciplines, find a harmonious gap to fill, or create new mediums entirely. What is important is that students learn how interdisciplinary making offers the doors to new ways of making, thinking, seeing, and presenting that is not possible in a single discipline.
- Learn how to foster connections and exchanges across disciplines and cultures
- Experiment with alternative ways of making & thinking
- Learn how to decentralize dominant forms of knowledge making
- Expand your framework of reference
Making community refers more to the process than the result. It should be fun. Students will learn how to care for each-other, give space and take space when needed. It is about learning what makes a group tick. Perhaps we need to bring food? Perhaps we need to produce our own rituals? Or a shared passion or a common enemy? Students are encouraged and guided to learn about how their individual contributions to the group can have a big impact on caring for the community.
- Discover and create methods for community building
- Learn what caring for each-other might mean in very simple, practical acts
- Gain a stronger ability to (actively) listen
- Learn how to recharge through connection and exchange
Finally, the work that results from the project week will not stay in the dorm-room and neither just the classroom. Making public is an integral part of the week. Public for each-other, for the other students and for teachers at the academy. Students will learn about how to communicate their idea to an audience through presentation.
- Learn how to communicate concepts and ideas in a physical presentation
- Experiment with and learn about how different materials, sizes, colours, textures communicate
- Explore different contexts and audiences for collaborative work
- Learn how to share credit and ownership of collaborative work
- Learn what a collaborative approach to presenting is uniquely able to offer
Vragen?
Contact
Voor vragen neem contact op met academiebreed onderwijs coordinator
