From 4 - 8 May, eleven students from KABK and ten from Beaux Arts Marseille visited the Accademia Bella Arti Palermo for the third and final installment of the Blended Intensive Program Triangle of the Sacred. The project, initiated by Maarten Cornel and Ingrid Grúnwald from the Graphic Design Department, was continued from different perspectives by the three partners.
While the first of the project stemmed from a philosophical and language perspective, and the second part from a decolonial perspective, this third and final version explored the vernacular. The question became: How is contemporary religiosity expressed through vernacular practices rooted in folk and popular culture?
The students worked on two connecting themes. One was death, and the human need to reckon with our own mortality, while the other was "isolitudine" — the existential condition of geographical and internal solitude.
The program brought them through the city, admiring churches, Mosques, places where the secular meets religion, controversial temples, and places for multiple ways of worship from past and present. Death was found in the Catacombs and in folk stories in the puppet museum, then explored in the urban sacrality workshop concerning the soul.
‘Please respect this place. Our bodies are destroyed but our souls live on’
After two extensive talks about the topic of 'The Sacred' on Wednesday, the students made altars and animated images of the soul, creating a beautiful tangible result of the project at Abapa. The final moments were shared together in a beautiful protected garden with food and drinks. Next, they will move towards creating a publication.
How to include spirituality at KABK?
In these three versions of the Sacred project the students felt they had found an answer to the Big Dialogue question: “How to include spirituality at KABK”
"Looking back, the best moments were not necessarily connected to the place itself or the activities. Even though the experiences were great and the sights amazing, what had the most impact were the conversations with everyone during the trip. Both in formal settings but also in the informal ones, that was when the topic became really tangible."
Mani Thorlaksson (Graphic Design year 2)
We wish to thank our Italian colleagues for creating this fabulous program: Pietro Airoldi, Sergio Sanna, Giusva Pecoraino, Allessandra Buccheri, Rosario Perricone, Stefania Galegati, Agnese Giglia, and Luca Pulvirenti — but above all Flora Pivoretti & Gulia Ingarao for hosting as well as their amazing generosity towards all participants, including our lovely colleagues from Marseille Adriana Lara and Lisa Duroux.