Practical student projects to facilitate integration in and access to the public sphere
What are the current post-migrant positions in the arts – and how do they relate to us? In this project, students develop a variety of creative, artistic and educational projects that explore post-migrant society. We examine different notions of what is meant by the term “we” and in doing so encourage renegotiation of communities and we-identities.
Methods:
The project is combined with three courses and lectures that the project team will run in the 2022 spring and autumn semesters. Two of them are interdepartmental. They provide interested students with an opportunity to explore anti-discrimination, post-colonial and feminist perspectives before they plan their project, and also to reflect on their own artistic and design practice in the process. Within the scope of the courses and lectures, students get to know practitioners who report about their projects and experiences. Afterwards, they develop their own project design for a particular objective in interdisciplinary groups, which they then implement in a public sphere within the scope of “ZHdK and post-migrant society” (e. g. in the public sphere, a school, an NGO, a gallery, on stage, etc.).
Objective:
The objective is to manifest a public sphere through the student projects on integration, using their artistic-design practice as the basis. In the process, all those involved in the project explore post-migrant experiences and day-to-day realities as well as critiques of representation. Moreover, they learn about the potential of institutional and structural criticism, and thus to experiment.
Conclusion:
There are very few opportunities to develop practical projects within the ZHdK curricula that relate to our current social circumstances. The combination of courses and lectures with individual interdisciplinary student projects attempts to address this gap.