Oskar Hansen was an outstanding architect, artist, theoretician and pedagogue, associated with Team X and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His theory of Open Form negated the hierarchy between the architect and the user, and postulated treating architecture as a frame for life, open to changes and each user's individual expression. The theory of Open Form, taught by Hansen in Warsaw and by his student Svein Hatløy in Bergen, became an inspiring reference for several generations of Polish artists and Norwegian architects.
The Pedagogies of Space conference, organised by the Index gallery in Stockholm and devoted to Hansen's pedagogical legacy, analyses the concept of space in the context of experimental art and architecture education. Perceiving space both as a learning environment and a teaching tool, the organisers of the conference gather post-war and contemporary examples of educational practices which question and reshape established methods of architectural and artistic education.
Deriving from different contexts and time, those practices share their interest in space as a means to provoke changes – either to test the borders of disciplines, as in Hansen’s open-air games or Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s performative workshops, or to transform educational process through redesigning its setting, as in Hansen’s adaptation of the seat of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts to Open Form curriculum. Space may be used as a site to embody innovative pedagogical concepts, as in Ciudad Abierta (Open City), collectively built microutopia constructed by the students and faculty of the Architecture School of the Catholic University in Valparaiso, or as a non-site, becoming a tool to free education from its institutional ties, as in Buckminster Fuller’s nomadic teaching or contemporary self-organized academies that in their lack of attachment to particular place find an escape from neoliberal logics of result-oriented education.
The conference will see presentations by Eva Diaz, Mark Wasiuta, Oscar Andrade Castro, Anna Molska, Tor Lindstand, Jens Evaldsson, Sam Thorne, Kuba Szreder, Alberto Iacovoni, Peter Lang, Magnus Ericsson, Alina Serban and Florian Zeyfang. Besides the presentations by researchers and writers, there will also be presentations from student workshops, organised in collaboration with the Swedish Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and the Art Academy of Jutland, Aarhus.
The conference is organised in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, with the support of the Polish Institute in Stockholm, as part of the Polish Presidency in the Council of Baltic Sea States.
The project is supported by Culture.pl
Full programme of the conference
Pedagogies of Space Conference
25th and 26th February 2016
Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm
Source: artmuseum.pl, press materials, translated by OK, 23 Feb 2016