FIELD SCHOOL: JOHANNESBURG – Urban Commons
FIELD SCHOOL: JOHANNESBURG – URBAN COMMONS
07.10. – 12.10.2024
The Field School is an ongoing project organised by the Laboratory for Art and Research at the Department Art and Music, University of Cologne. The upcoming iteration will take place as an exchange project in cooperation with the Department of Visual Art, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA), University of Johannesburg and will include lectures and workshops by Thulile Gamedze and MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa & Nare Mokgotho).
Facilitators: Karina Nimmerfall, Leon Filter (University of Cologne); Ruth Sacks, Sachin Narain (University of Johannesburg).
Field School: Urban Commons focuses on how the complex fabric of contemporary cities can be conceived as a commons. It aims to widen our perspective on the city’s organization of human social life towards everything that contributes to it and is present in the city: not only buildings, streets and transportation but also plants, ground, water, air, pebbles, rocks, and animals. By understanding ourselves as part of the cities’ fabric, alongside all these fellow temporary and long-term inhabitants, we will think through our entanglements in the city with what appears unintentional and unplanned in the original urban order. In the context of Johannesburg, a city still scarred by apartheid and ongoing inheritance of race-based inequality, Field School addresses questions of how we can learn from each other through making connections and offering a framework for research methodologies, workshops, lectures and process-based practice-based experiments. It invites reflections on how we understand the locations we visit and inhabit against the backdrop of two vastly different cities, cultural socio-political situations and histories.
The Field School: Urban Commons is supported by the International Office of the University of Cologne as part of COLOGNE SUMMER SCHOOLS