FIELD SCHOOL: COLOGNE – URBAN COMMONS (PART 2)
FIELD SCHOOL: COLOGNE – URBAN COMMONS (PART 2)
22.04. – 26.04.2025
University of Cologne
A collaboration between the Labor für Kunst und Forschung at the Department of Art and Music, Faculty of the Human Sciences, University of Cologne and the Department of Visual Art, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA), University of Johannesburg.
Field School: Urban Commons focuses on how we can conceive the complex fabric of contemporary cities as a commons. Departing from ideas for inclusivity, accessibility, and democracy in urban spaces, the Field School 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.
The Field School will address 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. It will include the student’s personal perspectives and narratives of the respective cities in form of (local) student-led explorative walks which will be framed by curated workshops and lectures of invited practitioners, as well as visits to local art initiatives, institutions and museums.
Field School: Cologne – Urban Commons (Part 2) will take place with students from the University of Johannesburg.
The Field School: Cologne – Urban Commons is generously supported by the International Office of the University of Cologne as part of Cologne Summer Schools.