Visual Assembly in Sommerakademie Paul Klee curated by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou as a part of the programm Shaping What We Owe (One Another) held in collaboration with together with our Kenyan’s partners:
Jamey Ponte and Patrick Othieo are co-founders of House of Friends Kenya and the Kibera Arts District.
Kibera Art Districts showed us videos of their workshops, studios, and galleries located in the middle of one of the largest informal settlement in Africa—perhaps even in the world.
We can say that Kibera already functions as an existing network of educational studios, laboratories, and various workshops where people produce many different things.
This is why it was especially interesting to compare how Swiss students—who are mostly engaged with theory and images—relate to the people who, in the video, showed us a large-scale, hands-on production process, and to see what each group imagined as their ideal university, and what they felt they were missing.
Here are some notes from Kibera.
In Bern in Video Assembly students who are studying curating, pedagogy, and other disciplines, curators and teachers gathered to imagine a university of their dreams.
We assumed that we had the following conditions: the university would have about one hundred students, but the entire campus would occupy a very small area—only one hectare. Our task was to think through how such an institute could be organized internally, and how it might relate to the outside world. For us, this “outside world” was represented by the space of Kibera.
The big thing that came up right away was that we would design our space as decentralized from the very beginning as possible. Someone called it that we are going to create a set of “temporary autonomous zones”—so we can be able to constantly renegotiate the space with each other, both around and inside the university.
People would meet in these assembly spaces and together decide what to do about the common space. It’s not top-down. It’s everyone figuring it out as they go.
We also talked about private versus public, the connections between what’s outside and what’s inside, and where the territory begins and ends. How is the university going to sustain itself?
Other key ideas that emerged:
- Learning from masters who practice what they teach, not just art but science too. The emphasis on learning by doing—testing and trying rather than pure theory.
- Focusing on students rather than teachers. Mapping the institution from the students’ perspective.
- Many small public spaces instead of one large one, all temporary and rearrangeable.
- Lots of doors for free movement in and out. Open kitchens where people cook for each other.
- Self-sufficiency: growing food, gardens, animals, compost systems, toilets, solar pannels—all managed collectively by those with relevant knowledge.
- No surveillance.
- A sheep drawing with the caption: “I have no concept of value except for the value of life.”
- Connection to the outside world is crucial. Maintaining links to the city and beyond.
- We are radically international.
- A library as essential infrastructure.
- Laboratories. Connections between art, science, engineering and humanities.
- Solutions devoted to avoiding natural disasters like floods and storms, but also to sustain human life.
- The recurring question: do we even need to build anything, or could we set up a university within existing spaces where people already work and live?
