Art is a form of organizing relationships between disparate objects and/ideas that can produce new meaning and experiences, thereby effecting disruptions or significant change in everyday life – even if only small. As a way to form and formulate knowledge, art can create uncommon perspectives and bring about new ways for understanding, beyond what is relevant to its own context. One could even argue that art brings change only there where it breaks with the desire to perpetuate its own rules. Transgression is seen as an intrinsic quality of art, and the transgression of art’s institutional limits can be seen as springing from a reflective engagement with those very limits. How can this urge for self-reflection; the continuous challenging of prevailing ideas, and persistent refusal of absolute models, be disseminated as a potentially extra-disciplinary tactic – a way to work with undefined or unclassified knowledge and in spaces that are subject to change? The School of Missing Studies takes artistic practice as its point of reference for the desire to experiment with new modi operandi for the production of relations, meaning, and experiences in public space.
URGENCY
In a world where the value of art is challenged, it is timely to reinvest in its place in society. The School of Missing Studies embraces the qualities intrinsic to artistic practice, as a means to disclose – make public – what is at stake in public space. The issue of public space has long been articulated in close connection to democracy, and many theorists have argued that when democracy is under threat, so is public space. The discussion of public issues is therefore not exclusively of this time, but all the more relevant in light of the current increase of private ownership and privatization of public space.
With the term ‘public space’ we refer to any site of potential conflict over rights, information, relations, and objects – a space that requires articulation, so that a community can be formed, called to order, and enter the order of the political. ‘Publicness’ does not manifest itself in spatial matters only. In fact, recent debates over forms of common property such as knowledge and culture show that public space is to be understood in the broadest terms possible – as that which holds the fabric of experience-as-community together. Threatened by forms or acts of exclusion, privileged access, and disinformation, these sites of public property are just as precarious as natural resources, and need to be rearticulated time and again. However, if the economic paradigm forces us to retreat from the realm of publicness, then what is the public issue?
COURSE
As a platform for experimental learning, the School of Missing Studies considers education as a space of experience and encounter, a strategy for emancipation, and a potential response to public issues. The programme offers time for analysis, speculation and imagination. While functioning as a collective space of discourse and experimentation, SMS also turns to itself – the space of education – as a model and manifestation of publicness, taking the paradoxical but necessary form of a ‘closed’ programme. Within the institutional setting of the art school, SMS proposes to formulate a notion of (artistic) practice that is articulated in dialogue with other fields of knowledge, and that could generate a political attitude towards the need of a more ‘general’ practice for effecting change and innovation in society, that takes the speculative, the undefined, ‘the missing’ into account. SMS welcomes students who believe that artistic practice has the potential to turn the School into a public sphere.
Collectivity is not the result of dialogue, nor is dialogue the result of collectivity. Learning is a time-based art that implies action, ritual, theatricality: a tutorial team of thinkers and practitioners (working in, and between areas such as the arts, urbanism, technology and politics) will assist students in developing and formulating new processes of learning, using different formats of collaboration, staging, publishing and writing. We imagine a way of learning that is rooted in practice as a process for continuous reconfiguration, using dialogue as its major mode of transfer. Collectivity is the means, not the end: in the collective attempt to find common and uncommon ground, with public space as the (literally) common denominator, students enable themselves to develop conceptual tools and methods for a form of critical (self-) education.
TUTORS
Ayreen Anastas, Samira Ben Laloua, Bik Van der Pol, Maria Boletsi, Rene Gabri, Ernst van den Hemel, Maria Lind, Sarah Pierce, Praneet Soi, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, and others to be announced.
PRACTICAL
We embrace the ability and flexibility of artists to be in charge of their own ‘context’ in a public environment – both in terms of production and presentation. During this two-year programme we will investigate the socio-cultural and political function of public space and spatial practice through relevant theoretical writings and reflect on current developments with different thinkers and practitioners, forming key areas of contemporary experience. Students of the School of Missing Studies develop a critical notion of ‘spaces of experience’ and actively respond to this by examining how individual practice positions itself within. Fieldwork, reading groups and discussions are tools to develop the conditions for such a space to take shape.
The SMS programme will be structured in blocks with a range of national and international tutors. Interactions between students in various disciplines, as well collaborations with other institutions and stakeholders will be part of the programme. Students will be connected with different spaces of production as well as seek collaboration with museums and art spaces, archives, theatres, universities, corporations, and other possible platforms and professional circles. Students will work in and out of a team, and develop a criticality towards collaboration, practice and research.
STUDENTS
Candidates for the School of Missing Studies have a clear interest in what’s happening in the here and now. They share a desire to address urgent issues of collectivity, and have already developed a basis for this in their practice. The ideal cohort of students would be of varied backgrounds, including but not limited to arts, design, architecture, social and urban sciences. Prospective students are interested in other fields of knowledge and knowledge production: by switching roles between ‘expert’ and ‘professional amateur’, and through processes of de- and re-skilling in their respective fields, The School of Missing Studies enables students to develop surprising and unconventional perspectives in their respective fields, and promotes the integration of multi-disciplinary knowledge.
The School of Missing Studies accepts a maximum of 12 students. Applicants can submit their applications by filling out the online form of the Sandberg Instituut, accessible via the link on this page. We ask applicants for a clear motivation, and description of how they envision their contribution to the programme. Applicants should also provide descriptions of their background, provisional plan, research questions, professional goals, and how they expect the programme to help them realize these goals. Candidates will be evaluated on the basis of their creative talent, expertise, motivation, craftsmanship, analytical skills, flexibility, and ability to work and think independently. Students who successfully complete the programme obtain a Master degree of Fine Art (MFA) or Master of Design (MDes) from the Sandberg Instituut.
