Tuning Transdisciplinary Education is a part of a larger Erasmus+ project that took place from 2019 to 2022. Initially, we, somewhat naively, planned to design a curriculum which would lay the grounds for transdisciplinary teaching. However, as we hosted different events, conducted interviews, gathered keywords, and reviewed related literature, projects and teaching practices, we realised transdisciplinary education is…
Read MoreLearning
Situationer Workbook / Cookbook: A Transformative Pedagogy Reader
Situationer Workbook/Situationer Cookbook, a transformative pedagogy reader initiated by Michelle Teran and published by Research Center WdKA and Publication Studio Rotterdam publishers. Bringing together experimental practices of learning otherwise, my contribution is a letter to Michelle about the pedagogies of my kitchen.
Read MoreLearning with Others (2021)
Co-taught with Irina Shapiro, Learning with Others is a seminar in the Master Education in Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute. With sessions planned amongst flora, fauna, and fungi, the seminar focuses on how educational practices might take into account the limits of the human while imagining perspectives from others, both human and non-human. Through the theoretical frameworks of Posthumanism and New Materialism, we will be asking: How might educational practices in art academies, primary schools, museums, and communities relate to multiscale, multispecies environments and contexts?
Read MoreExcerpts from an interview with Robin van den Akker and Renée Turner
As a part of the publication, RASL COMPOSITIONS: Collaboration, Commitment and Creativity in Education, Robin van den Akker and I discuss the potential of transdiciplinary education and approaches. Interviewed by Inge Janse, our conversation touches upon mapping the cultural moment, responding rather than reacting to the present and critically questioning the brief when it comes…
Read MoreLearning with Others (2020)
Irina Shapiro and I will be teaching a seminar together at the Piet Zwart Institute, Master Education in Arts. (2020) Learning with Others We find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic, a climate crisis, a migration crisis, and a crisis related to cultural and ecological urgencies. In the whirlwind of these larger forces, this…
Read MoreTake care and see you soon on the other side of the quarantine,
Pedagogies: Committed, Critical, In the Plural, Feral, Resistant, De-colonial, Adaptive, Tactical, Practiced, Engaged, Transformative, Listening, Situated, A Work in Process, Ecological, Embodied, Embracing, Whispering, Observant, Hidden… Finding ourselves in quarantine, I made a digital scrapbook for my Critically Committed Pedagogy students reflecting on a January day we spent in my garden. In retrospect, it felt…
Read MoreResearcher at RASL
RASL, Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab, is a consortium between Codarts, Arts & Culture Studies (EUR), Erasmus University College (EUR) and the Willem de Kooning Academy. Part of the work I do within RASL is to work with other partner institutes on an Erasmus + awarded body of research exploring transdisciplinary education combining the arts, humanities and sciences.
Read MorePanel Discussion: Framing and Reframing Archives
Framing and Reframing Archives: Panel discussion moderated by Alice Twemlow with Renée Turner, Lauren Alexander, Dr. Andrea Stultiens
Some of the issues raised: What does the artist bring to the archive, what are the ethics of subjective interventions and how does epistolary work as a research methodology.
Read MorePublished in Daisyworld Magazine
‘To Sanne’ is a short text featured in Daisyworld Magazine, a seasonal art publication by Zazie Stevens. Originally, it was written on an assessment form and is an attempt to understand evaluation as an act of care rather than simply grading.
Read MoreFault Lines: KABK Research Symposium 2019
This one-day symposium, presented by the KABK Design Lectorate, features projects being developed through the KABK Research Group 2019, with an emphasis on practice-led research. Art and design research methods to be explored include: activism, collaboration, collective making, corresponding, diagramming, drawing, enactment, filmmaking, framing, juxtaposition, letter-writing, mapping, movement, notation, pedagogy, performance, re-archiving, re-narration, salvaging, speculation, translation, visual analysis, zooming in, and more.
Read MoreReflections on the 15th ELIA Biennial Conference
From November 21st through the 24th, the Willem de Kooning Academy and Codarts hosted the 15th ELIA Biennial Conference in Rotterdam. Two years in the planning, we welcomed over 460 delegates from art academies across the world. The conference titled Resilience and the City: Art, Education & Urbanism explored four wide-ranging themes: Shifting Centres, Shifting Margins; Art and Social Cohesion; Art and Economy and Art and Innovation.
Read MoreEuropean Academy of Participation: Cooking & Conviviality
As a part of the European Academy of Participation hosted at Herengracht 401 a group formed to take care of the very simple and practical task of preparing lunch and dinner for all those who attended. While chopping, stewing, and stirring, certain thematic trajectories intuitively emerged and were explored: Limits as possibilities Cultures of cooking…
Read MoreSetting the Interconnected Table
Networks of people, things, and places don’t emerge from thin air. They are choreographed, staged, plotted, and planned. This workshop, within the context of The Autonomous Fabric research at the Willem de Kooning Academy, explored the table as a scene. It looked at the ritual of eating together as a catalyst for exchange. Working with…
Read MoreELIA Biennial Conference selected presentations from the Thematic Mobile Sessions
While this publication by no means represents the sum of the conference, which included performances, keynote speakers and panels, it nonetheless offers an impression of the Thematic Mobile Sessions which took place at different venues across the city.
Read MoreInterview by Amy Pickles with Renée Turner for the Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab
You know, one of the things I like about writing in a digital environment is that there is no master narrative, only tentative propositions, networked connections that can be followed or ignored. Maybe as a form, it suits my own inability to prioritise and make decisions and my desire to circle around things without really landing on a single point or conclusion.
Read MoreLearning Otherwise
This series of lectures entitled, Critically Committed Pedagogies: Learning Otherwise, examines unexpected sites and paradigms of learning, with the aim of plotting spaces for maneuverability, if not resistance or possibilities for imagining and acting otherwise in the present.
Read MoreJoin us for Living as Form at H401
International Conference: LIVING AS FORM
First day with keynotes by: Renzo Martens, Patricia Kaersenhout and Pierluigi Sacco.
On 2nd day ‘Open Space Technology’ facilitated by Mahir Namur, with contributions by Tandem (ECF, Breg Horemans), A Sharing Academy (Merlijn Twaalfhoven), University of Utrecht, dept. Community Art: Practice and Theory (Eugène van Erven), DasArt Creative Producer (Barbara van Lindt), Willem de Kooning Academy (Renee Turner), University of the Arts Utrecht (Thera Jonker), Sandberg Institut (Thomas Spijkermann)
Willem de Kooning Academy Studium Generale talk with Jan Verwoert
Studium Generale, lecture by Jan Verwoert on “appropriation–>invocation–>supercommodification”
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine, his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the de Appel curatorial programme and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Read MoreDear Bill: an ongoing conversation on art education
As my eyes catch yours in passing, I think about the Black Mountain College, and what it must have been like. Did you even use the word ‘curriculum’, or was there simply an unspoken symbiotic flow between lessons and like minds? I can’t imagine what it must have been like to work alongside Josef and Anni Albers – his disciplined studies on colour and her textiles and weaving.
Read MoreConversation with Nana Adusei-Poku and John Akomfrah
For me, the two most timely and memorable quotes of the evening were from The Stuart Hall Project, where Hall says “Race is the lens through which people come to perceive that a crisis is developing.” In the wake of Ferguson, no truer words could be spoken about current economic and social divides.
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