Roaming Assembly #23: Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns

Dutch Art Institute (DAI), in conversation with the Bauhaus in Dessau, warmly invites you to join Roaming Assembly #23, Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns, a public event convened by Pedro G. Romero and Leire Vergara, with lively contributions from flamenco dancer and researcher Javiera de la Fuente, artist and researcher María García, professor in architecture Francesco Careri, thinker, translator, activist Sergio Ghirard, and a collaborative work by participant students Anastasia McCammon, Flávia Palladino, Giorgos Gripeos, Irati Irulegi, Leeron Tur-Kaspa, Livio Casanova, Lucie Draai, Polly Wright, Saskia Burggraaf, Sofia Montenegro, Yen Noh and Zoi Moutsokou as well as a new, commisioned text by situationist Raoul Vaneigem.

Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns claims that the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus has been infused with Gypsy, Romany and Flamenco gestures. The assembly proposes to observe how those gestures appear at the beginning and at the end of the History of the Bauhaus with capital letter: messing up, altering, stirring and crossing out, singing and dancing the attainments and failures, through minor narratives, anecdotes and oral stories of the bauhaus, now most certainly with small letter.

Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns will focus on the relevance of the critical pedagogies, informal architectures, institutional critique, that between 1955 and 1957 re-emerged as a permanent exile of forms: appearing, disappearing and reappearing time after time. It will explore how these forms can help us to construct the present and to imagine the future. 

We Eat Circles And Drink Squares is a textile piece crafted collectively within the framework of The art’s room, a Planetary Campus workshop for DAI initiated by Pedro G. Romero and Leire Vergara in which knowledge has been shared through a constructive process. From formal language degradation to a crafted endeavor, this textile piece attends to erratic and useless impulses from all its makers, most of them uninformed in the language of stitching.

A stitching reduced to minimum expression learnt from one another as a way of survival, behaving as an early unconscious strategy to escape from the pressure of functionality and to embrace a more moveable fictionality. A precarious form in the making that denotes the spirit emanating from the pedagogical model of DAI Roaming Academy.

The patch-worked piece will first serve as an ephemeral scenography, a backdrop for the Roaming Assembly on March 10, and later return to the Bauhaus premises on March 22nd for its first unfolding as an improvised classroom during School FUNDAMENTAL: a festival—as part of the 100 Years of Bauhaus—revisiting the original pedagogical practice of the Bauhaus with an eye to its contemporary potential, seeking to offer a platform and testing ground for alternative schooling models and learning experiments from the past and the present.

We Eat Circles And Drink Squares’ unfolding will count on the participation of Spanish textile artist Teresa Lanceta, artist and DAI’s senior facilitator technical support Ricardo Liong-A-Kong and director of DAI Gabriëlle Schleijpen, students Anastasia McCammon, Irati Irulegi, Yen Noh, Zoi Moutsokou, Raphael Daibert and tutor Leire Vergara.

DAI Roaming Academy
The Dutch Art Institute aka DAI, aka DAI Roaming Academy, fosters a variety of praxes at the intersections of art and theory (both seen as un-disciplines), and invigorates (collective) thinking, researching, voicing, making, roaming, curating, performing, writing and publishing. 

The DAI’s MA in Art Praxis consists of 3 curriculum components: individual study at HowToDoThingsWithTheory, collaborative work at the COOP studygroups and a variety of relational devices at the Planetary Campus.

As of September 2017, after bidding farewell to its venue in Arnhem, to bricks and walls, DAI became a Roaming Academy inviting its students and tutors to plug into the so-called DAI Week: an experimental learning environment/think tank/networking platform/theory camp, a quite funky temporary art commune, a soft spaceship carefully landing at a changing variety of locations in and around Europe.