Teaching at the cx also includes courses in English. Please find the complete course offer listed here with each seminar described in the respective teaching language.  
 
Summer Term 2017


Ökologien des Essens. Alternative Nahrungsmittelsysteme und Design-Aktivismus (auch Modul B.06.09)
Karianne Fogelberg, M. A.
 
Raum E.ZG.04, Akademiestr. 4
Zeit Dienstag 10.30–12.30 Uhr, Beginn: 02.05.17 (Einführung, Referatsvergabe),
weitere Termine (wöchentlich) 09.05., 16.05., 23.05., 30.05., 13.06., 20.06., 27.06., 04.07., 11.07.
Kontakt This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 
In unserem Essen laufen brennpunktartig einige der wichtigsten Fragen unserer Zeit zusammen. Die soziale und ökologische Unverträglichkeit unseres gegenwärtigen Wirtschaftssystems wird in unserer Nahrung ebenso manifest wie die asymmetrischen Machtverhältnisse auf lokaler, regionaler sowie globaler Ebene und die ungleich verteilten Auswirkungen des Klimawandels. Die Agrarindustrie wird weltweit von einigen wenigen Konzernen dominiert, und die Politik nimmt regelmäßig und ungeachtet ihrer marktwirtschaftlichen Dogmen Einfluss auf die Lebensmittelversorgung, u. a. durch die Normierung von Naturerzeugnissen, Steueranreize, Einfuhrzölle und Embargos.
 
Das Seminar versammelt aktuelle Positionen des Social Design, der angewandten Designforschung, des Design Thinking und des Design-Aktivismus, welche die verschiedenen Ökologien unserer Nahrung kritisch reflektieren und versuchen, positive Veränderungen zu stiften. Dazu zählen beispielsweise gestalterische Ansätze, die bestehende Nahrungsmittelsysteme im Interesse der Gemeinschaft optimieren wollen; Experimente mit alternativen Formen der Landnutzung und Nahrungsproduktion, insbesondere im urbanen Kontext; die Erforschung aufkommender Technologien und ihrer Potentiale im Hinblick auf die künftige Versorgung einer wachsenden Weltbevölkerung; sowie die Rückbesinnung auf überlieferte Wissensformen, die die Dynamik von Ökosystemen als grundlegend und soziale Gerechtigkeit, Solidarität und Nachhaltigkeit als einander bedingend erachten.
 
Diskutiert werden im Seminar Texte von Jane Bennett, Heather M. Davis, Carl DiSalvo und Alastair Fuad-Luke sowie Arbeiten von Conflict Kitchen, Cooking Sections, Amy Franceschini/Future Farmers, Genomic Gastronomy, Katja Gruijters, Marti Guixe, Natalie Jeremijenko, Lisa Ma, Thomas Pausz, Public Design Workshop, Standart Thinking und vielen mehr.
 
Am 04.07. findet ein Workshop zu essbaren Wildpflanzen mit dem Landschaftsgärtner und Koch-Aktivisten Maurice Maggi (Zürich) in Kooperation mit der Klasse Klaus vom Bruch statt. Der Workshop beginnt mit einem Vortrag im Freien, gefolgt von einer Exkursion im städtischen Raum und endet in der Kantine der Akademie. Die genaue Uhrzeit und der Ort werden noch bekannt gegeben.

 


Image Ecologies – Mobility and Mobilization of Artworks (auch Modul C.01.09)
Prof. Dr. Marietta Kesting
 
Raum/Room E.ZG.04, Akademiestr. 4
Zeit/Time Wednesday 2–6 pm / Mittwoch 14.00–18.00 Uhr, Introduction/Einführung 26.04.2017, further dates/weitere Termine: 10.05., 24.05., 31.05.,14.06., and/und 28.06.
Kontakt/Contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Teaching language/Sprache: English and German / Englisch und Deutsch
 
This seminar focuses on the mobility of artworks, and the tension between their movements across borders, nations, formats and their mobilizing effects in the political, social, aesthetic and economic realm. These topics are connected to the question of media and specifically image ecologies. Aby Warburg had introduced the concept of “wandering images” that travel in his “Bildatlas: Mnemosyne.” Presently, the speed by which images migrate has increased enormously. W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion of “migrating images” indicates images that have left their original context and reappear in a different one, sometimes still bearing traces from their former locations. The assumption of a “post-medium condition” (Rosalind Krauss) in the field of art-history suggests a seemingly limitless fluidity across formats, and digitalization promises effortless transmission, archiving and reception. These views are on the one hand contested by postcolonial perspectives that call attention to the lingering unequal distribution of (material and immaterial) resources, and on the other hand complicated by artists and art markets that increasingly invest into artworks as objects, with monetary value that is often tied to material substance. This seminar addresses entanglements of image ecologies and economies in three interconnected fields by asking:
 
    1.    How do visual artworks on the one hand, and art practices on the other hand travel? How do they translate, disperse, and assemble anew when crossing boundaries (both political/geographical, as in: national borders, but also conceptual/technological, as in: the boundaries of medium specificity)?
    2.    What processes of remediation and politics are engaged in visual artworks, when they converge across different technological and legal contexts, e.g. from analogue to digital, across multi-media platforms, or from ‘rightful ownership’ to pirated copies? What ethics of economy and mobility can be imagined in this context?
    3.    Which aesthetics are used to show economic contradictions, and how have artists’ strategies put them to work – for example, to criticize the institutions in whose production of value they are nevertheless caught up? How is racism, as a privileged mechanism of capital accumulation, hidden or exposed?
 
Many readings for this seminar are in English, but there are also some alternative texts in German as well as German translations of the original texts. Therefore, both English and German speakers and, of course, Erasmus students are invited to participate.

 


 
Project Class Simon Starling
 
Room A.UG.25, Akademiestr. 2
Time April 25th–28th all-day, more dates will be announced.
Teaching language English
Signup until 17.04.2017 at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
 
Simon Starling lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art and is one of the leading artists of his generation. His multi-media works (film, installation, and photography) deal with the history of art and design, scientific discoveries as well as global economic and ecological questions. He represented Scotland at the 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003), and won the Turner Prize 2005 for his work „Shedboatshed“. From 2003 to 2013 he taught as professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Starling’s works were shown in solo exhibitions world-wide, e.g. at the Villa Arson, Nizza, the Museum for Contemporary Art in Basel, at Mass MOCA, North Adams, USA, in Tate Britain in London, in the state gallery Stuttgart, and at MUMA in Melbourne. They are also part of many international collections like the Astrup Fearnley Collection; Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasglow; Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

 



Project Class Labofii (John Jordan und Isabelle Fremeaux)
 
“Think like a Forest, Act like a Swarm”
Room A.UG.25, Akademiestr. 2
Time May 14th–20th and June 18th until July 1st
Teaching language English
Signup until 07.05.2017 at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
 
“Think like a Forest, Act like a Swarm” will merge the ecological practices and design models of Permaculture with forms of creative resistance, and aim to make productive connections between artists and activists in Munich.
 
Permaculture is an ecological design system whose central tenet is that by observing the way eco-systems such as a forest or meadow work, we can learn to build human systems and habitats that are energy efficient, resilient, waste free and productive. Described by some as ‘the art of creating beneficial relationships’ and by others as ‘the science of connections’, permaculture merges traditional wisdom with contemporary ecological research. The idea of mimicking the patterns of natural systems can be applied to everything from planting edible landscapes to the way a performance is designed, from organizing an act of creative resistance to setting up a protest camp.
 
Facilitated by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii), whose practice refuses to produce political art, e.g. a piece of theatre about injustice, or a video installation about an uprising, but prefers to apply the processes of art to political action and social movements, the course will explore how the imagination and aesthetic processes of art can be combined with direct action and movement building. Creating desirable alternatives whilst simultaneously resisting the destruction of our life support systems are the entwined DNA strands of Labofii‘s practice. We see art and activism as inseparable from everyday life. Our experiments aim not to make art but to shape reality, not to show you the world but to change it together. Exploring the ecology of human inter-actions, “Think like a Forest, Act like a Swarm” will be an intensive class, taught using consensus decision making, collective work and participatory methods of popular education. It will result in the collective design of an act of creative resistance on (a) topic(s) of the participants’ own choosing.
 
Art activist John Jordan has been described as a “magician of rebellion” by the press and a "Domestic Extremist“ by the UK police. Co-founder of "Reclaim the Streets“ (1995–2000) and the "Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army“ he is also co-author of We Are Everywhere: The irresistible rise of global anticapitalism (Verso, 2003). Isabelle Fremeaux is a popular educator, action researcher and deserter of the academy. Together they coordinate The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, bringing artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience, infamous for launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station, turning bikes into machines of disobedience, using ants to sabotage banks and refusing the attempts at censorship by the BP sponsored Tate gallery. Co-authors of the film and book Les Sentiers de l‘utopie (Pfade durch Utopia, Nautilus, 2012), they now live and work on the ZAD (Zone à Défendre) of Notre-dame-des-landes.