EXHIBITION / REVUE of Un/Learning
Curation Bernadette Krejs & Max Utech
Exhibition of the Design Studio "Palace of Un/Learning" at TU Wien / Department Housing and Design
27.06. - 29.06.2023
Installations, performances, discussions and a fanzine
with Hannah Bayer, Batja Ferch, Marvin Gronski, Sebastian Hofer, Laura
Huber, Chiara Huf, Berran Kalkan, Stella Konietzka, Felix Lehner, Leonie Mühlegger, Hannah Nusser, Franz Ollertz, Muamer Osmanovic, Elena Perez y Schneider, Sebastian Pichler, Lena Rössler, Paul Sebesta, Nicole Stecher, Larissa Sunderbrink, Mona Swiczinsky, Viola Wagner
The Radical Cute REVUE of Un/Learning is a breeding ground, a testing site and a laboratory of an ongoing discourse about un/learning in the field of architecture education and practice started within the Master Design Studio Palace of Un/Learning. It is therefore a feminist, participatory action, “a form of refusal” [Russell, 2020] of a dominant and exclusionary knowledge production and distribution.
Un/Learning is not about forgetting or cancelling, it is about questioning, adding, transforming and shifting perspectives to open static conditions. When we unlearn we step outside (the institution) and choose a different model. Un/Learning means to overcome hegemonies, hierarchies, rituals, values and conditions of current heteronormative, capitalist and human-centered spatial production to be able to relearn creating other future spaces of living.
Therefore, the Radical Cute REVUE of Un/Learning creates a dissident moment of counter visibility using the transformative potential of otherness and multiplicity. This transformation is a joyful act as Paul B. Preciado states, “the crossing is a place of uncertainty, of the unobvious, of strangeness. It is not a weakness, but a power.”[Preciado, 2020]
In the exhibited Master Design Studio Palace of Un/Learning we questioned the unquestioned in the field of architecture. In times of multiple crises and uncertainty, we need to unlearn the status quo in order to rethink our discipline, our teaching methods and our practice: How and what do we learn in architecture? Which architecture knowledge is part of the canon we rely on and what remains invisible? How can we design, plan, build without exploiting the environment and architecture labour? So, what‘s good? Who is we? And how to do less harm with architecture?
For a semester we experimented on new formats of sharing knowledge and production of space. We created our own Palace at TU and gathered in weekly Salons where we read, wrote, discussed, designed, built, ate and moved to different places and sites together.
We started with a spatial intervention week “Claiming Gemeindebau” at one of Vienna’s Social Housing blocks, explored individual topics of urgency, camped in Prague to exchange about experimental pedagogies and brought all this counter knowledge back to the Radical Cute REVUE of Un/Learning to share it with you.
A wild ride!
Embrace and welcome the wonderful contributions to the exhibition:
HOW’S WORK? – a performative reflection of nowaday’s architectural labour, Reading in the Gaps – a glossary of gaps / an unaccustomed honest worldmap / floating quotes, Time Out! - on the resistance to withdrawal in architectural production , Mastermind of Dreams - the Priorities Paradoxon / TUnder / too true to be beautiful / ErLösung or SieLösung, TRANSformation - shaping spaces & shaping identities, Living Room - a living creature, a constructive textile knitting project / consider teaching yourself, Open Archive of Un/Learning – about storing, reflecting, transgressing and sharing knowledge, Discard Draft Design?- a radically suggestive objectification of materials
Enjoy, un/learn and participate in the Radical Cute REVUE of Un/Learning, which is an accessible, approachable and cute collective space to elaborate transformation collectively. It’s a safe place to experiment, provoke, negotiate and claim missing words and spaces for a most diverse, queer, feminist and post-colonial future. It’s a playful overcoming of codes of design, society and aesthetics. The exhaustion of the concept of „architecture“.
So everybody is invited to be an accomplice!
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” (bell hooks)
Paul Sebesta
Paul Sebesta
Paul Sebesta
Paul Sebesta
Paul Sebesta
Paul Sebesta
Paul Sebesta
Paul Sebesta
Max Utech