4ème Biennale de Design d’Istanbul – A School of Schools, le design pour façonner le monde de demain

Titled A School of Schools, the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial will stretch both the space and time of the traditional design event, manifesting as a flexible year-long programme within which to respond to global acceleration, generating alternative methodologies, outputs and forms of design and education. A School of Schools manifests as a set of dynamic learning formats encouraging creative production, sustainable collaboration, and social connection. Exploring six themes, the learning environment is a context of empowerment, reflection, sharing and engagement, providing reflexive responses to specific situations. The six themes are developed through six schools : Unmaking School, Earth School, Time School, Currents School, Scales School, Digestion School.

Can the biennial use, question and reframe previously tried-and-tested education models – from the museum-as-encyclopedia to the laboratory, the studio and the academy – to create a setting for meaningful dialogue and design? Can design itself be a brave space for people to share their knowledge and ignorance, their experience and curiosity?

Engaging multigenerational, transdisciplinary practitioners from Turkey and abroad, A School of Schools brings together old and new knowledge, academic and amateur, professional and personal, focusing on the process as much as the outcomes. Together, agents in this complex and ambitious ecosystem will create new knowledge, search for alternatives to implemented systems, and with radical diversity, push the boundaries of the design discipline.

Earth School, for example, asks what natural is, what disaster is, what progress, and who is in charge when the planet and human are forced to renegotiate our precarious relationship.

War, famine, climate change… the news paints a grim picture of the present as constant crisis. The projects featured in Earth School draw on various project-based learning strategies – from co-creation and institutional collaborations to artistic research, data analysis, critical making, and manual- and machine-making – but all have one thing in common: they recognise the importance of questioning and subverting the prioritisation of capitalist growth over the planet’s resources and rhythms, and who determines global priorities. An active learning space in the exhibition provides opportunities to reconceive fatalist trajectories.

“A total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation,” wrote Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this year celebrating its 50th anniversary. This seminal text first identified how schools treat students as empty vessels in which knowledge is deposited, like coins in a bank, by teachers. Schooling assumes that teachers know everything, prevents students from knowing more than teachers, and stifles the potential for generating new ideas and new knowledge. Earth School prompts us to doubt what we consider inevitable about geopolitics, abundance and scarcity, and the future

4ème Biennale de Design d’Istanbul, A School of Schools
22 septembre – 4 novembre 2018
Istanbul UNESCO City of Design
Pour plus d’informations : http://aschoolofschools.iksv.org/en/#