Towards a Bauhaus School Europe:
Workshops for the Whole Earth

// European Online Forum on Education-Oriented Design Making
4 + 5 June 2021
Bauhaus Dessau
>> registration required

What can we still learn from the Bauhaus today in light of the almost planetary challenges of designing our living environment? This is the question addressed by the Workshops for the Whole Earth, to which the Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar invites people to the Bauhaus Dessau on 4 and 5 June 2021. This European forum of design education is the starting point for a European initiative that develops building blocks for workshops of post-fossil, post-disciplinary design for schools, educational projects and universities.

The institutions working together in the Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar – the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar – are more than mere places for collecting, communicating and preserving the Bauhaus heritage. For these institutions, the comprehensive material legacies of the avant-garde school are an ideal basis for contemporary education, learning and information programmes, in which making and searching, tinkering and experimenting, researching and designing intertwine.

Just as the Bauhaus responded to the challenges of industrial modernity by founding a radical educational institution for design, so today nuclei for alternative models of a socially and ecologically responsible production, fabrication and design are developing in Europe’s design, art and architecture schools. The urgent change in design thinking, which no longer understands nature as an exploitable silent resource and questions design as a hegemonic Western construct, begins in educational institutions. The starting point for many programmes and initiatives in Europe that face up to design responsibility in view of the threats to our planet is often their own practice of making, of material-based shaping, the crafts: after all, this is associated with the appreciation of local resources, places of knowledge and cultural practices as well as with ethical and ecological aspects of design activity and collective production.

The Workshops for the Whole Earth forum is an invitation to discussion and to exchange between a wide variety of transcultural educational initiatives, schools, programmes and projects, which associate the legacy of the European art school reform movements with a mission for alternative forms of design education in the 21st century. While their workshops were historically incorporated in the national competition for European and global dominance in the industrial age, the material-based educational experiments, which meet in the Workshops for the whole earth and which are oriented towards local resources and methods of making for the common good, present approaches to transnational ecological cultures of making.

The event – developed together with international designers, researchers, architects and artists – is a prelude to further conversations with institutions, initiatives and stakeholders across Europe. The objective of these conversations is to have building blocks of a curriculum of Workshops for the Whole Earth, which in a way of a travelling experimental workshop will be linked up with and further developed at universities and initiatives, cultural institutions and academies all over Europe. The kick-off event in Dessau creates a platform of transcultural encounters of pluriverse post-disciplinary cultures of making and movements searching for the design of a different culture of nature. Pluriverse post-disciplinary cultures of making and movements searching for the design of a different culture of nature will meet in five workshop clusters.

Registration

Register here for the online event via Zoom.

Programme

Friday, 4 June 2021

4:00 p.m. – Welcome
with Rainer Robra, Chairman of the Foundation Council and Minister for Culture of the State of Saxony-Anhalt
and Annemarie Jaeggi and Regina Bittner for the Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar

4:30 p.m. – Can Bauhaus help us save the Planet? A public debate.
with keynote speakers Mária Beňačková Rišková (Design researcher and member of the High Level Round Table of the New European Bauhaus Initiative), Hicham Khalidi (Director of the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht) and Regina Bittner (chair)

6:00 p.m. – Workshop 1: Taking up the thread

7:30 p.m. – Agents Talks

8:00 p.m. – End

Saturday, 5 June 2021

9:30 a.m. – Workshop 2: Alternative prototypes and critical objects

11:00 a.m. – Agents Talks

11:30 a.m. – Workshop 3: Do it yourself: making as collective self-empowerment

1:00 p.m. – Agents Talks

1:30 p.m. – Break

2:00 p.m. – Workshop 4: The workshop as a biotope: designing material cycles and material flows

3:30 p.m. – Agents Talks

4:00 p.m. – Workshop 5: Botanizing on the asphalt

5:30 p.m. – Roundup of the Forum: Workshops for the Whole Earth, the curriculum as an assemblage.

8:00 p.m. – Get together

The five thematic sessions will be complemented by Agents Talks, in which Bauhaus Agents will enter into dialogue with European cultural institutions on questions of cultural education and communication in the field of design making.

The Workshops for the Whole Earth invite to a Europe-wide networking of these educational initiatives in the spirit of the workshop. For this purpose, the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, a built manifestation of this educational programme, provides a perfect genius loci.

A contribution to the initiative New European Bauhaus of the European Commission.