By Gabrielle Kennedy
Back in 2015 curator Silvia Franceschini was part of School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015 - led by Georg Schöllhammer and Hedwig Saxenhuber. It had similar ambitions to A School of Schools and focused on the role education can play in fostering change. More specifically it was exploring how a gathering of international artists and intellectuals could collaborate with the local community to address issues pertinent to both Ukrainian citizens and beyond.
Franceschini brought her knowledge of the artistic scene in post-socialist countries, and her on-going research into counter-educational experiments in the field of art and architecture. One of her particular interests is the lesser-known 1973 experiment, Global Tools. Together with Valerio Borgonuovo she is co-authoring the first monograph about this inspiring movement.
Global Tools was an Italian initiative that responded to the 1968 student upheavals and all the struggles it came to represent in education. It was founded by members of the Radical Architecture group including Ettore Sottsass and Andrea Branzi together with figures coming from the Arte Povera and Arte Concettuale movements. It was conceived as a system of laboratories across Italy with a central goal to “bridge the alienating gap that has formed between the work of the hands and that of the brain”. It was built around a multi-sited “anti-school” using five different themes: body, communication, construction, survival and theory.
“It was a radical rethink of design education, and a fervent critique to the rubric of modernism and to the late-industrial society’s role in fostering widespread alienation,” says Franceschini. “The laboratories of Global Tools touched upon topics such as ecology, survivalism, marginality, failure, community, handcrafts, and ideas around archeologies of the future.”
It is possible to insert Global Tools into a historical trajectory of art and design education starting with the Bauhaus. The 1919 German Bauhaus model initiated by Walter Gropius linked art and design to the world of production with a strong utopian vision on the role of the arts in society. But after the war the Ulm School, firstly directed by Max Bill and then by Tomàs Maldonado, took over with its focus on rebuilding a devastated Germany and a crippled industry. It assumed the role of re-establishing all that was lost and of giving a scientific and academic character to the profession of designer. To do this it excluded the arts from the curriculum.
This more functionalist drive was a problem for the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (MIBI). They decided to change things up by bringing back the artists and a renewed vigour for free experimentation. Founded in Alba, Italy, in the mid-fifties this movement culminated in the formation of the Situationist International.
“The fundamental idea of the Laboratory of Alba, extremely heterogeneous in both its participants and its contributions, was to unite subjective (artistic) research and scientific objectivism in the name of ‘free research’ and experimentation,” says Franceschini. “It was a linguistic and formal renewal movement that had emerged in order to free itself from the functionalist reminiscences of the Bauhaus. Rationality was seen as problematic after the war.”
“Experimentation and the potential of interdisciplinary laboratory situations were all parts of the early Global Tools conversation,” Franceschini continues. “And of course it connected to the time. 1968 was a lively moment for critical discourse. It was the first moment when critical theory, feminist politics and ecological discourse entered education. There was also the oil shock in the Middle East, which affected everyday life in Europe and beyond. I think this all developed a fascination with behaviours rather than with objects, which is another way Global Tools differed from Bauhaus. Global Tools asked questions about how things might be done differently – how to produce, distribute and consume. It also spotted how everything was entangled – saw the relationships between education, ecology, and politics.”
Global Tools pedagogical inspirations were drawn from the fundamental texts Deschooling Society and Tools of Conviviality by Ivan Illich. This all sounds very relevant today and might explain why Global Tools - which died from internal bickering and philosophical disagreements – is back in the art and design conversation.
“Global Tools didn’t leave any tangible heritage,” says Franceschini, “we are mostly only rediscovering it now, even though many of its characteristics were taken on by groups like Alchimia or Memphis. Aspects were also implemented in the premises of other educational projects like the Domus Academy, which was founded in Milan in 1982. Today I can see that some of the most experimental academies or independent educational programs around the world are also adopting some of its thinking.”
But what happens next in design education – which pedagogical ideas will develop and make a difference to how the discipline is both taught and practiced? So much of what was considered radical in the 70s has been appropriated. “There is no outside anymore,” says Franceschini. “It is difficult to be counter anything because everything operates inside the logic of capitalism, and the knowledge economy.”
Biennials have recently become a rich territory of experimentation. There we can see how experimental pedagogical models can connect to the logics of cultural production and the civil society, and how they can impact on structural and institutional change.
The School of Kyiv – like Manifesta 6 in Cyprus before it - was cancelled due to local political instability, but the team of curators together with the local organization VCRC (Visual Culture Research Center) found other sources, seventeen participating institutes and worldwide support from artists and intellectuals to continue.
There were six schools with six topics: The School of Abducted Europe, The School of Landscape, The School of Realism, The School of Image as Evidence, The School of Displacement, and The School of the Lonesome.
“The biggest strength of running a biennial using the idea of schools,” Franceschini continues, “is that it can change the temporality of the exhibition: there is always something going on. It doesn’t turn into just an exhibition machine like in Venice, which after the opening is often dead. Instead it has the potential of becoming an important discursive platform, which departs from the pieces exhibited. There is more discourse even beyond the fields of art and design.”
And although the School of Kyiv had its problems given the difficult organization, the lack of funding and the harsh political situation, many of the participating institutes did end up implementing part of its program after the end of the biennial. “This was amazing given that many of these institutions were still stuck with an outdated mentality and were not open to the contemporary,” says Franceschini. “One thing I am very keen to see in the upcoming Istanbul event is how they manage to connect to the local scene, how they will address the urgent and delicate problems which Turkey is facing right now.”
Franceschini has already been exposed to the Istanbul atmosphere with her 2014 exhibition, Global Tools 1973-1975: Towards An Ecology of Design. It was right after the Gezi Park protests so the subject of how critical pedagogy can nourish a new way to address a liminal situation, or how to work with civil society became an urgent topic of discussion. Global Tools, which emerged during the so called “years of lead” in Italy, a period characterised by an ambiguous political tension and terrorism, became an inspiring and emancipatory example.
“I am interested to test to which point experimental educational models can become a curatorial device,” Franceschini says. “I am wondering what can be effective in the sorts of circumstances that a biennial provides, but also beyond that.”
A lot of research on this has emerged in recent years and while the so-called “educational turn” risks becoming just another curatorial trend, the strength is that once a methodology exists, there is more chance for it to be refined and implemented. It is then that it loses its radicalness and becomes a norm proving that a curatorial experimentation can have an impact on design and art education.
