From 5 February to 15 March 2024

The Stand-in School for Graphic Design is a six-week free and open educational program currently taking place in Berlin, Germany, from 5 February until 15 March 2024.

The term ‘stand-in’ refers to taking on the role of someone else for a period of time. Initiated from within the context of official studies at the Masters in Graphic Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Stand-in School for Graphic Design shares the institutional resources of the course by allowing students and participants to utilize it’s infrastructure, shape the curriculum, and themselves shift between the role of student, teacher, host, and organizer.

The primary motivation of the school is to give space for sharing knowledge between students, amateurs, professionals, or anyone who's curious to make imagined possibilities within graphic design education more accessible. The school offers the opportunity for those organizing classes to shape the conditions around learning and focus on topics and methods for exchange which might otherwise be overlooked within their academies.

During the next six weeks the school will host over 60 classes ranging from workshops to lectures to reading groups to screenings and more. Each week will be organized around a different theme: Tools / Text & Language / Labour & The Body / Disobedience & Society / School of Alternative Histories / Research.

The entire school is free to attend, and will be open every week from Monday to Wednesday. In some cases workshops will have a limit for how many participants they can accommodate, so prior registration may be required where noted. Please check this website again for updates as some programming may be added or might change.

Unless otherwise stated, all lectures and workshops are held in English, and will take place at Gerichtstrasse 45 (back Hof) in Wedding, Berlin.


ACCESSIBILITY

While the studio is mostly accessible (ground floor, accessed through a back courtyard), it does require crossing an uneven surface and there is a small incline at the door way. If you have accessibility needs, please let us know ahead of time and we will provide you with assistance.


TEAM

The Stand-in School for Graphic Design Berlin is organized, programmed, and hosted by current first-year students from the MA Graphic Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts: Archil Tsereteli, Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas, Hanafi Gazali, João Pedro Nogueira, Karthik Palepu, Laura Martens, Linnea Lindgren, Rok Ifko Krajnc, Anna Wittenkamp Rich.

The scenography and furniture of the school was conceptualized, designed and built by the first-year students together with Shubham Aggarwal, Andrew Beltran, and Taylor 'Tex' Tehan in a week-long workshop fascilitated by Manuel Raeder with Santiago Zamudio.

The Stand-in School for Graphic Design is initiated by Sean Yendrys and further developed together with students. The school's evening programme and publishing is further supervised by Alexandra Margetic.

This project would not be possible without the support of the Design Faculty, Graphic Design Department and International Office at the Estonian Academy of Arts, together with ERASMUS+ Mobility, and Hopscotch Reading Room.

Contact:
stand-in.school@artun.ee

www.eka-gd-ma.ee
www.artun.ee

Website designed and coded by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas, with title illustrations by Linnea Lindgren, Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas, João Pedro Nogueira, Rok Ifko Krajnc, Anna Wittenkamp Rich, Laura Martens.

This website uses the typeface Routed Gothic, designed by Darren Embry in 1970.

TOOLS
5 to 7 February 2024

The next three tool-themed days will be filled with considering, discussing and feeling togetherness, while simultaneously engaging in the act of making. During this time we will touch upon different technical, practical, and productional aspects of tools, as well as how these can be made to misbehave.

From systems and networks to circulation tactics. There will be clay, lists of words, printed photos, and after lunch specials. We will go somewhere near or stay in the school, sit around a table or on something that has yet to be made.

Guided by a dinner set as a manifesto, we will set the table. To change the setting right after, continuously.

Monday, 5 February

Workshop, 14:00-17:00

Setting the tone / Setting the table
with Yvette Bathgate and Jake Shepherd

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Together we’ll sit around a table and work with clay to form plates that will be used to set the same table later for communal dinners. As a duo we are interested in the intimate space around a dinner table and how spaces of tenderness and kinship can also hold space for collective action, activism and learning. While working practically with our hands in the clay, we will discuss the politics of togetherness and the infrastructure that institutions (and creative industries) have in place in attempt to maintain a false narrative of individualism, and how to dismantle this through radical care, support and friendship.

In response to the GD MA library we will pull from a book, Group Efforts, changing public space, borrowing from some of the themes and how they reference collective activities to embody this. We invite the participants to consider the finished dinner set as a potential manifesto.

Note: We will be using clay so wear clothes that can get messy. Bring along a rolling pin if you have one or any other tools that can be used with clay.

Yvette Bathgate:
I'm interested in the interconnection of ecology, care and the traces and relics around this, thinking and making through collaborative practices. Day to day I work with different groups of people in hospital settings, schools and community groups, using art as a tool for social practice to build connection, relationships, wellbeing and resilience. This work is both a part of my practice as well as directly informing and contextually underpinning the material explorations outwith these immediate environments.
Website: yvettebathgate.com

Jake Shepherd:
My practice is more informed by a set of beliefs and moral values than grounded in or bound by a specific medium, however I have a background in sculpture which is how a lot of the work I do is realised and the lens through which it is considered. There are several strands to my practice, but the all encompassing theme for me is connection. I enjoy exploring different collective models I find myself feeling far more fulfilled and empowered within such models. Whether working across collaborative, socially engaged or 'individual' projects I am interested in questioning what an individual practice is, where does the labour lie, who is credited for the work they do and whether it still really exists?

Screenings and readings, 18:30-20:30

Micro-cinema: TOOLS
hosted by Laura Martens and Karthik Palepu

No registration needed, just come by!

Join us for a curated evening of short films and readings which elaborate on the topic of the week: TOOLS. Popcorn will be provided!

Tuesday, 6 February

Workshop 1, 10:00-12:00
Workshop 2, 12:30-14:30
Workshop 3, 15:00-17:00

Collaborative Letterpress
with Gregory Cowling
Offsite: Praxis Typography

Maximum 4 participants per workshop
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Over two hours we will cover the basics of letterpress composition and printing. You will use original wood type to both sketch and refine typographic layouts. Learn about the technical demands of letterpress, while engaging in the radical act of making something with your hands. Finally, we will bring our experiments together onto a single composition.

Please bring two lists of words.

List 1: Five to ten words about tools.
List 2: Five to ten words about time.
The words should vary in length. Words can be in any language, but should use basic character set (26 characters A–Z).
Submit your full name ahead of time, and turn up at the workshop at least 10 minutes before the start of the session.

Note: We will be using inks, so wearing appropriate clothing is recommended.
Note: This workshop takes place offsite, at Praxis Typography.

Workshop, 10:00-13:00

Table Setting
with Lee Richardson

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

In this class I will demonstrate competition level table setting. This style of table setting is seen in regional and national culinary salons alongside a range of disciplines such as hot main presented cold to the premier Toque d’Or team event. I will perform the table setting in conditions as close as possible to competition.

After this as a class we will start to break down the “table”. Thinking about the origins of table setting. The multi purpose use of the table for eating, preparation, study, reading, working, drawing ect. How could we miss use the table? This will be done while we have some kai (food).

Following these discussions the class will collaborate on a table setting. I see this workshop as research through making and a starting point for more “table settings”.

Lee Richardson is from Ōtautahi (Christchurch), Aotearoa (New Zealand). He graduated from the University of Canterbury with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. Richardson has been lecturing at the Ilam School of Fine Arts in the Graphic Design Department, and in the Product Design faculty. He was one of the founding members of Hot Lunch artist-run gallery. Most recently has been a participant in the Southland Institute 1:1 program in Los Angeles and is currently living in Amsterdam.

Lecture / Tutorial, 14:00-15:00

Colour Management and Print
with max-color

No registration needed, just come by!

One-hour tutorial sharing the process of how to get started with colour management and file preparation in print.

No laptops necessary, but feel free to bring one or anything for taking notes.

max-color has over 20 years of experience in pre-press and file preparation for the print production of artist books and magazines, including working with 032c, DISTANZ Verlag, ARCH+, Sternberg Press, and more.

Lecture / Workshop, 16:00-18:00

The Mid Story Epic
with Joshua Yang

No registration needed, just come by!

In this talk/exercise, we will delve into the field of literature to learn and translate techniques into our graphic design practice.

Specifically, we will explore Homer’s Odyssey, where the author employs a literary technique known as 'in medias res.' This is a narrative technique where the author does not begin the story in a linear chronological order but rather immerses the audience in the middle of the plot.

Throughout our session, we will elaborate on this technique and also contemplate how it might be applied in the design process for publications.

**Please note: Joshua will join and conduct the lecture/workshop online from zoom, but participants are asked to meet at the school and follow together.**

We will create a simple, draft-like A6(size) publication.
1. Select a personal image or photograph
2. Print it three times as follows:
a) On A5 paper (full size)
b) On A4 paper (full size)
c) On A3 paper (half size, centered position)
3. Prepare a rubber band or stabler (to bind the publication)

Joshua Yang is a graphic designer, based in Athens from Korea. His practice revolves around content, where he explores the significance of typographical interpretation and interventions within the content itself.

Wednesday, 7 February

Lecture / Discussion, 14:00-15:00

We don’t talk about this enough
with Santiago da Silva

No registration needed, just come by!

Let’s talk about talking. It’s important for sharing, explaining and… convincing?

Santiago da Silva is a designer specialized in developing communication and display systems within the contemporary art context which facilitate formats as artistic space. He is active in the fields of editing, writing, teaching and curating. He is co-founder of Object Notes, a research platform about craft and labour in contemporary art and design.

Workshop, 15:00-17:00

Subjective Mapping
with Muj (Mujgan) Abdulzade

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

In this workshop, we're all set to craft a subjective map of the Open School. Your map should reveal how you see yourself navigating the school, considering activities, experiences, feelings, values, personal preferences, and unique details. There's no right or wrong way to draw this map.

Take a stroll around, explore the area, and gather activities to include on your map. Or maybe you'd like to create an abstract map reflecting the values and practices you hope to encounter at this Open School.
You can draw a map, make a collage, or use another accessible medium you are comfortable with.

Note: Please bring a quote and/or a printed photo that you would like to include in your subjective map.

Muj (Mujgan) Abdulzade is a designer and researcher based in Berlin with interests in collage, writing and community building. She also loves working on projects that go beyond graphics and revolve around spaces we design for learning, reflection and knowledge production.

Presentation, 18:30-22:30

Opening of the Stand-in School
with Manuel Raeder, Objektlabor / Santiago Zamudio, Mendi Glanz
and EKA GD MA Class of 2025

No registration needed, just come by!

Join for an evening presentation on tools, hosting, methodologies, and furniture, followed by the opening of our first weekly bar night.

TEXT & LANGUAGE
12 to 14 February 2024

Workshops in the week focus on the form of written text or spoken word as a medium of retelling, reimagining and repurposing. How and where do we access texts? How are stories shaped by the text and how do they live through the frameworks of written word.

Starting off with New Rules, the week begins by exploring in an experimental way, how breaking common design rules can be used for typographic experiments.

Notably, two workshops during this week approach memory; And the police were driving Ford Mondeos deals with participant’s memories, ones that ­appear as single words or sentences, images or objects from childhood, while Reshaping Memories deals with the memories as narratives that are continuously reconstructed, aiming to understand how the retelling of stories affects our perception and shapes narratives over time.

Writing on the margins of the web challenges the perception of digital text as intangible and flat, it proposes using comments in source code as margin that provides space for process documentation, conversation, and the otherwise overlooked or deemed 'unimportant‘.

Monday, 12 February

DATE & TIME CHANGE: Workshop, 10:00-12:00

And the police were driving Ford Mondeos
Writing and image collection based on personal memory
with Paul Mielke

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

The workshop deals with participant’s memories, ones that ­appear as single words or sentences, images or objects from childhood. Memorised or buried, reactivated by current events, by joking around with friends, by smell, sound or by some hashtag such as childhoodnostalgia.

The aim is to collect snippets of our socialisation in the surrounding world, our assumptions when growing up (and by extent, in the present).

A short introduction will feature a technique lent from Joe Brainard’s ­“I ­remember”. Participants will start with a comparable sequence of words to be repeated as a list of memories, without questioning the “importance” or “exemplarity” of their results. Alternatively or in addition, we will collect images from the internet.

The results will be briefly talked through with the group.

Paul Mielke is a graphic designer, researcher and maker who engages in re-examining, re-organising and linking historical themes and imagery. He studied in Mainz, Arnhem, Offenbach and recently obtained a Master's degree at KABK Den Haag. His work aims to question contemporary claims and existing assumptions in the social discourse on national identity.

JUST ADDED: Lecture, 13:30-14:30

Music Language, Language Music
with Andrew J Beltran

No registration needed, just come by!

“Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth”
—Give Me Back My Name by Talking Heads

A short presentation of recent research into music, language and how the two can interact, mediate, and translate into one another.

Andrew J Beltran is a graphic designer from Glasgow, Scotland. His practice and research has an increasing focus on publishing, and frequently crosses into the world of popular and unpopular music.

Reading group, 15:00-16:00

Nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it
with Benedikt Reichenbach

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

The title is a quote from Theodor W. Adorno’s text “The Essay as Form” from 1958, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will in 1984. Adorno held the text to be a preeminent statement of his philosophy. Read the text prior to the seminar.

Don’t worry too much if you don’t understand everything. It is probably impossible to understand more than 10%, for anyone who hasn't spent years studying philosophy and everything that Adorno is referring to. I doubt that even if you did, you could understand it fully. This however is precisely the argument, also that insight can hardly be put as per cent. Which in turn let the translators to so strikingly do the impossible.

Encouraged to be inspired, each participant should prepare one quote from the text that for some reason seems interesting and relevant to them today, and we’ll have a discussion along those lines.

Benedikt Reichenbach has been working as a graphic designer and editor since 2007, after studying history and philosophy. In 2015 and 2016, he was a grantee of the Graham Foundation, and a participant of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. In 2014, he published “Harun Farocki Diagrams. Images from Ten Films” (Walther König), and in 2017 “Pasolini's Bodies and Places” (Edition Patrick Frey). In 2020, he received a grant from the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap) to do research on the French graphic designer and painter Jacques Daniel, whose first works after graduating were forged papers for the French Resistance.

Screenings and Readings, 18:30-20:30

Micro-cinema: TEXT & LANGUAGE
hosted by Hanafi Gazali, João Pedro Nogueira, Anna Wittenkamp Rich

No registration needed, just come by!

Join us for a curated evening of short films and readings which elaborate on the topic of the week: TEXT & LANGUAGE. Snacks will be provided, but feel comfortable to bring your own!

Tuesday, 13 February

Workshop, 10:00-13:00

Reshaping Memories
with Barbora Demovič

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.
— Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, 1983

In this workshop we will explore the nature of storytelling. By sharing and re-imagining our memories, we will reflect on narrative reconstruction. The aim is to understand how the retelling of stories affects our perception and shapes narratives over time. We will listen, tell, write and create visual interpretations that capture the essence of our stories, focusing on poetic memory. We will explore the possibilities and limitations of AI image generating. How do you translate the ephemerality of the moment into prompts? And what can AI remember?

Barbora Demovič is a Slovak graphic designer and academic associate at the Berlin International University. Besides teaching and developing conceptual and design solutions for various clients, she is interested in the politics of design and interdisciplinary approaches.

JUST ADDED: Workshop, 14:00-17:00

On technical images (working title)
with Daria Luchinina

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

In this workshop we will explore the idea of technical images, that was introduced by a philosopher Vilém Flusser. Following his research on connections between images and texts, we will make series of small exercises and discuss the results collectively. We will go for a short walk and use smartphones.

Vilém Flusser is a Brazilian-Czech philosopher and writer that is a prominent thinker of an electronic age. He introduced a synthetic and playful way of thinking instead of linearity and made a huge input into media theory, art and photography.

Presentation, 18:30-20:30

You Loved An Image
with Charlotte Rohde
presenting a publication made together with Tatjana Stürmer

No registration needed, just come by!

Author’s Note (without my daddy issues™ I am nothing)

I’m not a writer, I’m a wronger – pretty explicit and semantically hand-greiflich
I think it’s because my dad kinda slut shamed me
When I told him that I would become a figure of public responsibility
I mean ya I‘m a sucker for physical touch and I max. medium care whose hands it are
But I’m also FUCKING PROFESSIONAL

And that’s why you, dear reader, will never perceive me in a way that will emotionally satisfy me
regardless how slutty my writing, how revealing my words
regardless how vulnerable I feel after sending this PDF to print
I don’t really want to write, I just want to be read
I will cut the onions so you might finally see me cry

Wednesday, 14 February

Workshop, 10:00-13:00

Writing on the margins of the web
with Kim Kleinert & Polina Lobanova

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

The practice of writing on the margins is as old as writing itself. particularly in books produced before the printing press, marginalia often formed dialogues between readers, as these books were handcrafted and passed down through generations. while our engagement with physical books remains, we frequently encounter digital texts. This leads us to ponder: what are the margins of a webpage or a code?

Challenging the perception of digital text as intangible and flat, we propose using comments in source code as margin that provides space for process documentation, conversation, and the otherwise overlooked or deemed 'unimportant‘.

For this workshop's practical component, we will bring a selection of digital texts. You will be invited to write your own annotations, comments, and interpretations, exploring how these marginal notes can shape and add dimension to the source-code.

A basic understanding of HTML will be helpful but is not required.

For more details visit → here

Polina Lobanova (b. 1996, Moscow), an artist and designer writing her BA thesis in Klasse Digital Grafik HFBK Hamburg. Re-searching handmade web, she looks for 'computer-feeling'—focusing on the subjective, intimate experiences with computing devices, seeking a deeper sense of possibility and excessiveness.

Kim Kleinert is a graphic designer and developer from Berlin who recently finished her BFA at Klasse Digitale Grafik in Hamburg. She is interested in technologies and languages, their mechanisms and visual appearances. Her research on ‘intertextual intimacies’ was presented at the Are.na Annual launch (2023) and her Thesis Website ‘ecologies.online’ (2024) found numerous mentions (hallointer.net, naive weekly, collected.li).

DATE & TIME CHANGE: Workshop, 14:00-17:00

NEW RULES!
with Florian Mecklenburg

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Graphic design comes with a seemingly strict set of rules when you first engage with it: Rules from the Bauhaus era to Swiss Typography, rules by long-dead typographers about micro spaces and their relations, as well as subjectively proclaimed dogmas about readability and functionality. But who made these rules, and why do we follow other people’s neuroses? Do we need new rules, and if so, what would they look like? How can we use existing ones to rethink and elevate our own design drill and push beyond our practice?

WELCOME TO NEW RULES!

Starting from a set of predefined and subjectively selected guidelines and regulations, we practice disobedience. Within a variety of fast-paced design sprints, discussion and making exercises, we explore, experiment, evaluate and manifest within the format of a simple black and white 'poster'.

This is going to be a HIIT Workshop for all graphic design peers from beginner to advanced – an experimental workout of dissent. An individual effort, collectively exercised, to find out what happens when we break free from the chains of conformity and (possibly obsolete) graphic design dogmas! Unleash your full potential! Gain new insides! Participate!

Florian Mecklenburg is a Berlin-based designer, art director, and lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague | KABK. Within his practice, he develops and experiments with visual strategies for commissioned and self-initiated projects spanning graphic design, moving image, and publishing. He is interested in the politics of design and how contemporary visual communication can challenge existing power structures and social norms.

Lecture, 17:30-18:30

Shadow Libraries and The Undercommons: PDFs coming from below
with Paul Schmidt

No registration needed, just come by!

Shadow Libraries distribute literature freely to everyone. Especially for academic workers they are indispensable, providing access to research confined by big copyright owners earning without doing anything other than providing files. Moreover, PDFs of books and papers, freely available regardless of copyright status, form a critical foundation for knowledge work everywhere.

My talk will revolve around Shadow Libraries, their operators and communities, their technical infrastructure, and aesthetics within the context of an increasingly commodifying and professionalizing world. The book "The Undercommons" (Harney and Moten, 2013) will support to underline the importance of subversive actions and initiatives like Shadow Libraries in universities and beyond. Practically, you will learn how to use, support, and start a Shadow Library yourself.

Paul V. Schmidt wrote a thesis around Shadow Libraries with the title “After Aaron, Alexandra & Anna: A Shadow Library Multitude on the Horizon of The Stack”. After studying in Vienna, he studies in London and contracts as a poker blogger for a publication backed by the gambling industry.

NEW DATE & TIME: Book Launch, Readings, and Bar, 19:00-22:30

PUBLISHED: Nine Book Launches
with the Estonian Academy of Arts GD MA Class of 2024

No registration needed, just come by!

Nine book launches by the graduating students of the Estonian Academy of Arts MA in Graphic Design, with nine presentations, readings, recordings, streams and whispers.

Oleksandra Hruzynska, Sharovarshchyna
Taylor "Tex" Tehan, A space for etc.
Agnes Isabelle Veevo, I Wish for More Mushrooms to Emerge
Shubham Aggarwal, Either/Either
Andrew J Beltran, The Best Weapon is the Weapon of Learning
Pierre Satoshi Benoit, Core Extensions: The framemaker's studio
Daria Luchinina, Touching Matter
Urtina Hoxha, RKS/81: Graphic Design as Evidence
Helga Dögg, The Desire of the Daughter

with special guest Lieven Lahaye

The evening will conclude with a bar night before we close for the week until the following Monday.

LABOUR & THE BODY
18 to 22 February 2024

Making is enabled through the body, there’s no labour without tasting, playing, pretending, inhabiting, expressing.

During this week we perceive how our bodies connect us to our surroundings and how it even enables us to access different spaces.  How do you remember your body in nature? What is the work involved in giving a gift? Can we typeset with clay? What do you sense when you eat? Are you escaping your own private hell? Does your body know about your VISA situation?

There will be instructions to try vocal cords in motion in a LARPshop, tutorials on how to get a freelance artist VISA in Germany, popcorn to watch a daring movie, tea for queercrip expressions and snacks for a brainstorm session. Let’s get physical.

Monday, 19 February

Workshop, 11:30-13:00 / 14:00–15:30 (1-hour lunch break between)

Collective archive of our body in nature
with UNPAE collective

No registration needed, just come by!

The workshop is an open discussion on the idea of the “body in nature”, its fragility, and the remains and traces of it in its absence. The objective of the workshop is to create a common archive of memories and work with it by sharing thoughts, objects and practices one is fond of.

The workshop consists of two parts. We will start with the creation of a collective archive (estimated 1,5h) through an open discussion where everyone will be invited to bring a contribution on the idea of the “body in nature”, which can take any form for example, memories of one's own body in a naturalistic context; readings from texts, essays and writings; objects with a symbolic value. In the second phase (estimated 1,5h) we’ll decide together how to move forward. An idea could be to work together on a restitution by combining the contributions of the “collective archive” into a series of collages that can take the form of physical objects inhabiting a space. The work could be carried on in one large group, in smaller groups or individually, depending how natural it feels.

Please note that participants are asked to reflect on, recollect memories or stories of bodies in nature; or bring items that evoke this idea: texts, objects, pictures, ephemera, anything really. It would be nice to have a concept of how to make a restitution beforehand and think of specific tools or items one needs to work and bring them, but it’s not mandatory — it could be something very spontaneous too.

Michele Sablone (b. 1997) is a graphic designer. His work focuses on editorial practices and experimentation with visual languages in relation to themes of network cultures and visual arts. He collaborates with art foundations and cultural institution producing books, posters, visual identities, and websites. He graduated from Iuav University of Venice in 2023 and attended an exchange program at HfG Karlsruhe in 2022. He is the art director of Unpae and curates the communication design of the project.

Andrea Croce (b. 1996) is a curator and visual artist. He graduated from Iuav University of Venice in Fashion in 2021 with a thesis investigating the performativity of the everyday and the ambiguous relationship between fiction and reality. He moved to Brno (CZ) to work as an assistant to artist Julie Béna between 2021-2022. In 2018 he founded Unpae, a project characterized by a free and spontaneous spirit. Since 2021 he has been working as a curator and producer for Una Boccata d’Arte.

Alessia Delli Rocioli (b. 1998), graduated in Art History in 2023, is a researcher of contemporary artistic and cultural practices; her research takes shape through cultural design, critical writing and storytelling. Since 2021 she has been co-curator of the non-profit project Unpae; She has collaborated with other art projects and art foundations as a curatorial or gallery assistant. Recently, she is getting closer to working in visual art archives and designing alternative education programmes.

Presentation & Discussion, 15:30-17:00

Guide to the Freelance (Artist) Visa for GDers
with Katharine Wimett

No registration needed, just come by!

An informational session for those interested in staying in Berlin and who are from a non-EU country. The focus will be on navigating the application process for the German Freelance (Artist) Visa. I will speak to my own experience (as an American, Graphic Designer) who applied and received the three-year Freelance (Artist) Visa in 2022.

In the first half of the session, I will plan to give a presentation sharing the portfolio of work I applied with. I will also plan to present other design portfolios, along with letters of intent from potential clients (a key part of the application). Additionally, I'll share my experience navigating some of the catch-22 situations that exist in the application process, such as securing health insurance.

Following the presentation, the session will transition into a collective conversation among participants. Depending on who joins the session we could also discuss renewing the Freelance Visa, applying for the Künstlersozialkasse (the social fund for Freelance Artists), working with non-EU clients, managing finances between your home country and Germany, German taxes for Freelancers.

Katharine Wimett is an American graphic designer based in Berlin. She completed her bachelor’s degree in The Netherlands at ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in 2019. Currently, she designs the visual identities of art exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (NY, USA). Additionally, she holds the role of Digital Director at Cabinet magazine.

Screenings and Readings, 18:30-20:30

Micro-cinema: LABOUR & THE BODY
hosted by Linnea Lindgren & Archil Tsereteli

No registration needed, just come by!

Join us for a curated evening of short films and readings which elaborate on the topic of the week: LABOUR & THE BODY. Snacks will be provided, but feel comfortable to bring your own!

Tuesday, 20 February

Workshop, 10:00-13:00

Beyond the table: The visual language of taste
with Antonia Ludwig

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

What do you think about when you taste? How do you feel durning it, and what do you hear?

Sensory perceptions are too diverse to break them down in one word. So let’s think about visualizing individual intangibles. In this workshop, we want to explore what we sense, think, and experience when we taste. I invite you to a meal where we give space to our senses, perceiving different flavors in familiar and unfamiliar ways. We will snack, brainstorm, and discuss the multidimensional aspects of food. Beyond the table, we'll create visual works and invite each other to discover what we sense. You will find a medium of your choice to express and share insights, thoughts and feelings as much as you want and feel safe doing so.

Just bring yourself, your curiosity, a bit of love for experimentation and about three hours’ time to join me in this embodied research workshop.

Workshop / Lecture, 14:00-17:00

QUEERCRIP GROUNDS
with Michiel Teeuw

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

keywords: poster-making, exchange, non-conform, care.

How do you ground, as a queer and/or crip person, in this world? How do you keep standing your ground? How do we support each other in times like these? How do we build community with each other?

QUEER & CRIP: To be unapologetically nOt able-bodied/minded, nOt heterosexual, nOt cisgender etc. TOGETHER: we celebrate the crooked, anti-normal, and mysterious forms life can take.

In this workshop-lecture, you will experiment with typography in clay, responding to the questions above. We will do several short sculpting and talking exercises, as well as thinking and reflecting. It is not about making a typographic masterpiece, but more so about conversation and exchange.

At the end of the workshop-lecture, we will end up with a series of statement posters made of clay, showing the different perspectives and positions within the group.
We will copy these posters and paste them in the city!
We will try our best to organise the workshop as inclusively as possible. If you have any access needs you would like to discuss with us, please contact us beforehand so we can see what's possible.

We will soon share more specific accessibility info as well.

Michiel Teeuw is an artist, designer and researcher based in Groningen (NL). Their work fosters a critical, direct and tactile engagement with the systems around us. Teeuw is currently a lector/researcher in Graphic Desig theory & history, at Academy Minerva (Groningen).

LARPshop, 18:30-20:30

Transformation Sequence
with Michael Fowler

No registration needed, just come by!

Tapping into the inner beast, what can self-abstraction serve for a design practice?
Unravelling the body as maker as a means of resculpting perspective.

How can Roleplaying derail design for gazing back into an ever-complicating world?

A moment to eviscerate the cringe co-opting of Storytelling in the design world and pry at re-harnessing fiction as a queered tool.

In this workshop participants will tap into the methodology of LARP and character creation, as well as co-create sonic content for the Transformation Sequence radio show via IDA Raadio.

Wednesday, 21 February

JUST ADDED: Workshop, 11:00-13:00

Smell the Flowers, Finger Knitting Workshop
with Lesley Schouela

No registration needed, just come by!

Smell the Flowers was conceived to bring people back into a singular focus and reconnect with their senses by teaching a simple skill that involves both hands and full concentration to start, and once into it, a hand tied relaxation and unconscious break from our overstimulated constantly communicating surrounding.

This is a hands-on workshop where you will learn to knit with your fingers. No sticks or tools needed, please bring your own wool if you have, some yarn will be available.

Workshop, 14:00-16:00

Gift making workshop
with Rita Davis

No registration needed, just come by!

This is a hands-on workshop aimed to help you evolve your skill of gift-making as well as gift-giving.

As a group, we will seek for references and explore handmade techniques to make a special object — from conceptualization to packaging, going through the actual making of it.

The making of the present will take into account: low-cost, inventiveness, what's available in the surrounding area, particularities of the person to be gifted to. In a second moment we will explore gifting each other as a simple and straightforward way of building social bonds — gift-giving through performative action (a poem, a reading, a song, a game...).

Panel discussion, 18:30-22:30

Money Talks, and a Bar Night
with Serge Rompza of NODE Berlin, Vanessa Olt of Nea-Kosma, Louise Borinski, Alejandro Bellón Ample, and Lucas Liccini

No registration needed, just come by!

Join the Stand-in School for an evening to talk about money and running a business/studio. Special guests for the night include:

Serge Rompza of NODE Berlin, representing the perspective of a small-scale studio working with a range of collaborators and employees

Vanessa Olt of Nea-Kosma, representing the perspective of a business consultant and financial manager

Louise Borinksi, Lucas Liccini and Alejandro Bellón Ample, representing the perspective of recent graduates at different stages of establishing their own independent practices and studios.

The evening will be followed by a bar night as the school takes a rest before opening again the following Monday.

Serge Rompza is a graphic designer and graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (NL). In 2003 he founded the design studio NODE Berlin Oslo together with his Norwegian colleague Anders Hofgaard. He regularly teaches at design and art academies at home and abroad.

Vanessa, Co-Founder of Nea-Kosma, a Berlin-based business consultancy bridging the gap between the financial and creative realms. With a background in International Business Administration, she worked as a financial manager and accountant for various creative businesses. Quickly recognizing the frustration many creative professionals face regarding their finances, Vanessa, alongside business strategist Rea Stamatoulakis, founded Nea-Kosma in 2020. Their mission is to make business knowledge more accessible and transparent by demystifying financial structures and processes.

Thursday, 22 February

Discussion, feedback, 18:30-20:30

Speed Dating Crits
hosted by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas

No registration needed, just come by!

In design education, feedback takes the form of an emotionally charged critique session where verbal criticism, both negative and positive, takes place in front of an audience. If the critique is to help one improve output, it should be conversational, both giving and taking in the interest of collaboration.

Using the structure of speed dating, everyone will be put into pairs to share something they're working on with one other. Pairs will shuffle throughout the night, and everyone will both give and receive feedback. Drinks and snacks will be available!

Note: participants can bring work in any state of progress, or even previously finished work. It can be brought physically, shown on screen, as print-outs, or any way they'd like to use for sharing and discussing it.

JUST ADDED: Lecture, discussion 20:45-21:45

Parasite Lectures #1
with Pierre Satoshi Benoit & Urtina Hoxha

No registration needed, just come by!

Parasite Lectures are a series of discussions about graphic design processes happening during the Stand-in School for Graphic Design. Each lecture will react to the existing programme of the school and will slide in-between planned events.

1. Collected material
For the first talk, we would like to introduce you to two researches that were made in the school context: an investigative journey to find a Japanese jazz guitarist in Estonia and a scrapbook made by a rave party enthusiast from Kosovo.

The lecture will be given by Urtina and Pierre, second-year students of the MA in graphic design at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Sunday, 25 February

Screening, 18:00h

BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism
hosted by Lena Böckmann & Rita Davis

No registration needed, just come by!

During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicentre of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community.

Michelle Handelman’s provocative and pioneering documentary BLOODSISTERS captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment, shot on digital video with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of the era. Twenty-five years later, the film has become recognized as a treasured historical document of a movement that tore down barriers of sex, gender, and activism.

Note: The film is 77 minutes long. Snacks will be provided, or feel comfortable to bring your own!

DISOBEDIENCE & SOCIETY
26 to 29 February 2024

At its core, disobedience in the context of a school run by students for students, is not about mere defiance for the sake of rebellion, but rather a deliberate act of questioning established norms and conventions. Disobedience becomes a means for designers and people alike to start conversations and break free from the shackles of conformity. This week wants to encourage people to question authority, challenge conventions, and embrace risk-taking by defying the status quo and exploring unconventional ideas.

There will be workshops that seek to redefine the most mundane tasks surrounding us, that deconstruct the tools we use, screenings that spark conversation around a sociopolitically grounded graphic design practice, itinerant reading groups, peer-learning and speculation on what is imminent for female work models in graphic design, and conversations regarding the work we make as students or cultural workers coming from the so-called Global South.

Monday, 26 February

Workshop session 1 of 2, 11:00-12:30

They do it for free
with Frédérique Gagnon & Austin Redman

No maximum, but prior registration is required
[register here]

Janitor is the title given to volunteers who are tasked with the job of ‘cleaning up’ image boards to maintain the quality of the forum.

Janitors scrub sites endlessly for no compensation and receive little to no appreciation for the job done in anonymity.

A potboiler is a term used for a creative work, where the authors intent of producing such work is solely to provide a living - and to fund the ‘real’ creative work.

Typically these works are thought to be inferior, ‘cheaply’ produced and done with anonymity to the author through pen name or similar.

Pulp fiction as a medium was invented through potboiler. Its originator combined “cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors” into a package that provided cheap entertainment.

Consider yourself a janitor tasked with cleaning, fixing, replacing or removing something which is by the rules / TOS you’ve set unacceptable. This thing can be either public or private (think a statue, a broken bench, an image, a location, a book, website).

Anonymous intervention (a fix, replacement, removal) which goes unrewarded and likely unnoticed or overlooked. Collectively these interventions could be documented and reproduced using the same means of production as pulp fiction and sold, the profit to be distributed to the participants. Consider the effort to reward ratio and the tiers of anonymity in production of these works.

Austin Redman (US) and Frédérique Gagnon (CA) are graphic designers working together between Los Angeles and Amsterdam. The two met while attending Werkplaats Typografie and have since been collaborating on publication, exhibition design and identity primarily within the cultural sector.

Note: May be helpful for participants to consider the brief prior to the workshop and begin to think through their own personal rules / TOS which would help them to identify what thing it is they will be intervening on - possibly having a site / object / etc. already picked out. If any participant(s) has a particular interest in being responsible for overseeing design / production of the documented pulp it may be good to decide on that already beforehand. Both of us will be available to consult with the participants on the pulp through the process of its production.

Please note that this workshop takes place across two sessions (Mon, 26.02, 11:00–12:30h & Tues, 27.02, 11:00–12:30h) with the same group of participants, and is not two separate workshops.

Screening / Q&A, 14:00–15:45

The Music is the Making of the Music – An ongoing conversation about a design practice grounded in co-existence
with Dimitri Reist

No registration needed, just come by!

In the context of my research project I organise a class, in which i want to elaborate on the following questions:

How can one as a graphic designer, shift and relearn understandings of visual knowledge towards the social political context each of us is living in? And can this eventually lead to a more inclusive, co-existing, community-based and social-political reflective praxis?

My research is interested in a shift of conversations about design, away from form, to a more process oriented, and more sustainable one. One that takes the political and social responsibility we carry as graphic designers seriously. Especially important in these trembling times.

I want to present a current state of the ­research in the form of a video-essay I produced for the Swiss Design Awards in 2023.

After that I would like to invite you for an open discussion around the video-essay and build a practice of knowledge-sharing that helps each other understand how we can partake in a meaningful change, by challenging the dominant western idea of design.

Please note: Dimitri will join and conduct the Screening / Q&A from zoom, but participants are asked to meet at the school and follow together.

Dimitri Reist, lives and works in Brussels and Bern. Next to his personal research, he is co-founder of the design studio Bonsma & Reist and part of the fashion/artist collective NCCFN (Nothing Can Come from Nothing).

Workshop, 16:00-18:00

Anti-Navigation Tools
with 4KHD collective

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

Travelers during their journeys blindly use GPS devices to not lose themselves and optimize their efforts. The orientation skills of the subject is then reduced to: turn left, turn right. But what if the travelers don’t want to look at their GPS device? What if this runs out of battery? What if the “Points of Interest” are not interesting? What if following wind directions is their final goal? And what if there is no goal at all?

While deconstructing a map or a navigation tool, it’s fast to realize that the information provided on these artifacts are not necessarily related to our own way to see the space. And that the space around us has therefore endless other layers through which we can navigate. To gain freedom of movement, personal, unfriendly, and small maps are needed. Driven by our own curiosity to create never-tired devices for our slow bike journeys and field observations, we will introduce you on how to make disobedient, low-tech navigation tools.

Note: Participants are asked to bring a laptop or some tools to draw.

4KHD is the name of a long, rainy, off-road journey started in 2018. Today it's a group of people doing things together scattered between Italy, Switzerland and The Netherlands. They exist in motion as they travel, packing useless things under the saddle, losing their way through experimental maps they have drawn or drawing imaginary routes they will eventually never make. While dreaming of an endless journey away from their lives, what they do is frequently mocking the canons of modern travellers and hyper-tech amateur sport. Instead of another project where it could have been documented everything, everywhere and with the best resolution, they create broken, shaky and usually rather useless tools that are more practical to dream than to perform.

Screenings and Readings, 18:30-20:30

Micro-cinema: DISOBEDIENCE & SOCIETY
hosted by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas & Rok Ifko Krajnc

No registration needed, just come by!

Join us for a curated evening of short films and readings which elaborate on the topic of the week: DISOBEDIENCE & SOCIETY. Popcorn will be provided!

Tuesday, 27 February

Workshop session 2 of 2, 11:00-12:30

They do it for free
with Frédérique Gagnon & Austin Redman

No maximum, but prior registration is required
[register here]

Janitor is the title given to volunteers who are tasked with the job of ‘cleaning up’ image boards to maintain the quality of the forum.

Janitors scrub sites endlessly for no compensation and receive little to no appreciation for the job done in anonymity.

A potboiler is a term used for a creative work, where the authors intent of producing such work is solely to provide a living - and to fund the ‘real’ creative work.

Typically these works are thought to be inferior, ‘cheaply’ produced and done with anonymity to the author through pen name or similar.

Pulp fiction as a medium was invented through potboiler. Its originator combined “cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors” into a package that provided cheap entertainment.

Consider yourself a janitor tasked with cleaning, fixing, replacing or removing something which is by the rules / TOS you’ve set unacceptable. This thing can be either public or private (think a statue, a broken bench, an image, a location, a book, website).

Anonymous intervention (a fix, replacement, removal) which goes unrewarded and likely unnoticed or overlooked. Collectively these interventions could be documented and reproduced using the same means of production as pulp fiction and sold, the profit to be distributed to the participants. Consider the effort to reward ratio and the tiers of anonymity in production of these works.

Austin Redman (US) and Frédérique Gagnon (CA) are graphic designers working together between Los Angeles and Amsterdam. The two met while attending Werkplaats Typografie and have since been collaborating on publication, exhibition design and identity primarily within the cultural sector.

Note: May be helpful for participants to consider the brief prior to the workshop and begin to think through their own personal rules / TOS which would help them to identify what thing it is they will be intervening on - possibly having a site / object / etc. already picked out. If any participant(s) has a particular interest in being responsible for overseeing design / production of the documented pulp it may be good to decide on that already beforehand. Both of us will be available to consult with the participants on the pulp through the process of its production.

Please note that this workshop takes place across two sessions (Mon, 26.02, 11:00–12:30h & Tues, 27.02, 11:00–12:30h) with the same group of participants, and is not two seprate workshops.

Itinerant Reading Group
10:00-12:00
14:00-16:00

Experimenting with Prussian Camp Aesthetics
with Pablo Santacana López
Offsite: Guthaus Mahlsdorf, Berlin

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

We will look at examples of Grunderzeit aesthetics and designs through a queer perspective, following the work of trans-activist and antiquarian Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.

Through two sessions we will discuss how and why the neoclassical aesthetics that obsessed the Prussian empire (and present everywhere in Berlin) can be understood as queer practices of anachronic resistance and how they confront the ideas against kitsch developed by the Werkbund in the beginning of the XX century (the time Berlin also started to become Europe’s queer capital).

The workshop includes a visit to Charlotte’s Gründerzeitmuseum in Mahlsdorf.

Please note: The workshop starts at the museum with a 4,5€ entry fee, the exact meeting point is TBA. After the visit, there is a two hour lunch break and then the group moves to Gerichtstrasse 45.

Pablo Santacana López (Madrid, 1991) studied architecture and works as artist and researcher focusing on archives, activism and performative memory practices. He co-leads the graphic collective Humo_Estudio and is currently enrolled as a PhD student at the Fachhochschule Erfurt and the Bauhaus University Weimar.

Reading Group, 16:30-18:00

Ecstasy of Learning: Reading Club
with Jasmina Begović & Barbora Demovič

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Together we will read a text from bell hooks' book Teaching to Transgress and discuss in a circle about community, care and engaged pedagogy. We will think about education as the practice of freedom and how we can all work towards our common learning and teaching goals.

Jasmina Begović is a communication designer with a focus on typography and print, and an artistic associate at the Berlin University of the Arts. In her own work she deals with the question of access and exclusion in and through design.

Barbora Demovič is a Slovak graphic designer and academic associate at the Berlin International University. Besides teaching and developing conceptual and design solutions for various clients, she is interested in the politics of design and interdisciplinary approaches. 

Presentation, 18:30-20:00

Curated, deconstructed, updated, commented, bootleg
with students of Klasse Hickmann at the Berlin University of the Arts UdK and Louise Borinski

No registration needed, just come by!

“Bootleg – The Rediscovery of Past Texts / Publications / Zines” was a seminar in the winter semester 2023/24 in the graphic design class at the Berlin University of the Arts, organized by Louise Borinski. Together with the students we went on our search for forgotten treasures, we came across 12 texts, publications and zines, which were given a new form and reprinted in a collective publication.

Participants:
Lilli Reinlein
Béla Machemer
Gerrit Ludwig
Nora Veismann
Ira Goeller
Eli Zaza Moysiopoulou
Hilka Dirks
Julius Riek
Annika Kiefer
Hannah Stöwe
Konstantin Wagner
Sebastian Richter

Wednesday, 28 February

Workshop, 11:00-13:00

Exploring feminine collaborative formations
with Denise Amann

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

In the realm of social structures, graphic design functions as a connector, fre-quently serving as the intermediary that links diverse entities and domains.

The interpersonal aspects inherent in the design process highlight the significance of activities such as exchange, translation, and mediation.

In this workshop we want to examine historical and contemporary examples of feminine collective work models in Graphic Design, also to shed light on the invisibility of the female practitioner as it continues to exist today. It aims to equip participants with a renewed perspective on the empowering potential of feminine collective works models in (graphic) design and speculates on what is imminent for female practice in the future.

Denise is an art director, graphic designer, and lecturer based in Berlin. She is co-founder of OFFICINA, a collaborative design studio in which visual communication unfolds its potential across many disciplines.

Reading Group, 14:00-16:00

Messy wishes for a murky belonging
with Ana Cecilia Breña & Rita Davis

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Making work related to one’s national “origins” is a murky business, but rarely described as such.

Between idealisation, newfound nostalgia, decolonial trends, western aesthetic ambitions, academic pressure, wishes for belonging, wishes for standing out, race, class, isolation and food cravings, there is an inherent messiness and difficulty in creating from this position. We think we should talk and reflect on it, and be honest about the doubts, frustrations, pleasures and advantages that come with this position.

Taking a selection of texts as starting points, we propose to think collectively on the ways in which colonised countries have developed their post-colonial identities, and how this relates to the work we make as students or cultural workers coming from the so-called Global South. We will question the concepts of “origins”, “roots”, “heritage”, or “culture”, in relation to exploitation, mestizaje, decolonial thought, (self-)exoticisation, and cultural appropriation.

Ana Cecilia Breña is a graphic designer working mainly with printed media within the cultural sector. She's been living in Berlin for over two years, after having obtained her masters degree in 2020 from the ENSAD Paris. Currently working with Stoodio Santiago da Silva and other collaborators.

Rita Davis searches for unexpected encounters via printing with different methods, drawing with different tools, and gathering people over different excuses. She comes from and misses Belo Horizonte/Brazil. Currently lives and feels cold in Berlin/Germany. She happily interns at Stoodio Santiago da Silva. And recently graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts, MA in Graphic Design (2023).

Lecture, 16:00-17:00

Reflecting on Ornament in Graphic Design: Past. Present. Future?
with Hannah Schedl

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Do you ever think about ornament in your design practice? What even is ornament? Is your practice ornament? What shaped your ideas of ornament? What does it look like? Was it part of your education? How could it be used? And why? What are its possibilities?

The modernist design philosophy deemed ornament as inherently incompatible with its ideals of standardisation, function, and objectivity; ornament got rejected as a design element. This desire for objectivity and universality meant a rejection of diversity and different forms of expression. A rather small and exclusive group like the modernists – who were predominantly male, white, and European – had enough influence to decide that ornament was out.

After some theoretical input I would like to invite everyone to a collaborative and collective reflection/discussion on ornament – exploring our own backstories with it, feelings, thoughts, insights, and ornament’s potentials.

Hannah Schedl is a communication designer currently based in Vienna, Austria. Recently graduated, she is reflecting on the norms, history and aesthetics of design while exploring new approaches for her creative practice.

Invited lecture, 18:30-22:30

Stings of names, skeletons of words: On a theory and history of hand reading (After Charlotte Wolff)
with Sam Dolbear

No registration needed, just come by!

Join Sam Dolbear for an informal discussion of his research on the hand-reader and theorist of gender and sexuality Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986).

Through an array of images, Sam will present how he came to discover Wolff, via a diagram of friendship drawn by Walter Benjamin in 1932 — and the numerous projects that have generated from it.

The final part of the talk will explore Wolff’s archive as a site of contradictions and the hand print, in particular, as an object suspended between legibility and illegibility, violence and disobedience.

Thursday, 29 February

NEW DATE/TIME: Online Reading Group, 19:30-20:30

Designing Communalism
with Margherita Huntley

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

A reading group considering how communalism might persist as an anticapitalist political-economic form in the 21st century.

What designed structures – legal or otherwise – might be needed to precipitate political self-determination and autonomy beyond institutions?

Excerpts of texts will be drawn from visual culture and political economy.

Please note: this reading group will be conducted over zoom, a link to the readings and meeting will be sent in advance.

Margherita is a designer, lecturer, and union organiser from London. She was part of educational collective Evening Class, participated in the first Collective Practices Research Course at the Royal Institute of the Arts in Stockholm, and is currently completing a Masters at Birkbeck (UoL) in Law and Political Economy. She makes publications (very occasionally!) with designer Andrew J Beltran under the name Minimum Efficiency Press.

SCHOOL OF ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES
3 to 7 March 2024

The week uses history and lived experience as a starting point to speculate and propose new methods for meeting, reading, making, and publishing.

While Gerichtstrasse 45 continues to be a spine we return to, the limbs of the school will frequently move outwards throughout the city, taking place in cafes, trains, forests and department stores. This feeling for the need to move comes from a shared desire to do things differently, acknowledging that what happens on the side of things might actually be the real thing.

Sunday, 3 March

Tour 1 of 2, 11:30-13:00

Tours de Tours
with Barbara Acevedo Strange, Moritz Appich, and Paula Buškevica

OFFSITE LOCATION: Dicke Marie
Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

Tours de Tours invites students to join two guided tours through the landscapes of Berlin, exploring both local urban and natural environments while observing elements of intersection and different temporalities. These excursions also offer moments of discussion and contemplation concerning the inherent need to travel, move, and be moved.

The first voyage will lead us to Dicke Marie, an oak tree renowned as the oldest tree in Berlin, located near the shores of Tegeler See in the Northwest. The second exploration is scheduled to take place at the KARSTADT shopping mall at Hermannplatz in Neukölln. Additionally, members of the expeditions will receive a comprehensive reader beforehand and gain access to a shared research folder compiling our findings related to these two distinctive places. Travel advice and the exact meeting location will be announced before the first tour.

The research will be constantly uploaded an updated and can be found in this shared dropbox ← folder.

Please note:
— this workshop takes place offsite
— this workshop takes place across two sessions (Sun, 3.03, 11:30–13:30h & Wed 6.03, 10:00–11:30h) with the same group of participants, and is not two separate workshops.

Exhibition Tour, 16:00-17:00

Intermediate Objects
with Kristina Stallvik

OFFSITE LOCATION: Art Laboratory Berlin
Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin
No registration needed, just come by!

Intermediate Objects represents the first culmination of artist Kristina Stallvik’s practice-based investigation of independent publishing ecosystems. The works on view are both a documentation of Stallvik’s research dialogues and a mediation on the social and material histories of risograph printing.

By displaying the physical stencil masters used to print an eponymous publication, Intermediate Objects animates these traditionally discarded products of duplication. Drafted with tools developed by full auto foundry, the typefaces utilized in the exhibition further explore the collaborative potential of the stencil itself as a creative methodology.

Join Stallvik in the gallery for an artist talk and walkthrough of the exhibition.

*Note: This exhibition tour takes place offsite, at Art Laboratory Berlin (Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin).*

Kristina Stallvik is an artist, curator, and founder of the publishing project, cover crop. Recent exhibitions and presentations include Non Productive Readers: a Performance, Between Bridges, Berlin (2023); Slow Leak, a.p., Berlin (2023); Bubble Bath, Magma Maria, Frankfurt (2023); and Act 1, Nylistasafnid, Reykjavik (2023). Stallvik's writing was recently published in Landing by Inland Academy & Lumbung Press of documenta 15 (2023).

Monday, 4 March

Workshop 1 of 3, 09:00-10:00

THIRD PLACE (Breakfast)
with Elsa Baslé, Leyre León Álvarez, and Chloé Gourvennec LB

OFFSITE LOCATION: TBD
Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

For the past two summers we have been involved with the Provisional School for Nothing in Sabóia, Portugal, bringing students and artists together to collaborate in an environment of learning, alternative pedagogy, improvisation and performance. Situated between the town's village hall (our home) and the school building (our workspace), a café in the centre of the village has become our third place, where red chairs bear witness to hours spent chatting, eating, writing and more, blurring the distinctions of time.

It became vital to meet there with our different energies, where we would often ask ourselves: is it breakfast, lunch or dinner?

We invite you to join us in a familiar café for collective reflections, exercises and discussions, starting with looking at books, progressing through a series of exercises as well as the writing of a collective newsletter. Over three days, before, in between or after classes - breakfast on the first, lunch on the second and dinner on the third.

Please note:
— this workshop takes place offsite.
— this workshop takes place across three sessions (Mon, 4.03, 9:00–10:00h / Tues, 5.03, 13:15–14:15h / Wed 6.03, 19:00–20:00h) with the same group of participants, and is not three separate workshops.

okbooks is an association and publishing project founded by Leyre León Álvarez, Elsa Baslé and Chloé Gourvennec. Created in March 2022 and based between the roads of Lyon (Ensba, FR) and Amsterdam (Rietveld Academie, NL), the group is attentive to questions of pedagogy, language and performative materials. lifelong students

Reading group / Workshop, 10:30–12:30, 13:30-15:30

DRAMA
with John Philip Sage & Alessia Arcuri

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

Things are a bit too much.
Do you ever find yourself being extra?

A workshop somewhere in between a reading group, a writing workshop, and a performing activity.

We work with oversharing as an opportunity for connection, collaboration, and empathy; as a poetic modality; as a performative moment; and as a tool for the narration of the self.

DRAMA opens up the spaces of written and visual communication while challenging the format of the reading group. It uses these elements both as points of departure and rapture, exploring non-linear and personal approaches to the production, analysis, and performance of text.

john philip sage (he/they) is a Graphic Designer and Researcher based in London. They co-run spreeeng, a graphic design cooperative practice, and they are currently a lecturer at Kingston School of Art and Camberwell College of Arts. Their research practice explores the relationship between language, publishing and typography.

Alessia Arcuri (she/they) works as a graphic designer and educator. She teaches Graphic Design at Kingston School of Art and she is a context tutor at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design. She is interested in self-organised learning practices; the intersection of language and performance; and forms affective and embodied writing. These interests are pursued within the collectives Evening Class, DRAMA and Autocoscienza Writing Group.

Workshop, 16:15-17:15

Look! A loop!
with Ana Cecilia Breña

OFFSITE LOCATION: Wedding S41/S42 Ringbahn
Maximum 25 participants
[register here]

If something in Berlin can be described as “awkward, relatively inefficient, sometimes impractical, peripheral, slow, and limitless”, it would be the Ringbahn. S41 and S42: the two trains that endlessly circle the city and that occupy the thin margin that pretends to divide the periphery from the center.

In 1963 Lygia Clark made a work called Caminhando in which she filmed herself cutting a paper möbius strip, an act that uses the infinity of this simple shape to prolong the act of cutting, the lovely sensation of scissors on paper, making infinity bigger.

I propose to get on an S-bahn and repeat Lygia Clark’s performance. Once each of our long and weird strips of paper are done, each person should write an awkward question, or a marginal one, or a problem they can’t solve on it. After drawing, talking, writing and daydreaming over them, and once we’ve all found the answers we weren’t looking for, we can get off the train.

Note: This workshop takes place offsite, on the Ringbahn. But participants will meet at the school first.

Ana Cecilia Breña is a graphic designer working mainly with printed media within the cultural sector. She's been living in Berlin for over two years, after having obtained her masters degree in 2020 from the ENSAD Paris. Currently working with Stoodio Santiago da Silva and other collaborators.

Screening & Discussion, 18:30-20:30

Graphic Design Retreat
with Gilbert Again

No registration needed, just come by!

Gilbert is an amateur historian of graphic design. Impeccably sculpted in silicone, resin, oil paint, and human hair, yet quite at home on the internet. They’re certainly not the kind to get hung up on small details. They once commented “looks like a david rudnick ❤️” on a Cultural Tutor post about sixteenth-century woodcuts, lol. As graphic design arrives at its sublime conclusion, who did what first seems trivial anyway.

This video screening tells the story of how graphic design was dreamed up by some frighteningly old Euro males in order to automate their ugly cousins out of the Lord’s work. Graphic design turned out to be highly persuasive communicology, went a little out of control, but then spent half a millennium years grinding the gears of its legacy hardware. Computerization set graphic design free, ushered it into the incandescent digital light, only for it to be tragically captured, reduced to mere templates, and paraded unceremoniously around contemporary visual culture on a giant platform that tracks your eyes. You can’t look away.

Gilbert has terrible amnesia and is therefore having to relearn everything they once thought they knew.

Tuesday, 5 March

Reading Group / Workshop, 10:00-13:00

Withering Blossoms and Blossoming Withers: A Reading Group on Reading, Thinking, and Making (With)
with Seppe-Hazel Laeremans & Joram De Cocker

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

Could blossoming, when considering it to be a movement outwards, become a strategy to imagine multitudes within the field? Could the natural process of withering be a strategy to disrupt the legibility of a picture-perfect nature?

Joram and Seppe-Hazel invite you to a moment of collective research and reading, looking for ways to keep and lose track of the ways in which we absorb all kinds of different stories. Deriving from different methodologies that embrace failure, disorientation, and messiness, this gathering is most importantly a place to collect, assemble and remember. As a moment of collective research, it invites every reader to move at their own pace.

We will provide fruits and vegetables and hide questions and scores in between the texts that will turn the leporello into a place of entrances, exits, and temporary paths. At the end of this 3 hour workshop we might end with a map of a documentation of our readings. We might also fail in our intention to do so, or this table of contents might start to dance around. Who knows.

Both Seppe-Hazel Laeremans (they/them, BE) and Joram De Cocker (he/they, BE) followed the graphic design course at KASK, Ghent, where they started developing a mutual friendship and practice.

Seppe-Hazel’s nomadic existence is led in between João Pessoa, Barcelona, the Italian Apennines and the city of Ghent. Currently they have perched in Porto for an internship. Their research focuses on disorientation and illegibility as strategies for the decolonization and queering of language. Think of all things fruity, fluid, and flowery. Seppe-Hazel is currently finishing their MA at KASK, Ghent.

Joram studied an additional Master in Cultural Studies to elaborate on their interest in the invisible frameworks of storytelling, focusing on narratives of grief in public space. Their practice derives from imagined prompts and guidelines that give shape to an intuitive mnemonic archive. Think of afternoon tea under an empty billboard or a heartbreak on unmaintained putting greens. Joram currently lives in Brussels where they work freelance as a writer, designer and illustrator.

Workshop 2 of 3, 13:15-14:15

THIRD PLACE (Lunch)
with Elsa Baslé & Leyre León Álvarez & Chloé Gourvennec LB

OFFSITE LOCATION: TBD
Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

For the past two summers we have been involved with the Provisional School for Nothing in Sabóia, Portugal, bringing students and artists together to collaborate in an environment of learning, alternative pedagogy, improvisation and performance. Situated between the town's village hall (our home) and the school building (our workspace), a café in the centre of the village has become our third place, where red chairs bear witness to hours spent chatting, eating, writing and more, blurring the distinctions of time.

It became vital to meet there with our different energies, where we would often ask ourselves: is it breakfast, lunch or dinner?

We invite you to join us in a familiar café for collective reflections, exercises and discussions, starting with looking at books, progressing through a series of exercises as well as the writing of a collective newsletter. Over three days, before, in between or after classes - breakfast on the first, lunch on the second and dinner on the third.

For lunch, bring a book you are reading at the moment.

Please note:
— this workshop takes place offsite.
— this workshop takes place across three sessions (Mon, 4.03, 9:00–10:00h / Tues, 5.03, 13:15–14:15h / Wed 6.03, 19:00–20:00h) with the same group of participants, and is not three separate workshops.

okbooks is an association and publishing project founded by Leyre León Álvarez, Elsa Baslé and Chloé Gourvennec. Created in March 2022 and based between the roads of Lyon (Ensba, FR) and Amsterdam (Rietveld Academie, NL), the group is attentive to questions of pedagogy, language and performative materials. lifelong students

Workshop, 14:30-17:30

Download Exchange Programme
with Vincent Brod

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Participants of the Download Exchange Programme will exchange a collection of images found in their download folders. This material serves as a starting point for creating zines, by using / changing / rearranging / recontextualizing / curating / extracting the fragments found in these folders.

The goal of this class is to train our eyes to find artistic value in found material, come up with quick concepts, enable a playful attitude towards the creation of new visuals and direct interaction with material sourced by others.

Bring a laptop, make a folder with 30 files that you found in your download folder (jpgs, pngs, pdfs, fonts, etc.)

Vincent Brod is a designer based in Frankfurt, Germany. He specialises in the intersection of reality TV, pop culture, play, and design. In 2022 he graduated with a diploma in communication design in Darmstadt and is currently pursuing a Master's in Fine Arts at HfG Offenbach.

Public Program, 18:30-21:00

AMATEUR TEACHER, EXPERT STUDENT, PUBLISHING PUBLISHING
with Gerrit Rietveld Academie GD Class 2025

No registration needed, just come by!

Chloé & Anne Julie (Best Food Friends)
Parsa & Sasha (If Mirrors Could Talk)
Matthew (A Flower For You & Me)
Alec & Alva (Parasite Publishing)
Kadri-Ann (Radio Baltica)
Hagar (A Private Balcony)
Mingyu (Independent Publishing in Present Day China)
Idun & Esme (Paths and Playlists)
Einar (Web Utopia Index)
Elliot (The Bulletin Board)

The class will consist of 10 short ‘acts’ that share our research, experiments and results on non-conformist publishing structures, aiming to encourage and challenge others to consider and explore more diverse means of publishing that are not dependent on funding, existing corporate platforms or linear time. These ‘acts’ will be a blend of a more traditional lecture style as well as performative elements, gathering through food, deep listening, visual material etc.

Our own class with Werker Collective concluded in making postcards, showcasing each publishing structure proposed. These postcards will be curated in a mini exhibition/stall.

Wednesday, 6 March

Workshop, 10:00–12:00

a collective autofiction: re-inventing histories
with Yasmin Ghaemmaghami

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

The workshop explores the genre of autofiction—so often a mining of personal and internal experience—through the medium of the group. We will investigate memory, narrative, history, identity, and the boundaries of ‘self’ through the process of thinking, talking, editing, generating, and “lying” together.

By the end, we will construct a narrative piece through our frankensteinian collection of archives.

Participants are invited to bring something to write on (laptop or paper), as well as 5 pieces of 'history' (artifacts), including (but not limited to): diary pages, photos, videos, audio messages, text messages, notes-app entries, receipts, bills, and voice memos. While the medium of the artifact can vary, it must be self-generated (for example: a photo or video featuring or taken by you, rather than a screenshot or download). Digital and physical artifacts are accepted.

Yasmin Ghaemmaghami is an Iranian-American artist and writer currently living in Berlin. Her work explores novelty, intimacy, the found, and the abandoned, and the almost. She enjoys searching for essence(s), relating everything to everything, and weaving a strong web of connections between the topics she investigates.

Tour 2 of 2, 10:00-11:30

Tours de Tours
with Barbara Acevedo Strange & Moritz Appich & Paula Buškevica

OFFSITE LOCATION: KARSTADT (Galeria) Hermannplatz
Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

Tours de Tours invites students to join two guided tours through the landscapes of Berlin, exploring both local urban and natural environments while observing elements of intersection and different temporalities. These excursions also offer moments of discussion and contemplation concerning the inherent need to travel, move, and be moved.

The first voyage will lead us to Dicke Marie, an oak tree renowned as the oldest tree in Berlin, located near the shores of Tegeler See in the Northwest. The second exploration is scheduled to take place at the KARSTADT shopping mall at Hermannplatz in Neukölln. Additionally, members of the expeditions will receive a comprehensive reader beforehand and gain access to a shared research folder compiling our findings related to these two distinctive places. Travel advice and the exact meeting location will be announced before the first tour.

The research will be constantly uploaded an updated and can be found in this shared dropbox ← folder.

Please note that this workshop takes place across two sessions (Sun, 3.03, 11:30–13:30h & Wed 6.03, 10:00–11:30h) with the same group of participants, and is not two separate workshops.

Workshop, 12:30-15:30

Hammer and Chisel
Leaving a trail while carving in stone
with Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas and Laura Martens

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

A collective carving learning process that consists of three chapters. In the first chapter we will share references related to carving, which will be followed by a chapter that will take us on a walk to the cemetery near by. At last, the hammer and chisel will come in handy for a collective learning experience to leave a trail.

Tima (short for Fatima-Ezzahra) El Khammas is a student currently based between Agadir (MAR) and Tallinn (EE). With a background in architecture, she went on to pursue a graphic design BA at the School of Arts of Marrakech (MAR). She is currently enrolled in the MA graphic design program at the Estonian Academy of Arts where she’s organizing the Stand-in School for Graphic Design along with her fellow classmates and teachers.

Laura Martens is a student from Ghent (BE) currently based in Tallinn (EE), where she is proudly following the graphic design masters program at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA). She obtained a masters degree in Graphic Design at KASK School of Arts (Ghent) in 2021 and a masters degree in Urbanism and Spatial Planning at Ghent University in 2023. Together with a group of amazing students and teachers, she is orginizing and hosting the Stand-in School for Graphic Design in Berlin from February 5 until March 15, 2024.

Workshop, 16:00-18:30

Let's go on a (type) walk
with Agnes Isabelle Veevo and Rok Ifko Krajnc

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

Walking around Berlin Wedding neighbourhood, we look at different typographic shapes from found signs. We sketch the letters while we walk, tracking our way through Berlin and giving the letters our own personalities. For the reminder of the time, we will build a map of the neighbourhood by the typographic elements we have found - we are mapping Berlin, together. Let’s take a (type) walk, together. Beginner friendly!

Agnes Isabelle Veevo is a sometimes illustrator and an always graphic designer mostly based in Tallinn, Estonia. She is driven by colours, letters and others around her. She is interested in communal interactions and the friendships they cultivate.

Rok Ifko Krajnc is a graphic design student from Ljubljana. He is currently taking a break from the MA graphic design program at the Estonian Academy of Arts and dedicating himself to the Stand-in School for Graphic Design.

JUST ADDED: Lecture, 16:00-18:30

Parasite Lectures #2
with Pierre Satoshi Benoit & Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas & Urtina Hoxha

Parasite Lectures are a series of discussions about graphic design processes happening during the Stand-in School for Graphic Design. Each lecture will react to the existing programme of the school and will slide in-between planned events.

2. Public Displays
For the second talk, we would like to discuss strategies of display that are used to publish various forms of printed matter in the public realm. The lecture will intermittently be broadcasted during and to the participants of the Type Walk workshop.

The lecture will be given by Fatima-Ezzahra, Urtina and Pierre, 1st and 2nd year students of the MA in graphic design at the Estonian Academy of Arts..

Workshop 3 of 3, 19:00-20:00

THIRD PLACE (Dinner)
with Elsa Baslé, Leyre León Álvarez, Chloé Gourvennec LB

OFFSITE LOCATION: TBD
Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

For the past two summers we have been involved with the Provisional School for Nothing in Sabóia, Portugal, bringing students and artists together to collaborate in an environment of learning, alternative pedagogy, improvisation and performance. Situated between the town's village hall (our home) and the school building (our workspace), a café in the centre of the village has become our third place, where red chairs bear witness to hours spent chatting, eating, writing and more, blurring the distinctions of time.

It became vital to meet there with our different energies, where we would often ask ourselves: is it breakfast, lunch or dinner?

We invite you to join us in a familiar café for collective reflections, exercises and discussions, starting with looking at books, progressing through a series of exercises as well as the writing of a collective newsletter. Over three days, before, in between or after classes - breakfast on the first, lunch on the second and dinner on the third.

Please note:
— this workshop takes place offsite.
— this workshop takes place across three sessions (Mon, 4.03, 9:00–10:00h / Tues, 5.03, 13:15–14:15h / Wed 6.03, 19:00–20:00h) with the same group of participants, and is not three separate workshops.

okbooks is an association and publishing project founded by Leyre León Álvarez, Elsa Baslé and Chloé Gourvennec. Created in March 2022 and based between the roads of Lyon (Ensba, FR) and Amsterdam (Rietveld Academie, NL), the group is attentive to questions of pedagogy, language and performative materials. lifelong students

Thursday, 7 March

Live performance, 18:00-21:00

Sounding the Margins
with oH Radio

No registration needed, just come by!

oH Radio is set to occupy the Stand-in School for an evening of live performances that explore the sounds that occur in the margins, exploring the borders of music, narration, and audio appearances. As we cross over new borders again and again, what we thought was the margin reveals itself as the centre. Gather around for audio art, field recordings, interplanetary transmissions, bootleg tunes and other experiments in sound.

oH is a sound.
o is also a space.
It can be entered.
It seems that oH cannot stand by itself, but it can.
The o has the H to keep it from rolling.
H placed on top of each other forms a little ladder.
H makes connections and connections are rather important.

oH Radio is the online radio of EKA GD MA, initiated in 2021 by Paula Buškevica, each year it changes hosts, this years programming is organized by Shubham Aggarwal and Daria Luchinina.

RESEARCH
9 to 15 March 2024

Throughout this week, participants will engage in a series of lectures, workshops, and film screenings that delve into research projects and methodologies, all within the framework of theory, historical and a contemporary context.

The focus will be on integrating research methods, theory, and history into the execution of design projects. Various events will not only feature research presentations but also encourage attendees to explore both formal and informal research approaches through experimentation.

Saturday, 9 March

Symposium, 18:00–20:00h

Curious: Unruly & Unfinished
with EKA MA Graphic Design Class of 2024

No registration needed, just come by!

An evening of short public presentations sharing in-progress research by the soon-to-graduate students of the MA in Graphic Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Carrier bag, Garg, Væl or a Structure of Desire, Helga Dögg
“By the time I got born the silence of literature was considered an essential virtue and a sign of civilisation. Nannies and grannies told stories aloud to babies, and “primitive” peoples spoke their poems, poor illiterate jerks, but the real stuff, literature, was literally letters, letterpress, little black noiseless marks on paper. And libraries were temples of the goddess of silence attended by vigilant priestesses going Shhhh.”
Let's meet, read and use our spoken words. In the togetherness of the group, we can take the words out of the page and into the space.

Only Metaphors in the Building, Shubham Aggarwal
Hidden in a shifty room under the kitchen of a curry shop, an acoustic window looks inside of a world alive with electrical activity awaiting to be opened. Exactly eight steps down and three to the right, a slightly curving path leads you there. You step into a range of frequencies, a space smelling of defiance, or is that just the curry? A place to make meaning with each other, a place for broadcasting the invisible, a place to reimagine new communities. For all those working late into the night, for all those fugitive to the world as it is, come on in, the curry is still hot.

Fig. 112: On-the-spot materials, Urtina Hoxha
An examination of police files on Albanian Spring 1981 activists, using carefully curated evidence from raids as case studies.

Last one out turns off the lights, Taylor 'Tex' Tehan
Through the act of making space, we explore the multifaceted role of hosting, crafting environments, curating experiences, and establishing support structures to foster a culture of hospitality. Making space can be seen as a gesture in and of itself, but what other gestures contribute to the role of hosting, curating and care-taking. Last one out turns off the lights.

Tools to use together, Agnes Isabelle Veevo
Using collective tools to draw a map through the sketches and ideas of upcoming projects of togetherness.

Jura Suisse, Pierre Satoshi Benoit
16.08.95, a giant pink condom for a Stop Aids campaign. 06.07.96, the belly of Frank Zappa wearing leopard briefs. 05.10.09, the shoulder of a woman holding a perfectly spherical scoop of ice cream. For over three decades, a homeless man tirelessly covered thousands of advertisement posters in the industrial city of La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland), with three small circles surrounded by the date of his passage. With a single marker pen, the vagrant aroused the curiosity of the passersby, exasperating the private holding in control of the Swiss public displays, and teasing the local police enforcements until his passing in 2021.

Daria Luchinina
Hello world. I’m sending a message to you. Can you hear me?

Playing Word Chain, Oleksandra Hruzynska
Mono-play, two unrealistic characters playing a simple game that helps them to connect the present and the future of their shared experience.

The outcome and process of this symposium was supervised by the artist Kasia Fudakowski.

Monday, 11 March

Workshop, 10:00-13:00

Bedsheets Joints Jeans
with Archil Tsereteli

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

This workshop takes inspiration from the sport of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) and translates the techniques involved in practicing a “roll” into an act of collective making.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a self-defence martial art and combat sport based on grappling, ground fighting, and submission holds. BJJ focuses on taking one's opponent down to the ground, gaining a dominant position, and using a number of techniques to force them into submission via joint locks.

The structure of the workshop will be organised by a series of prompts. The process of designing and making is often an attempt to give form to ideas, bringing images into existence, this process can be full of confusion and frustration. It is also a process that usually requires group effort. How do we stay calm during this arduous work? How do we communicate when things get tense?

Participants will work in pairs to create a case for a BJJ mat. Please come with pieces of fabric or clothing that will be stitched to create the mat-cover. We will use techniques such as sewing and experiment with other forms of connecting.

Talk / Workshop, 14:00-17:00

Exquisite Hypercorpse
with Miriam Humm

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

Exquisite corpse — Surrealist technique and game by which an outcome is collectively assembled through each collaborator adding to a composition in sequence.

hyper- (prefix) — implies something above and beyond, in this case referring to hypertext or hypermedia. These go beyond the possibilities of traditional text/media through the implementation of hyperlinks.

The class unites these two concepts and will be organised into two parts. Firstly a presentation of Linking Nodes, a short lecture investigating systems of hypertextual knowledge transfer and the idea of a world brain. It can be read here https://linking-nodes.net/. We will discuss the ideas of hypertextal, networked thinking and how they relate to graphic design.

Secondly an experiment in a playful approach to non-linear practice by collectively building an exquisite corpse hypertext that connects each part through links.

Note: Bring a computer.

Miriam Humm is a digital and print designer based in Berlin. She finished her MFA at Klasse Digitale Grafik, HFBK Hamburg last year including a semester abroad at EKA GD MA in Tallinn. During her BA at BURG Halle, she completed an Erasmus semester at KASK Ghent and interned at NODE Berlin Oslo. Her work has been shown at Le Signe Chaumont, It’s a book Leipzig, Graphic Design Festival Scotland and Weltformat Luzern among others.

Workshop, 19:30-20:30

Heraldic Devicemaking
with Zody Burke

Maximum 20 participants
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL

The heraldic device, or coat of arms, is a form of insignia design which came into general use among European nobility in the 12th century. Heraldic devices are associated with historical legacy and inheritance; they are sigils denoting membership to a noble family. As design-objects, they invite a certain response as class-markers of European wealth and significance.

What if we were to experiment with recontextualizing the visual language of the heraldic device to talk about different kinds of legacies? For example, creating our own coats of arms could invoke personal histories, histories other than Western ones, or speculative future legacies.

This workshop will teach students to work with epoxy clay, an air-drying medium which hardens to a plastic consistency. They will make small high-relief tablets inspired by the visual language of the heraldic device. After the clay cures (overnight) we will discuss what additional applications the works may have.

Zody Burke (b.1991, Manhattan) is an American multimedia artist and musician who is currently living and working in Tallinn, Estonia. She creates cyphers through sculpture and sound, through which to cartograph the complexity of American identity within late capitalism, and interface world-building with geological time. Her material practice ranges from ceramic high-relief to monumental sculpture, experimental music, video, illustration and more.

Tuesday, 12 March

Live Action Reading Group, 10:00-13:00

Composition as Explanation
with Insa Deist & Hjördis Lyn Behncken

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

As a product of various confrontations, designers develop narratives and positions by means of collective and/or individual language. From this emerge creative, sometimes sprawling self-designations, words, categories, subcategories, and expressions of an expanded concept of design and are reflected in theoretical texts, essays, etc. in the design research field.

Lyrical Design, Reflective Design, Emotional Design, Disobedient Design, Ontological Design...

Which worlds do (these) language(s) represent and how accessible are they outside (but also inside) a class meeting, an art school, a cultural scene, a design context?

By collectively and individually assembling and embodying various texts and borrowing positions within a LARG (Live Action Reading Group), we aim to develop a potential response through (com)position. We gather different texts from design theory, poetry, critical studies, and language theory, and provide the opportunity to embody these positions within a LARG.

Notes on is a Berlin based design and research studio run collaboratively by Insa Deist and Hjördis Lyn Behncken. Founded in 2023 and rooted in many years of friendship and collaboration, Notes on is working on and in between digital and analog formats for cultural institutions, as well as close cooperations with art producers, joint teaching activities and research formats.

Lecture, 14:00-15:00

These URLs will save the IRL: real problems and imaginary websites
with Nilya Musaeva

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

These URLs will save the IRL is a result of a two-year-long speculation on the topic of German art schools’ websites by Nilya Musaeva. The project started a hypothesis that German art schools sometimes deliberately create opaque interaction patterns to create an obstacle for potential applicants. During the research, I conducted UX tests, accessed archived versions of the websites, made design/UX analysis, comparison tables, wrote manuscripts, and travelled on the spot undercover to compare the website and real-life accessibility.

This turned into the publication, collaboratively designed by 25 students of University of Arts Bremen and Klasse Digitale Grafik Hamburg. I will tell you about my project and methods I used, struggles I went through and some conclusions. We can also do some exercises and try to adapt the websites to our needs, create and bend, stretch and inspect.

Nilya Musaeva was born in Moscow, Russia, has Azerbaijani roots and lives in Bremen, Germany. She is a multimedia artist, researcher and world wide web enthusiast. Has interface and graphic design skills, highly interested in finding non-profitable ways to use them, as well as research the institutions behind graphic design education. Keywords: grotesque infrastructures, humour in digital media, media archaeology, art school websites.

Workshop, 15:00-17:00

Dressing in Disguise
with Shubham Aggarwal

Maximum 15 participants
[register here]

...A little stage fright. You take in lots of air before you make your relatively casual entrance. And you’re on.

It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role … It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.

In publishing, individuals often transform out of ordinary forms in order to facilitate production and dissemination of knowledge. This can more notably be seen in spaces with restrictive publishing regimes, where most knowledge becomes inaccessible or underrepresented.

In this session, we put on masks, costumes and take on roles as ways to step out of our everyday appearances. This workshop takes cues from theatre routines, articulation exercises, dance and performance drills as methods to creating awareness over the mechanisms underlying our daily communication procedures, as well as providing the participants the opportunity to develop tactics and instruments of their own.

We hide, we bend, we stretch, we jump, we swerve, and we might event dance. Pro tip, wear something comfortable.

Screening & Discussion, 18:30-20:30

SCHOOL, FAMILY, STATE
with Claudia Doms

No registration needed, just come by!

a film by Claudia Doms
with Filip Birkner, Vasily Dyakonov, Klara Eneroth, Natalia Kukina, Lesya Kuranova, and special appearances by Sebastian Campos, Sam de Groot and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
running time: 40 minutes

'School Family State' is a documentary film about a group of graphic design students from the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and BHSAD in Moscow. Closely linked to her own biography, graphic designer Claudia Doms follows the diverse protagonists in their last year in art school and a year after graduation. The film reveals the unique mind set that exists in the isolated space that the art school provides, contrasted with the different pathways that follow graduation.

Following the screening will be a discussion with Claudia, moderated by Andrew J Beltran and Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas.

Claudia Doms is a graphic designer with a background in stage painting. Having moved from Bochum to Amsterdam to London to Moscow, she is now settled in Leipzig, where she has been exploring the relationship between art studies and market realities in various forms and formats, including lectures and educational projects at HGB Leipzig and Burg Giebichenstein Halle.

Wednesday, 13 March

Walk / Discussion, 10:00–12:00

Following a stream of thoughts: A contemplating walk with the Panke as backbone.
with João Pedro Nogueira and Laura Martens

Maximum 15 participants
[register here]

Near the Stand-in School, a river flows. We will follow along this river, the Panke, from the nearest accessible point to where it flows into a larger one.

We will notice that on the riverbanks some objects were left behind. Maybe these objects are starting points to our memories in the city, or the future, or far away. What sorts of things can happen when we try to not lose sight from the river flow?

There will be walking, talking, sharing, listening, reacting, reading, collecting, keeping, pointing, imagining, and seeing. There will be streams of thoughts flowing into larger ones.

Please note:
— this workshop takes place offsite, at Panke river inside the Wedding neighbourhood, but participants will meet at the school first.
— Participants are invited to share personal and collective memories, the mood is contemplation.

Lecture, 12:00–13:00

Research, design, etc.
with Jonas Berthod

No registration needed, just come by!

Research is both simple and complex, exciting and dull, familiar and arcane. In the field of graphic design, it is approached differently by practitioners, academics and those in between. Designers are often interested in incorporating research into their process, or perhaps even required to graduate, but sometimes lack method and direction to undertake research. Veering between a how-to guide and a buffet of references, this lecture shares key steps to conduct research, presents tools and methods you could apply, and hopefully proposes some inspiring possibilities to approach your own interests with a research mindset.

Jonas Berthod is a researcher, lecturer and ex-graphic designer working at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne (HES-SO) and Kingston School of Art, London. After completing a PhD on the role of the Swiss Design Awards on the design scene, he is currently undertaking postdoctoral research as part of the project “The Cultural Turn of Swiss Graphic Design from the 1980s to 2020”. He also leads a research project on Herbert Matter and co- organises the yearly exhibition Behind the Books in London.

Reading Group / Collective Writing, 14:00-16:00

How transforming words makes them corpo-real
with Benji Ciappini

Maximum 20 participants
[register here]

How transforming words made them corpo-real will be a moment to read, write, and talk together around the theme of language as an influential material presence and a world-building tool.

The participants are invited to read together a selection of texts chosen by Benni that investigate language as a con-textual, political, and impactful presence, and share ideas on the topic.

These texts will be later used physically to create a new, collaborative text, to transform our conversations into convers-action, and to play with words as a communal practice.

Benni/Benji Ciappini (she/they) is a visual researcher and word chewer, born in Rimini (IT) and now based in the Netherlands. Benni’s research inhabits the blurred territories of images and words, seeing in both an opportunity for encounter, play, and imagination. They are interested in how both textual and visual language can become tools for collaboration and horizontal making.

Workshop, 16:00–17:00

# Webring
with Karthik Palepu

No registration needed, just come by!

A social bookmarking and p2p knowledge sharing repository

The workshop is centred around the idea of knowledge organisation sharing and publishing over internet.

In graphic design, self-publishing is the conscious decision to release one's works into the public instead of going through traditional gatekeepers like print magazines or design companies. By enabling graphic designers to directly share their own aesthetic ideas and design philosophies with a larger audience, this promotes creative freedom and elevates various voices in the design community.

Social bookmarking techniques in graphic design involve the methodical arrangement and distribution of design materials, guides, and ideas, which efficiently builds a community library of visual inspiration and expertise. Through bookmark sharing on design platforms, practitioners add to a dynamic ecology of ideas and methods, bringing a range of viewpoints and design approaches to the creative world.

Creating webrings in the field of graphic design functions as a peer to peer method to make, distribute and collaborate.

In this rapid workshop we explore basic methods of publishing personal knowledge with free and opensource tools.

The workshop requires:
A browser that let's us export html files of bookmarks (ex:Firefox)
A PC
a text editor to customise webpages using CSS
a free hosting space ie; github/gitlab, Netlifydrop etc.

and we compile these pages bookmarks files to make a webring for the public school.

Guest Lecture, 18:30–20:30

On V
with Till Gathmann

No registration needed, just come by!

In this lecture I want to give some insight into my artistic research about the self-taught scholar Alfred Kallir, his theory of the historical development of writing, and his understanding of the psychic dimensions of letterforms. Kallir, born 1899 in Vienna, ended up in London during the war years, where he in 1942 became fascinated with the letter V, its meaning and forerunners.

I would like to address the ways of working with the biographical and theoretical material. What happens to it under the conditions of different media? How does research gain shape, artistic form? I will discuss this with the help of the principle of transposition and the concepts of model and material, the latter used both in aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory.

Furthermore the Freudian concept of transference is of importance: What is the space of relations created in the process of trying to understand? What triggers your interest (or aversion), what does the object of interest do to you (or does not)? How does it shape you, while you trying to shape it? And: What is research for after all?

I will speak about the challenges to write a book as a book designer and to write about the history of writing as a typographer – and the world that opened while writing a biography about an unknown person and a letter.

Till Gathmann is a typographer, artist and writer based in Berlin. He specialised in conceptual collaborations on artist books, is art director of the photo magazine Camera Austria, and created the design for the Kyiv Biennial (2015), Public Art Munich (2017), and 11. Berlin Biennale (2019/20).

Thursday, 14 March

Party, 18:30–00:00

Closing Party of the Stand-in School

No registration needed, just come by!

Join in celebrating the end of the Stand-in School (for now?), there will be music, drinks, snacks, a silent auction for the furniture*, and more.

18:30: Doors
19:00: Silent Auction opens
19:30: Launch of the Stand-in School Bulletins
20:00: A small toast
20:00– closing party, music, and drinks

*A selection of furniture from the Stand-in School will be available through a silent auction. Winners of the auction will be notified the following day. The furniture will be available for pick-up only, at the end of April, after the final use of it in the space is over.