Artist-in-residence Nick Shepherd en zijn collega-onderzoekers Christian Ernsten en Nicola Visser organiseerden in januari 2018 de eerste Winter School van de internationale Master of Museology van de Reinwardt Academie (de opleiding voor cultureel erfgoed van de Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten). De winterschool vond plaats in samenwerking met ARTIS. ARTIS was een van de eerste musea van Amsterdam. In het verleden omvatte de verzameling ook ongeveer 12.000 objecten uit Afrika, Oceanië en Azië. Momenteel bestaat het uit een park, een verzameling levende dieren, planten en bomen, een "dode" natuurhistorische collectie (knuffelbeesten, geologie, schelpen, skeletten), kunstverzamelingen, geschiedenis en etnografie, en 28 nationale monumenten. Het onderwerp van onderzoek tijdens de winterschool was het idee van een dierentuin in het Antropoceen. Hoe beschouwen we dierentuinen in het algemeen, en ARTIS in het bijzonder, in een tijdperk waarin menselijke impact op de aarde en haar ecosystemen de belangrijkste factor is om rekening mee te houden? Hoe reageren dierentuinen op de uitdagingen van biodiversiteit en klimaatverandering? Hoe ziet een dierentuin van en voor het Antropoceen eruit? Gedurende een 'walking seminar' in de dierentuin en door middel van embodied research onderzochten de studenten de alternatieve toekomst van de dierentuin voorstellen in het Antropoceen.
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Me: Seeing is a creative act
When we appointed the photographer Jeroen Musch as the new Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, we could not have known that the start of his term would coincide with the death of one of the most influential writers that has changed our idea of seeing, the English art critic John Berger, who died aged 90 on 2 January 2017. In his seminal essay Ways of Seeing he writes: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.”
Although Berger was initially concerned with how we perceive art, he quickly called our attention to the wider world and introduced looking as a political act that challenges us to exercise our sensibilities and to ask ourselves: ‘What do we see? How are we seen? Might we see differently?’ For Berger, the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled, and therefore the act of looking becomes an effective tool to discover something (else) about ourselves and the situation in which we are living. -
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Amsterdam ARTIS Zoo and the Anthropocene
De Winter School van de Reinwardt Academie (Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) is een onderzoeksproject naar een actueel erfgoed-vraagstuk. Tijdens de Winter School 2018 deden de studenten van de Master of Museology onder leiding van artist-in-residence Nick Shepherd in ARTIS onderzoek naar hoe we dierentuinen in ons huidige tijdperk (het Antropoceen) moeten beschouwen en wat voor alternatieven er zijn voor de dierentuin van de toekomst. Het resultaat is, samen met dat van onderzoeksprojecten in Berlijn (naar Erfgoedwandelingen in de stad) en Groningen (persoonlijk reflecties n.a.v. wandelingen in deze provincie) vastgelegd in een krant.
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Me and the tourist
In January 2018, the visual artist, photographer and writer Jan Hoek was the Breitner Academy’s Artist in Residence. He and all the academy’s students studied and documented the relationship between residents and tourists over the course of a week in central Amsterdam.
On February 12, 2019 a publication was presented at the Breitner Academy: the best portraits are published in a book made of postcards. Have a look here
Amsterdam gets so many tourists nowadays that local people have come to view them as an anonymous plague – but have they forgotten that each tourist is a unique individual with a personal reason for visiting the city? For the Me and the Tourist project, Jan Hoek and Breitner Academy students probed preconceptions about tourists, and looked for ways of reversing, flexing, confirming or exploring these stereotypes. The project was part of the academy’s theme week around the subject of diversity.
From 29 January to 2 February, all 130 or so students at the Breitner Academy went into the city and seek out new ways of portraying tourists using photography, video, drawing or performance. At the end of the week, the students presented the results at the academy, and the best works were selected for exhibition from 15 - 22 February 2018 in different hotels in Amsterdam: Q-Factory Hotel Amsterdam, Clink, The Student Hotel, Andaz Hotel Prinsengracht and Hilton Double Tree. The hotel guests got an idea of how they are viewed.
Jan Hoek, 33, is a fine artist, photographer and writer. Much of the artist’s work reflects his abiding interest in 'the other', in the broadest sense of that term. The previous artists in residence at the Breitner Academy were art critic Terry Barrett, remix artist Eboman and visual artist Helmut Dick. -
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Silent Occupation
Over the course of two weeks in January 2018, 180 students from the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam and I joined forces during the Winter School. In this two-week research and design programme, students of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture explored the Kop van Java (Head of Java Island), an as yet undeveloped plot in the centre of Amsterdam. This new generation of designers is not just designing our built environment, but our mental space as well. How do we experience the space that is designed for us? How does it influence us and others? The space we presume to be our own (privately, architectonically, legally) is not as solid as architectural drawings or documents of ownership might suggest. We have laws regulating the right to have a home, and the quality of that home, but how about the right to silence? Or the right to speak?
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Clay City: Alexander Brodsky Artist in Residence
This publication presents Clay City, the 2019 Winter School at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture led by the Russian architect and artist Alexander Brodsky. He was invited as an artist-in-residence as part of the AIR programme of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Together with Brodsky, 136 first and second-year students worked tirelessly from 14 to 25 January 2019 to collectively build an imaginary city of clay. Temporarily occupying the Academy’s courtyard, it was an impressive sight: a vast, dense cityscape handmade with an incredible wealth of detail. It took us on an architectural tour through history from ancient Rome to future Amsterdam. Then left to the Dutch elements for six weeks, the city started to disintegrate. This edition of the Winter School was not about choosing a winning presentation; instead it centred on the idea of making something that exceeds the individual to achieve an end result to be collectively proud of.