REL @ Making Futures School

August 30th – September 15th, 2019

Haus der Statistik, Berlin

Making Futures School is part of the Making Futures Bauhaus+, an action research project that addresses questions of architecture as a collective form and architecture as a resource. Departing from these two perspectives, it operates as an experimental research unit that advances future paths for architectural practice and education. It was initiated in 2018 as a cooperation between raumlabor and the Berlin University of the Arts on the occasion of the Bauhaus’ centenary.

Over the course of two weeks, over 80 participants will take part in a diverse curriculum at the Making Futures School that is convened by practitioners in the field of spatial practices. Acting as a non-disciplinary learning environment, the School proposes, designs, builds, negotiates, maintains, performs and celebrates an educational and convivial space in and around Haus der Statistik, Berlin. At the same time, it becomes a dynamic actor within a process of urban transformation, serving as a common sphere of action between participants, neighbours and civic society.

Radical Empathy Lab

In a two-week workshop during the Making Futures School we will experience and experiment with holistic and relational –versus informational– learning, that embraces our knowing bodies as rightful allies. The general understanding of knowledge production is often understood as being disembodied, and with the emphasis on the conventional tradition of rational thought. But the materiality of our human existence as a multidimensional being and its sentient qualities, appear to be a key starting point for experiencing a critical practice, for a liberating and emancipatory learning, and for acts of knowing.

The practices we will experiment with, will range from radical pedagogies, Deep Listening to Yogic and meditational elements, that –along with some theoretical reflections– will support a holistic, non-separationist collective knowledge production and a re-learning of subaltern knowledges, that embrace connectivity to ourselves, the Other, and the place of the affective encounters.