With: Rick Geene, Thomas Grommers, Alec Mateo, Monique Todd, and Weronika Wojda.
To register: infugam@gmail.com
Website: www.sandberg.nl/main-department-critical-studies
Facebook: www.facebook.com/sandbergcriticalstudies/
The Critical Studies Department offers a two-year Master’s programme in critical thought and inquiry. The programme provides an open, interdisciplinary environment for the development of an independent research practice while giving students a rigorous grounding in contemporary critical theory and political thought. We are especially interested in forms of study and inquiry at odds with traditional academic frameworks, including practice-led research and experimental approaches to critical and speculative writing.
Over the course of their studies, participants have the possibility to pursue a self-initiated research project with great autonomy, working individually or collectively with our team of supervisors. Research projects are presented in a series of regular colloquia, which serve as spaces for collective discussion and exchange. Additionally, participants are provided with the support and resources for the development of collaborative projects related to their research, such as publications, screenings, or symposia.
Alongside the research trajectory, participants take part in an intensive programme of seminars, lectures, and workshops. This programme provides a thorough introduction to key debates in critical theory and continental philosophy, explores alternative modes of research and knowledge production, and supports participants in the development of a writing practice. In tandem with this, specific themes are addressed in depth during regular lectures and seminars by visiting speakers.
STRUCTURE
The Critical Studies curriculum is structured around weekly theory seminars, bi-weekly writing workshops, monthly guest talks and research colloquia, and tutorials with supervisors. In each of the three terms that comprise our academic year, the writing and theory courses focus on different themes and are taught by different core tutors. Classes are usually scheduled on three weekdays (currently, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays); alongside the scheduled classes, students work independently on coursework and their own research projects.
STUDENTS
Critical Studies welcomes applicants from a range of backgrounds, including writers, theorists, artists, activists, editors, curators, educators, and other cultural practitioners interested in exploring points of convergence between research, practice, and writing. Critical Studies explicitly welcomes applicants who want to diverge from a trajectory that they have previously embarked on, seeking an environment that offers space for further development and experimentation.
Kunstkapel, Basement
Kunstkapel, Front Yard
Sign up: embodiedknowledgebureau@sandberg.nl
Kunstkapel, Top Floor
Kunstkapel, Top Floor
Sign up: alix.stria@sandberg.nl
Kunstkapel, Top Floor
Kunstkapel, Front Yard
Sign up: embodiedknowledgebureau@sandberg.nl
Kunstkapel, Basement
Kunstkapel, Top Floor
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Kunstkapel, Top Floor
Kunstkapel, Top Floor
Kunstkapel, Front Yard
Sign up: embodiedknowledgebureau@sandberg.nl
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Kunstkapel, Top Floor
Kunstkapel, Basement
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Website: sandberg.nl/main-department-design
Instagram: @sandbergdesigndepartment
The Design Department is a two-year Master’s programme that provides a collaborative environment for students to develop their projects and practices. As the design discipline is increasingly hard to define, the Design Department reserves space and time for critical reflection on how to relate and contribute to—as well as problematize—contemporary design discourse. The open structure of the curriculum allows the tutors and students to reflect on, and respond to, urgent topics and current discourses. Considering design as a practice of “making things public,” we attend to the politics inherent in design, through actively opening up, sharing, and reviewing design in progress. Modes of expression range from print work, digital interfaces, films and videos, network infrastructures, games, performances, writing, educational platforms, audio tours, and more.
We are looking for students from a variety of backgrounds such as visual and performing arts, spatial design and architecture, philosophy, and computer programming. More important than prior education is a curious and self-determined research attitude and an openness to transgress predetermined disciplinary boundaries and collaborate. The Design Department furthermore welcomes students that are underrepresented in the field of design, art, education, and beyond.
Students of the Design Department apply to the programme with a project proposal, which might become the starting point for a deeper investigation of a subject matter or method. However, as students are expected to critically reflect on their own positions and assumptions, they often find themselves challenging and reformulating the very foundation of their practice. The department sees its role in stimulating and nurturing this process, supporting students in tackling their challenges and in opening up toward new discoveries.
With some exceptions, regular classes are scheduled on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursdays and Fridays are usually kept open for students to work independently and further develop their projects.
Next to individual guidance and collective meetings with tutors, the writing trajectory for both the first and the second year students accompanies the ongoing research and making process. The practice of writing helps students to work through obstacles, gain new insights, develop their own voices, and learn how to articulate their work.
We furthermore plan a manifold of extracurricular activities throughout the year, such as field trips, visits to exhibitions, festivals, and conferences. Specifically invited artists, designers, and researchers contribute to the programme with their expertise by means of lectures, seminars, and workshops.
Website: www.dirtyartdepartment.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/dirtyartdepartment
Instagram: @dirtyartdepartment
The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world, and other people and ourselves. It’s a place to build objects or totems; spiritual streams or websites; revolutions or business models; paintings or galaxies.
The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks, however, to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied. Since “god is dead” and “the spectacle” is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.
The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds, including designers, artists, bankers, sceptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious. Please enjoy the trip.
The aim of the Dirty Art Department is to develop singular practices, both individual and collective, and, regardless of medium or subject, to give an insight into how to place these practices into the existing contexts of art, design, performance, writing, pizza making, etc. The final challenge is to create new contexts, that is: the transformation of reality, or the “revolution” in contemporary terms. The Dirty Art Department promotes a strong theoretical and philosophical agenda and is open to dangerous attempts and spectacular failures. It sees itself as a journey, and wherever it stops off, it remembers that “Any Space is the Place.”
Milestones: Following the tenet of a non-pedagogic pedagogy, the department see its role as being to create situations for things to happen in: from buying one way tickets “on the road to nowhere,” initiating the occupation of Papaverweg and the creation of the autonomous living and project space Post-Norma, to the long term collaboration with the Macao Collective—including the Wandering School in 2016, a collective living and social sculpture which was nominated for the inaugural Milan Design Prize in 2017; followed by the Wandering School Part 2: Revolution or Bust! in 2018, a dérive that included meeting Franco “Bifo” Berardi as the oracle of Delphi, walking through the wilderness to Athens, clashes with Titans, a peace offering to the gods, helping to rebuild a refugee centre, regular encounters with tear gas, and just simply being there. The collective film Revolution or Bust! was presented at the third Youth Biennale of Bolzano in 2018, curated by Christian Jankowski.
Venom is a self-centered mixed media performance based between diez gallery and De Thomas Cultural center. Boyan Montero shares that space with packaged works by Sands Murray-Wassink and other artists as well as unpackaged works by Karin Iturralde. Composer Boris Bezemer has also joined the mixture. The performance at De Thomas is on Friday June 10th 20–20:45h.
Website: https://sandberg.nl/main-department-fine-arts
The Fine Arts Department retains a focus on autonomy and making, while addressing the social and economic roles of art production. During the Fine Arts Master’s, our students become more of themselves, stronger in who they are and what position they intend to take on in society. They reflect on their own practice, and what it might mean on a grander scale, especially in relation to understanding one’s position in the world. The department helps to create and test a student’s individual parameters, helping them to gauge the effect of their work, and challenging them to be able to critically support a piece in the context of its exhibition.
At the core of the programme are the consistent conversations held with the main tutors throughout the two-year period. Alongside these regular dialogues, guest tutors are invited for seminars and tutorials both in the first and second year. Studio time thus alternates with an extensive series of workshops, seminars, and one-off events that also steer the student to less familiar areas within their practice. In addition to these guests and activities, an annual group exhibition is held early on in the year and research excursions abroad take place twice annually. These trips are subdivided in focus and aim: for second-year students, an intense winter thesis writing and reflection period is organized abroad (in the past to the Arctic Circle, The Isle of Lewis, and Delphi), while the first years partake in a shorter programmed excursion outside of the Netherlands. All students join in a department-wide spring research trip (in the past to Glasgow, Athens, Naples, and Sharjah).
Several times a year, students come together with staff and tutors to discuss common interests that have emerged and can be addressed with the help of experts who, following these sessions, are invited accordingly. Student-led activities, such as group crits, film nights, and Monday lunches are encouraged, while internal platforms are in place to promote small-scale try-outs and experimentation in presentation. In short, the Sandberg Instituut functions as a base for the Fine Arts students, while encouraging participants to develop and test their practice both within and beyond the school.
Website: www.immediatespaces.nl
Facebook: www.facebook.com/immediatespaces
Instagram: www.instagram.com/immediatespaces
Studio for Immediate Spaces is a two-year Master’s programme on space-related practices. It questions how politics, ecology, society, technology, and economy manifest in space. Asking how they play out in reality also defines different possibilities of how to come together, how to manage work, leisure, resources, and commons in a time of ecological collapse and social divide. Through site-specific works, location-based installations, situated research, and context-driven scenography the course participants explore spatially engaging strategies beyond disciplinary boundaries.
Space is both a theoretical entity and a real thing—continuously informing one another. Thus the aim of the programme is to explore possibilities to work in space and to find means to act on it. Therefore the Studio looks for ways to deepen the understanding of, and knowledge about, space and guide the course participants toward critical positions that positively and productively engage with the world around them.
The Studio is set up as a post-disciplinary laboratory for testing ideas that have relevance for how we live today and how we could live tomorrow beyond the disciplines of art, design, and architecture—disciplines that continue to fail to bring about change, as they stay trapped in their inherent logics and economic systems. The question of “how to live together” serves as a guiding principle for the course’s approach. The practices developed during the course are informed by contemporary discourse on space, yet they foster independence and criticality and push for an execution on the scale of one to one, to directly engage with a given context. As artistic positions they inform the discourse of spatial practices; as design positions they propose alternative solutions with artistic means.
The Studio for Immediate Spaces invites “undisciplinary spatialists” who prefer the collective effort of making space over the alleged-ingenious gestures of the individual master. It aims to develop practices that are informed by an uncompromised and autonomous perspective in a time when critical spatial experts are so direly needed to proactively and productively shape a ecologically healthy, socially just, and beautiful world.
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Guided experience (max. 4 ppl.)
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
From Kunstkapel to Fabulous Future (Gaasterlandstraat 3).
Guided experience (max. 4 ppl.)
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Guided experience (max. 4 ppl.)
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Guided experience (max. 4 ppl.)
From Kunstkapel to Fabulous Future (Gaasterlandstraat 3).
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Guided experience (max. 4 ppl.)
Kunstkapel, Ground Floor
Guided experience (max. 4 ppl.)
From Kunstkapel to Fabulous Future (Gaasterlandstraat 3).
Kunstkapel, Lake Front Bar
Website: disarm.design
Instagram: @d_d.sandberg
Disarming Design is a temporary master’s programme committed to cooking, making, weaving, screening, giving, talking, playing, mapping, workshopping, sensing, celebrating, reclaiming, documenting, forming, witnessing, juxtaposing, tripping, translating, transposing, sculpting, publishing, and unfolding.
”Disarming” positions design as a cultural tool to oppose authority and create knowledge with affection, desire, and imagination. The curriculum aims to question, challenge, and locate the emancipatory potential of design and other organizational art forms. We uphold artistic practices that deal with conditions of anti-coloniality, activism, and entangled histories, and operate at the intersection of crafts, language, architecture, community, politics, and translation.
The programme focuses on the artistic work of the participants—helping them find their own methods, language, and tools—in addition to participative projects brought in by the team and institution. It is set up as a studio-space-led programme where students receive feedback from peers and tutors on their research, projects, and practices. The curriculum has an open structure and forms its final shape in response to the students’ different initiatives, collaborations, and developments.
The first year generated a cross-pollination of ideas and initiatives, alongside a questioning of the conditions in which the work and programme existed. Attention was on wayfinding, experimenting with new platforms, synchronizing languages, and responding to changing and challenging conditions. We moved as a department to an external self-ran location. Students campaigned for Palestinian rights and wrote an open letter to the board asking for a public statement to speak out against violence and oppression, and condemn all actions that violate human rights.
The second year started with an exhibition Disclosing Discomforts, that sketched research through action, participation, performance, and installation. The research further deepened through and in the essay that each student wrote. All together, this lead to the development of experimental practices that seek to imagine and enact ways of being together otherwise.
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
Occuring at The Conference Booth (ground floor).
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
Occuring at The Conference Booth (ground floor).
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
Occuring at The Conference Booth (ground floor).
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
The former Courthouse, Courtroom (Balcony)
Website: https://fforfact.net/
Instagram: @f___fact
At a moment in time when facts are framed as fantasy and feelings equal truth, F for Fact investigates different forms of knowledge through an artistic lens.
But what counts as knowledge? What’s the difference between truth and meaning? How are narratives shaped and by whom? What defines authenticity and what do claims of authorship and copyright mean today for the arts?
F for Fact is a two-year course where participants work on individual and collective projects in which the factual, philosophical, or tangible world is the point of departure.
The programme revolves around the interaction between knowledge and imagination and how to discover new forms of documentary storytelling.
We look at the difference between fiction and truth, fact and belief systems, and fake news and honest fantasies by working with a number of different sources. In short: we critically revisit the past and speculate about possible futures.
F for Fact has a strong relation to the outside world.
At this school of second thoughts we playfully explore the nature of personal, factual, embodied, digital, and spiritual information. We actively connect with other domains through official and unofficial institutions related to the sciences, performing arts, architecture, and society itself.
Being an interdisciplinary master’s programme, the research around a subject and the form in which it is shared are closely related.
Reading, creative writing, and open discussions about hopes, fears, and dilemmas of any nature are a part of F for Fact from the beginning of the first year. The thesis prepared in the second year will be a natural follow-up to this.
A strong collective consists of a diversity of individuals who each bring their own particular qualities and identity, and see individual authorship as a matter of taking responsibility rather than a naturally expected position.
Are you permanently distracted due to a curious nature? Do you have a critical eye and an open mind? Are you an unconventional thinker and maker with a proactive nature? You’re warmly invited to apply!
Truth has always been stranger than fiction. It still is.
Please also see https://www.fforfact.net