tread softly: the city, migration and memory

urban talk: 11 October 2017, 7 pm

Introductory conversation led by participating students about the works and their creation. The conversation is moderated by Agata Lisiak from Bard College Berlin and features in the BOX Freiraum series "StadtGespräche" (Urban Talks).

exhibition: 12 - 31 October 2017

A collaboration between Bard College Berlin, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and box freiraum. 

„Tread softly because you tread on my dreams “, begs W.B. Yeats in the last line of his famous poem. His call invites us to rethink our relationship between the well-trodden paths of the city and our experiences and memories of migration.  

The exhibition deals with migratory and migration memories in and of the city. It is an ongoing project, developed collaboratively by students and professors of Bard College Berlin and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Combining academic and artistic enquiry and expression, it aims to demonstrate the potential of learning, teaching, and researching in socially and culturally diverse and inclusive environments. Almost all the students have a migratory background, forced and/or voluntary. Some pay for their education, some receive scholarships and some are not even officially enrolled. 

The exhibits stem from individual research projects in the Liberal Arts programs at Bard College Berlin. They grapple with issues of identity and belonging, relating migrants’ memories to the Holocaust memorialisation in Berlin, dealing with gender visibility and invisibility in the city and trying irony as a tool to cope with the ambiguities of migrant existence. The installation in which these exhibits are embedded is designed and built by Students of Art and Architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Responding to the challenge of finding transitory, adaptable, disappearing and reappearing architectures, it seeks neither to master nor to serve the individual embedded pieces, but to enter a dialogue with them. 

Vienna and Berlin, two magnets for recent migratory movement, provide the double-centred, elliptical points of departure for a collaboration between education in the Liberal Arts and Architecture. This exhibition proposes alternative conditions and possibilities for experimental education, trusting in students’ creativity and embracing collaborative, collective, engaged learning and teaching. We hope to spark a discussion about how experimental education could be used to help regenerate the arrival city’s innovative potential and allow more people to meaningfully participate in it. 

—Dr. Marion Detjen and Univ. Prof. Michelle Howard