Radical Hospitalities, Radical Pedagogies
Expanding Academy and situated knowledge in the Arts in the frame of ARTICULATE 2022
Public debate
with Sara Alberani, Zoe Butt, Nico Dockx , Sandi Hilal, Morten Goll and Judith Wielander
moderated by Johan Pas
Expanding Academy invites and engages in this public debate with two specific ‘art’ projects that are generating spaces of radical hospitality and radical pedagogy, in which refugees and asylum seekers, confined within legal and regulatory regimes against their existence, “can figure out their own terms of engagement with their current reality”, and “feel once again a sense of collectivity and belonging”, as curators Zoe Butt and Sara Alberani state.
Trampoline House is a self-organized refugee justice community center initiated by artists Morten Goll and Joachim Hamou, and curator Tone Olaf Nielsen, more than a decade ago in Copenhagen, in response to one of the world’s most aggressive and humiliating migration policies. The project was born out of the act of listening to asylum seekers’ experiences and collectively putting together an answer to their needs in the form of a program.
Al Madhafah-The Living Room is a site-responsive and performative installation initiated by the artist Sandi Hilal in 2016, and situated between the domestic and the public sphere. ‘Al Madhafah’, in Arabic, is the living room dedicated to hospitality. It has the potential to subvert the role of both guest and host and to give a different socio-political meaning to this act of hospitality. Over the last six years, Al Madhafah-The Living Room has been activated in five different locations: the house of Yasmine and Ibrahim and the ‘Yellow House’ in Boden, ArkDes Museum in Stockholm, Fawwar refugee camp in the southern part of the West Bank, and in the living room of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti in Stockholm.
Both projects are currently in transition. Trampoline House has been closed down in January 2020 due to a deliberate lack of public funding. Using documenta fifteen for re-opening their project in 2022 as Weekend Trampoline House with the intention to find a more autonomous mode of operation, they hope to create a sustainable continuity of their work in the future. Al Madhafah-The Living Room of the ‘Yellow House’ had to end its activities as this unit had to be re-purposed. To gain independence and to guarantee continuity in the working process, Sandi Hilal feels the urgency at the moment to further explore what kind of outcomes could be enabled in owning the spaces with which we heal and learn.
To learn more about the projects please visit their websites:
Al MADHAFAH-THE LIVING ROOM TRAMPOLINE HOUSE
Radical Hospitalities, Radical Pedagogies is a public debate, commissioned by the research department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp for ARTICULATE Research week 2022.
Expanding Academy in collaboration with ARTICULATE 2022 tries to nourish through conversations, panels, and lectures the debate on practice-based and situated learning within the academic context. For the ARTICULATE research weeks 2022/23, situated artistic long-term projects, which address and deal with urgencies of our time, will be explored and discussed with the students. (the first evening took place during ARTICULATE 2021)
To know more about our guests:
The event is part of Sara Alberani's residency project Massaging The Asylum System - Creative Strategies Of Care, supported by the Italian Council (2022), Directorate - General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture