Workshop led by: Christoph Schäfer
Contemporary German artist Christoph Schäfer explores the city through drawing and discussion with a group of art students in a workshop called ‘Imagination and the City’.
Individual conversations to investigate students’ ideas and to develop their personal artistic language are at the centre of the course. The drawing may be seen as an end product or as a step towards an installation, painting, screenplay or utopian urban design. The main thing is that drawing should be used as a “desiring-machine” for constructing worlds of one’s own.
The course is intended as a platform for the exchange of subjective approaches to work, with drawing taken as the means of urban exploration. We will develop drawing tools for the analysis and representation of urban structures. You will go on expeditions into unfamiliar or forgotten areas of the town. Small-scale adventures in the town and escape routes from everyday urban life will be sought out, and their textures decoded.
Excursions, shared reading of poetic and theoretical texts, exercises in getting lost, and an intensive exchange organised in experimental set-ups are designed for the mutual reinforcement of the two aspects of the course, enabling the students to achieve new ways of looking at things, as well as imaginatively to cross their own boundaries and try out new techniques and practices. Photography and other visual techniques may also be used.
About the artist:
Since the early 1990s, Christoph Schäfer has worked on urban everyday life and the production of spaces for collective desires. This interest is reflected in a wide range of works, that often reflect and sometimes intervene. Christoph is decisively involved in ‘Park Fiction – the park at St Pauli’s Hafenrand, based on the ‘collective production of desires.’ As a member of the group ‘Park Fiction,’ Schäfer is interested in the exchange between different subjective perspectives and the collective redefinition of a public space.
Applications are now closed. This workshop is completely free of charge for the selected applicants.
