stress tests.diy
STREET COLLEGE & Kaethe Wenzel for Haus der Kulturen der Welt

The project team, consisting of members of STREET COLLEGE and Kaethe Wenzel has developed three objects, which were then designed and built by the artist. These objects help to recall your own experiences of learning spaces in school, kindergarten, professional training, university etc. What does this look like?

NOW YOU! Grab two shopping bags with books, coloured spoons from the icecream parlour and two pieces of cardboard and try for yourself. The video animations explain how. What is the first thing you think of when you remember your classroom in school, the lecture hall at uni, or the space where you had your professional training?


Please answer the following questions.
You can do so after trying out one, two or three of the DIY exercises, or simply from memory.

1. How did that make you feel?


2. If you now think back to your time at school or in training, and to those learning spaces, what ist he first thing you think of?


3. What should an ideal learning space have to be like for you?


E-Mail


By clicking "Send" and sending us the survey including your mailing address you give us permission to get in touch with you. This requires a valid email-address. The information you give us will be saved only in order to keep you informed about the result of our survey and for possible follow-up questions. As soon as the project is finished, all personal data are automatically deleted.


Thank you for joining! We will develop an artistic presentation of the survey results and expect to present them from June 2021 on this Website. We will notify you via email.

If Corona regulations permit it, there will be occasion to try out our objects at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in June 2021. We will announce this on our website and on social media.

More about the Project:

The artistic research project was developed specifically for the exhibition project "Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s" at Haus der Kulturen der Welt by a STREET COLLEGE team in collaboration with artist Kaethe Wenzel.

The exhibition and two publications show how the spaces of learning were deeply transformed under the pressure of demographic and technological developments, the Cold War and the social movements culminating around 1968. In the midst of the Corona crisis, which makes pressing problems in the education sector acutely visible, he proposes to reassess the educational ventures of the 1960s and 1970s, as an archive which may inform current debates.

As an experimental survey, "Stress Tests.DIY" asks about situations of school and learning, about ideals and actual experience. This includes three objects designed by Kaethe Wenzel which help to activate especially physical memory, and to recall the wide range of physical and emotional responses to the different spaces that we experience in school and during our professional training. Based on this, participants are asked to describe what they would consider an ideal learning space.

Since due to Covid-19 and the regulations for the protection against infection currently do not allow for live interventions in the exhibition space, we transferred the project online. In videos, STREET COLLEGE students take part in the experiment. Animated instruction videos demonstrate how to repeat the experiments at home simply by using everyday objects from your household. Participants are then asked about their associations, thoughts and feelings, in an interactive internet form. The results will be evalued in an artistic presentation.

Developed for the exhibition project Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, curated Tom Holert

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin
Spring - July 11, 2021