COOP
DAI's MA in Art Praxis study trajectory offers 4 distinctive curriculum components.
All students are required to take part in all 4 of them:
1. COOP study groups = introduced below
2. How To Do Things With Theory
COOP ~ formal framework 2024-2025:
COOP study groups ~ formal framework
COOP ~ curatorial framework 2024-2025:
COOP leader 2024-2025 is Philippa Driest; in charge of the management of all productional and formal aspects of this curriculum component. For the academic year 2024-2025 students and tutors direct all their questions in regard to the modus operandi of the COOPs to her.
COOP study groups, are at the heart of the DAI.
In the academic year 2024-2025 each member of the DAI’s student body will be able to join 1(one) out of 7 (seven) COOP study groups, activated by the following partnering institutions:
*Archive (Berlin, Dakar, Milan)
*Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao),
*Hosting Lands (Copenhagen),
*De Appel Amsterdam (Amsterdam)
*If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam),
*Neringa Forest Architecture (Nida),
*SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin).
These excellent platforms for research and presentation have all been invited because we admire their thoughtful ethics, resilient self-imagination, poetic politics, political poetics and interdependent acting in the world.
DAI's partnership framework is developed by artistic director and head of program Gabriëlle Schleijpen. From the early 2000's onward the DAI has taken up a pioneering role by creating substantial, educational space and agency within its curriculum for headstrong, non-academic partners from the expanded field of contemporary art. Form and output of the COOP as curriculum component have been thought and re-thought, shaped and re-shaped over many years (see our COOP ARCHIVE in the making).
As an educational program with purpose, we are absolutely thrilled that the COOP partners are willing to share their highly valued, precise knowledges, skills, experiences and networks with our community. In return upon DAI’s investment in each collaboration, we ask them to carefully curate tutorial teams with a compelling vision on study and non-extractive forms of research, while eager to collaborate with our student body. All COOPs acknowledge the hybrid nature of current praxis wherein roles can easily co-exist in one person or be swapped among the members of a collective or otherwise.
COOPs bring makers, researchers, writers, organizers and curators (be they students or tutors) together around well-defined, relevant questions and topics. All are called to active participation in these year-long curated, collaborative, un-disciplined, art research trajectories which are presented during the introduction week.
As said: over the course of one academic year every DAI-student will join one of the COOPs. Thus, during the two years of study at DAI a student participates in two different year-long COOP study group trajectories.
COOPs gather for several days during each DAI Confluence to share research and to develop a group work. Ideally this work comes into being as an entirely collaborative endeavour, but it may also be the umbrella for more or less individually produced works, imaginatively brought together by the study group.
Gatherings can take the form of a seminar, group presentation, workshop, reading group, walk, site visit, boot camp, laboratory, screening, interview, exhibition, ritual, meditation, party, work-out, exercise or otherwise.
Each COOP's modus operandi is guided by an overarching question or proposition to which all (so including the tutors) can respond with aural, visual, tactile, performative, digital, cinematographic, choreographic, architectural, curatorial, textual, theatrical, theoretical, and practical contributions (embedded within the framework created by the tutor team). Students can be asked to prepare and lead specific sessions.
The tutorial teams offer support to every student to help create meaningful connections between the student's praxis and the specific field of enquiry of the study group.
Students are asked to invest generous time, in-and outside DAI Confluences ( see the formal framework for the required number of hours). Next to artistic, theoretical, and curatorial vision, practical skills and knowledges will be of crucial importance to:
COOP SUMMIT 2025
During the academic year 2024-2025 the COOPs convene in St.Erme (France), Nida (Lithuania), Nicosia (Cyprus) and Middelburg (Netherlands).
The annual more or less 'grand' finale of the 2024-2025 COOP trajectory opens up to the public and is envisioned as a thoughtful intra-action between students, tutors, guests, and all those who are interested and happen to be around on the island of Cyprus. On the 24th, 25th and 26th of June COOP SUMMIT 2025 will be enacted in Nicosia, against the mournful backdrop of our world on fire. At the DAI we try to learn how we can live and work together without reproducing violences of past and present. We do this as a Roaming Academy: temporarily rooting there, where we are welcomed as friends by friends. We also do this as a COOP convenor: acknowledging since many years that a lot of truly transformative work in art education is done outside the confinement of the university. By inviting and commissioning non-academic art institutions and collectives to curate and guide transdisciplinary, collaborative research trajectories COOPs bring the academic and the vernacular together around pertinent questions.
COOP SUMMIT OVERVIEW since 2018
CHRONICLES
CHRONICLES are containers, curated, moulded, sculpted and choreographed by the student participants in our COOP study groups. Here textual, visual and aural notes echo day to day encounters during the DAI's monthly study group gatherings. Taking shape by diverse forms and styles of mediation, they exist as fragmented, artistic and lively modes of archiving how knowledge was produced and shared; thus building a student led mnemonic reservoir of and for our fleeting community and beyond.
