Making Exhibitions as a Collective and Pedagogical Practice

The idea of exhibition as a pedagogical tool is already well established in art and design schools.

Designing an exhibition as a holistic practice means producing content, selecting it, thinking about the coherence between the pieces, the general meaning, designing the scenography, the graphic identity, writing the texts presenting the content, mediating with the public, etc. It then involves a wide range of skills and is a valuable exercise for both the teachers and the students. Exhibition is also a very interesting form of production within schools, because it can only be a collective process, engaging the teaching team, the technical ones and the students to work together.

Ideally, students should be included in all these steps as much as possible, so they have a global vision of the entire creative process and can integrate into a single object the learning of various skills through experience, which the teacher accompanies. You become a blacksmith by forging.

Nonetheless, it is not always possible -- due to logistical and budgetary conditions -- to include students in all the steps of the work. There are indeed different levels of students' engagement and collective dynamics possible. In our schools, we often get them to focus on a particular aspect of the whole exhibition work in order for them to learn bit by bit, by digging into one task and observe, sometimes help for the other ones.

As part of the DTCC project, we had planned to create an exhibition at Esadse, to share the work accomplished over two years. However, as our thinking progressed, it seemed more appropriate to envisage a form of collective exhibition in collaboration with our partners and with the participation of students from the three schools.

After considering the idea of a nomadic exhibition -- which posed a number of logistical problems -- we finally settled on the idea of three exhibitions, one in each school, which would be both similar and unique. To this end, we are working with EKA and HfG to define common content, from which the three exhibitions will be developed. We also agreed that we all want students to be at the core of these exhibitions. Considering that their experience of our international collaboration and what it has generated in terms of experimentation, reflection and friction, is what the project has generated most richly, we have decided that these exhibitions will be structured around video interviews with the students.

On top of those interviews, we've decided to add, a certain number of items to the list of the ones to be optionally included in the exhibitions:

This content will be shared between the teams, each of whom will make their own selection of elements to include in the curating of their exhibition. We are also considering the possibility of freely distributing this content online, so that other exhibitions could take place. The scenography of each exhibition will then be designed independently by each school. A graphic identity will be defined together and be the visual link of the exhibitions.

What is most interesting is that the process of making those exhibitions is creating various inter-related group dynamics:

Indeed, the students were not directly involved to define the issues, objectives and content of those exhibitions, but were invited to contribute in various ways and at different stages of the process.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to student interviews, which are at the center of each exhibition.

We'll then explain the different ways in which we hope to involve students in the exhibition project, and the pedagogical goals of their participation.