Unsettling Educational Modernism
The iconic architecture of the brutalist modernist megastructure of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada built by architect Arthur Erickson in the 1960s is the site of the artistic research project into the history of this “radical campus” and its built environment by Vancouver and Vienna based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber. The collaborative research group, “Guests and Hosts”, formed by Bitter & Weber and Métis scholar June Scudeler including Métis scholar and student Treena Chambers, Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk student Toni-Leah Yake, as well as Rachel Warwick and Hannah Campbell, has challenged the narrative of the radical campus, so called because it was informed by experimental concepts of learning and teaching. Using the spaces of a settler colonial institution, the project shifts perspectives by unsettling and challenging western- based concepts of pedagogy and knowledge. Combining archival photographic material, architectural photographs by the artists, and interventions into the institutional spaces by Guests and Hosts, the project performs the claim for places rather than spaces for Indigenous ways of knowing and learning.
Texts: Treena Chambers, June Scudeler with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber.
The series Bildungsmoderne/Educational Modernism is published in cooperation with Edition Camera Austria, Graz.
The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Bildungsschock – Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, May 27, 2021 – July 11, 2021, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin