Public Arts Garage

The “Public Arts Garage” focuses on interdisciplinary and international collaboration in approaches to art and public space. A Garage can be more than a storage space. It can be a

repository for tools and ideas, a refuge from the daily routine, a safe space where creative people come together sharing the enjoyment of making and tinkering. Embracing this “Garage”

spirit, MA and Ph.D. level students, from different disciplines, countries and academic

cultures are encouraged to create collaborative interdisciplinary approaches to art and public space. Students will form tandem partnerships across international partner institutions. The pairs (or larger teams) collaborate through digital exchange and create interdisciplinary projects with a physical outcome at both locations. The collaborative work can stem from and further develop students’ existing projects or dissertation work. We encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration among students, finding approaches together with their tandem partners and embracing differences in disciplines, academic cultures and local context.

The “Public Arts Garage” encourages students to think across the boundaries of their disciplines. As collaborative teaching module across three international partner institutions, the "Public Arts Garage" promotes international and interdisciplinary collaboration in topics around art and public space. Between multiple crises of the pandemic, climate change, housing crisis, crisis of refugee admission, and discrimination against BIPoC and LGBTQIA+ persons, public space has remained a contested terrain of negotiation and political attention. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, the students are encouraged to find new methods to approach critical issues in public spaces in different local contexts and to develop projects that operate at the boundaries of artistic practice. The aim of “Public Arts Garage” is to foster collaboration and build a community of practice across different disciplines.

This graduate seminar is ideal for thinker-doers, research-creators who have an enthusiasm of practice and an ease with working on both art-making and with a theoretical framework for research-creation.