Neuhaus | Andy Weir

Neuhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2019

Exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, 19/5-15/9/2019

NEUHAUS: a temporary and transdisciplinary academy for more-than-human knowledge

Nuclear Media - review of the discussion event by Adam Nocek.

For this exhibition, I presented an installation of work from the Pazugoo project and I presented at a discussion event, Design for the Deep Future

with artists, theorists, designers and representatives of COVRA, the radioactive waste management service in the Netherlands. The installation included Index figures, prototype figures, and a two-monitor video work - An Excess of Wings (You are binders to my my granular polymers), which inverts the viewer/object relation, imagining the Pazugoo production process from an unknown future perspective. It also includes an interactive design element and Ele Carpenter's poster on Nuclear Culture: Networked and Distributed Art.

From Bauhaus to Neuhaus

Het Nieuwe Instituut joins the worldwide celebration of the Bauhaus centenary not by glorifying the historical achievements of this legendary school, but rather by reactivating and embodying its original spirit through Neuhaus. The contemporary situation of accumulated crises in ecology, economy, politics and society finds a mirror image in the era that immediately followed WW1. In the total burn-out that was the aftermath of that conflict, societal and political orders crumbled, technological developments put great strain on both workers and the environment, and became associated as much with large scale destruction as with emancipation.

The educational format of the first period of Bauhaus focused on the on-going, open enquiry of knowledge production: its initial paradigms embraced the idea of infusing the power of art into the societal and industrial fabric, striving for connective narratives to foster awareness of a new mode of society, a liberated society, based on the motto “reconsidering the world”. The experimental programme adopted a positive, affirmative approach that set out to bypass the unsustainability of the present in search of opportunities to envision it anew.

images: from installation and exhibition opening