Our learning journey with Curious Minds
Our learning journey with Curious Minds
By Fotini Takirdiki
Berlin, 13.12.2019
How can an exhibition-laboratory act as an alternative learning space for its diverse community of artists, scientists and civic participants? In order to approach this initial question, we started a learning journey with and for our community of Curious Minds. Since five years STATE Festival and Studio have gathered an open circle of people that dare to question further and dive into possible answers. We are aware of the large space of possibilities that comes with every person that interacts, participates and collaborates within our space; and appreciate each and every contribution from the outside. The ‘outside’ that we do not see as our outside. Therefore we took some time to reflect upon our further collective journey. In other words, we asked ourselves: How can we evolve into a learning platform that enables its community for deep connection and deep collaboration?
We feel that the challenges of our era with all its fuzzy uncertainties ask for new ways of thinking and learning together. When the Kompetenzzentrum Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft des Bundes and the BMWi asked us to be part of an experimental project on “learning spaces of the future” together with CODE University of Applied Sciences and Hafven, we found a framework to collectively re-think what learning means within our spaces. What we soon realized: The way we collaborated with CODE and Hafven in our project can actually be applied to how we imagine it to happen at STATE Studio; namely by peer reviewing each others evolvement, transferring knowledge and experience with each other as well as by co-creating prototypes. Thereby we quite naturally grew with each other.
What community means to us (and to you)
Frankly speaking, the term ‘community’ has been diluted and overused lately. Its meaning became quite blurry. In order to find out what community might mean in the context of an exhibition-laboratory, we invited Lieke Ploeger and Rachel Uwa, both inspiring visionaries when it comes to alternative community building in Berlin, into the process. Lieke has been the co-founder of SPEKTRUM Berlin and the Disruption Network Lab, where she has formed a strong activation programme for their communities. Rachel Uwa is the founder of the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe, where she facilitates alternative learning experiences in the areas of art, technology, and human connection. Bringing both on board and learning from their experiences has been a very important step during our journey. Here, some insights from Lieke: “It’s important to offer the possibility of a commitment to output creation towards the community” and “to create a common goal, the community will work on”. And from Rachel: “Forget about buying stuff for community building; invest in people and mix a self-made punch for them” and “enough with superficial connections, connect people in a deeper way”. All that has really stuck with us.
An important next step was going out there to find out who our community actually is and what their needs towards a community are. Thoughts we had and still have: What forms of curation and facilitation are needed from our side? What intensity level of interaction is desired? What resources and infrastructures are required? To anticipate these, we created an online questionnaire and planned a participative evening where we would test our programme ideas. During the event we explored four experience stations that symbolized different learning approaches (mindful; participative; peer; game-based). Each station was led by a STATE team member and the participating group itself. A very open and informal atmosphere that made interacting easy has been created. The general assumption was that not much facilitation is needed from our side - it is indeed all about the people; so in that sense, less has actually been more. Some voices from our (future) community: “I would want a place that I know I come to in order to engage with something new, to explore, to move beyond my limitations and to interact and exchange with others doing the same thing”, “a place where we can go through a topic in theory and practice” and “I would like to have a structure that I can join to learn about different topics and a structure I can contribute with sharing links, writing a blog-post and offering workshops in my field of expertise”. The feedback we got really resonated with our vision and keeps us going.
Our purpose in bringing together and activating the STATE Community is to create an open space where members can build meaningful connections and exchange knowledge beyond disciplinary and professional boundaries. We want to establish structures for collaborative learning, reflection and co-creation.
What we want to facilitate
Our aim is to create an environment where you can meet and work with people that you would normally not do. We want to become a platform, where artists, scientists, designers and other interested people can think and act together in a decentralized, autonomous way. We thereby curate encounters that might grow into fruitful and impactful relations if they are maintained over time. But in fact in this moment we do not want to spend too much time and energy in forming something that might not fit, but rather start something off that can be formed by the community itself.
We want to integrate the community into our space, into our program and our structures. A bit more concrete what we mean by that: from next year on, there will be community access to our studio, the possibility to participate in our curation processes and to initiate own formats within our framework. We are aware that our community is quite diverse and therefore has different needs. Some want to meet up, explore and have a dialogue; others want to create meaning by activating collective intelligences and developing collaborative projects. That is why we accordingly came up with formats that have different trajectories and foci.
What we learned from our journey
Building a community is about creating an open learning space with a warm, inclusive atmosphere
The first step is to actually get to know each other and to create a common basis for knowledge and idea exchange
By involving the community in what is going on in the exhibition-laboratory both sides can grow together
We need to create a free and flexible space with as few constraints and restrictions as possible, but with a certain framework and facilitation
Community building and collaborative project development within the community will take a lot of time and space to organically evolve
We want to facilitate deep connections and deep dives
What comes next
The first responses that we got from the outside world has encouraged us to take this organic next step and activate a learning community. Constant feedback and our own critical reflection helped to create a deeper understanding for the people and their wishes towards us. On a monthly base, on fixed days we will facilitate meet-ups and special accesses. We will soon announce more details. Also: if you want to share your thoughts or questions with us, please feel free to contact us or come by.
Many thanks to Kreativbund and our project partners CODE and Hafven for this great opportunity. And many thanks to everyone that has contributed to this process and wants to do so in the near future. We look forward to deeply connecting and collaborating with you. Stay curious and visit us!
