Visiting NOW FUTURE?

As part of NOWFUTURE?, the network meeting of art education students from across Switzerland at Bern University of the Arts in 2023, a series of interventions for the symposium was developed in collaboration with Annemarie Hahn (lecturer in the Master’s Programme in Art Education at Bern University of the Arts) as well as Nathalie Koger and Enar De Dios Rodríguez (The Golden Pixel Cooperative). These foreground artistic practice as a tool for reflecting on collective and infrastructural relations.

In addition to the screening programme “Frame Works: Educational Contexts and Moving-Image Works,” which presented two artistic works—Adelita Husni-Bey, “Postcards from the Desert Island” (2010–2011), and Nathalie Koger, “The Videoconference of the Animals” (2023)—both developed with children and young people in educational contexts and addressing the emergence of ethics of coexistence in symbolic and imaginative forms, a video essay by Enar De Dios Rodríguez was also presented. It engages with extractivist practices in relation to sand as—alongside water—the most extracted resource and was installed as a continuous presentation throughout the symposium as a contemporary dystopia.

In a further session, the publication The Golden Pixel Cooperative: De Dios Rodríguez, E., Koger, N. & Schwitzer, M. (eds.) (2022), “You’ll Never Work Alone: Collective Infrastructures in Moving Images” (SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR), was introduced and discussed together with one of its authors, Katja Lell (contribution: “On Overturned Chairs, Soft Pillows, and (Dis-)comfort with Accomplices – Thoughts on Queering Film Education”), and the students. The volume examines the potentials and challenges of collective filmic and artistic practices and addresses the question of shared infrastructures from both international and local perspectives of theorists and practitioners.