Duration: 07.07.2012 - 07.10.2012
Location: In front of the Hayward Gallery
Participants: 50
Visitors:
Number of Events: 4

Public Faculty No. 4 was part of Wide Open School and took place in front of the Hayward Gallery. Over the course of four days philosopher Johan Siebers and Psychoanalyst Maaike Engelen spoke about learning in public spaces. With the participants they discussed the idea that public space can facilitate responsible and collective learning in society. Public Faculty seeks to ‘draw out’ the anticipated conversations and findings by slowly building a visual analogy of its presence in the city. By taking these conversations outside it undertakes strategies for rethinking, redefining and re-entering public space through collective cultural action.

The series of faculties is to engage in learning through a process of knowledge exchange within the context of a certain place. It references Beuys’s seminal work ‘Richtkräfte’ (Directive Forces), an installation of 100 blackboards created for public discussions and later held at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in 1974. Using Rudolf Steiner’s concept of ‘thought drawings’, Beuys used chalk on blackboard to communicate to his audience the basic principles of his theory of ‘social sculpture’ – freedom, direct democracy and sustainable economic forms. In this way Beuys illustrated his “anthropologic construct” for a better world.