• Fri 26 05 – Thu 30 11 2017 •
The City & the City Bik Van der Pol

with BIK VAN DER POL

The Academy runs its own alternative educational program called the Youth Academy, where participants from Cologne join guest curators for workshops and projects. This season’s guest curator is the artist group Bik Van der Pol, and their workshop series is called The City & the City, referring to China Tom Miéville’s book in which two cities occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens, they are perceived as two different cities. The workshops invite participants to explore new forms of collaboration around alternative writing and storytelling in a collective research around the elections for North Rhine-Westphalia’s state legislature in May 2017 and the federal parliamentary elections in September 2017. They will concentrate less on the concrete events themselves and more on the basic questions raised by voting and voicing as a political act in public space. Storytelling – through texts and performances – becomes an alternative way of revealing how private bodies become political, how they participate, and how they are drawn into relations of solidarity. Bik Van der Pol’s curatorship of the Youth Academy culminates in further workshops and a final presentation in autumn 2017.

Workshop sessions
Fri 26 05 – Sun 28 05 2017
Mon 12 06 & Tue 13 06 2017
Fri 14 07 – Sun 16 07 2017
September – November 2017

Venue: ACADEMYSPACE, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
Free admission
In English

Are you interested in the program of the Youth Academy? Please send an email at youthacademy@academycologne.org.