Spinning Triangles:
Ignition of a school of design.
Kinshasa

On the occassion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, SAVVY Contemporary seeks to challenge and act against the inherent, neocolonial power structures in design practices, theory and teaching with its project SPINNING TRIANGLES. It takes up the founding moment of the Bauhaus one hundred years ago and starts from its reality as a school of design to reverse and reshape it.

First and foremost, the Bauhaus was a school of design. It aimed to educate a new generation of designers, makers and thinkers that would face the challenges of their “now”. SPINNING TRIANGLES takes up this founding moment of 1919. Not in order to repeat it but to twist it: we will create a school of design that has what it takes to tackle the challenges of our “now”, and might, precisely by this, turn into an “Un-school”. This school will not be developed by the geopolitical west, but through the accelerated movement between three deeply interwoven places – Germany, D.R. Congo, China – and will confuse their prescribed roles as idea provider, raw material supplier and champion of production.

The first spinning of this longterm project will have taken place in Germany (Dessau and Berlin), and will accelerate into its second spinning in Kinshasa, the capital of a country without which our smartphone-modernity, creative economy and data collecting mania is unthinkable but which also bears the highest costs: the past twenty years alone have amassed six million corpses caused by the ruthless mining of minerals and its associated conflicts – official numbers that can be deemed as cautious estimations.

Here, an exchange platform for knowledge transfer between several actors from the “Global South” is initiated. During a symposium, participants debate status quos, question solutions, talk about successes, failures, ideas, possi-bilities and impossibilities, while moving between presentations, walks, discussions, music and performances. Several workshops initiate further dialogues, where social and political climates, conditions of “now,” the practice of design and pedagogical formats are not only thought about but also tentatively redone through practice. Discussion rounds are initiated where a viable concept for a school of design is discussed and questioned. The speculative frame of this project creates a space in which some assumptions are clear: it is not meant to be temporal, but to last and be lived. It is meant to be created for the context in which it emerges (Kinshasa) but considers its furthering in other geographies, leading to the third spinning – when a tentative actualization of the school will take place in Berlin, and to be more precise, at SAVVY Contemporary.