Learning Site

A whole city leaves a school: a caravan of wearable buildings made from reclaimed coloured cardboard boxes, with legs and trainer-clad feet sticking out from underneath it. There are food shops and fun houses, a haunted mansion, a dairy and a recycling shop on a cloud, a hospital in a tree, buildings for snails and cats, and even houses that just look like ordinary houses. It is an explosion of buildings, a New Babylon replete with a solar-powered space station containing a football pitch on which the alien inhabitants of the city can play in zero-gravity conditions. One of the houses walks off to sit on its own away from the others, suggesting that cities also need places of solitude.

This performance, Walking City (2004), carried out in collaboration with 78 pupils from the Goshu Elementary School in Moriya, Japan, was one of several projects developed by the artists’ collective Learning Site under the umbrella title ‘Collecting System’ (2004–ongoing). Examining informal urban planning, the aim of ‘Collecting System’ is, in the words of the artists, to ‘discuss sustainability [and the] global economy in relation to conditions of living and the production of dwellings’.1 The four members of Learning Site all have considerable experience of working on collaborative projects around the globe: Rikke Luther from Denmark and Cecilia Wendt from Sweden were co-founders of the Copenhagen-based N55, American Brett Bloom is a co-founder of the Chicago group Temporary Services and Mexican Julio Castro was a co-founder of Tercerunquinto in Mexico City. In this way, Learning Site is a meeting point of N55’s work on re-imagining everyday objects and functions, Temporary Service’s discussion of collaboration and alternative ways of distributing knowledge, and Tercerunquinto’s examination of public and private space. Their work is multidisciplinary, but it’s not about transgressing media boundaries just for the sake of it. Rather, Learning Site’s concerns – natural resources, environment, labour, lifestyles, property rights, meetings between different economies – call for a diversity of approaches which are connected by artistic means. This, perhaps, is their lesson number one: that art activism’s greatest asset is its improvisational imagination, filtered through speed of execution and deftness of action.

In projects such as Underground Mushroom Gardens (2006) and Collected Material Dwellings (2005), Learning Site’s avowed didacticism turns into a Constructivist poetics of the social arena. Collected Material Dwellings was first set up in the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico, where the local economy is largely driven by self-employment and collecting discarded materials. Connecting this fact to the difficult housing situation in the area, Learning Site developed habitations made of used plastic bottles. Filled with sand and sewn together with metal wire, they can be used as building blocks that are comparable to concrete in strength. Covered with mortar, these plastic bottle walls can be made to resemble any regular building material yet cost approximately ten times less. In the world’s poorer areas such low-cost houses that don’t look like they can easily be demolished could help their occupiers claim ownership of unoccupied land. Underground Mushroom Gardens is a more speculative project, a proposal for underground farming where land is scarce. The subterranean fungal colonies are presented in drawings or as mushroom-growing modules; space-age cubes with four, six and eight-sided openings.

Learning Poster #002: Connecting Systems (2005) – which shows how to connect wires to existing power sources, such as transmission lines in the metro system and high-voltage cables – might be said to effectively encapsulate the Learning Site ethos; namely, the idea of connecting to systems that are already in place, then adding to, and redefining them. On another level, this is a strategy that also tackles some of the unresolved issues raised by the wave of collaborative art projects in the 1990s, which in many cases evoked a retrospective discourse of the idealised collectivism of the modern era, or produced some surprising overlaps between artistic practice and vanguard managerial ideologies. If the commercial art market and a traditionalist understanding of authorship have often excluded collective authorship from art discourse and art history, it becomes important for these practices to confront their own exclusion at the same time as deconstructing heroic reference points of strong collectivism such as the Paris Commune, the October Revolution and the modern avant-gardes. Of course, the latter go some way towards explaining a genealogy of collective authorship and agency, but they also contain the germs of nostalgia and over-determination vis-à-vis today’s networked collectives who try to establish social engagement from a quite different scenario: a post-political, mass-mediated, de-institutionalized, middle-class existence.

From this perspective, Learning Site’s almost parasitic way of focusing their attention on local conditions opens up for debate the whole nature of aesthetics. Self-organization itself becomes an aesthetic strategy, and their workshops, dwellings and ecological models become representations of thought experiments. This is different from the more functionalist orientation of art activism towards the production of space: Learning Site’s experimentalism delivers counter-images to what we thought we knew about the city, asking new questions where we previously only had premature answers.

1 All quotes from www.learningsite.info