The course price includes lunch on course days, a welcome package, excursions and a social programme as well as the farewell and welcome events.
Students from all disciplines
Discover the creative potential of walking!
Health benefits of walking are well established, but walking can also be used to explore places, to build community and to be creative. Indeed, there seems to be good evidence that walking enhances creativity. This course will put this hypothesis to the test through a series of walking activities that will result in a set of experiential designs / art works.
The Swiss sociologist and founding dean of Bauhaus-University’s Faculty of Art & Design in the early 1990s, Lucius Burkhardt, was also a leading scholar on walking as an academic and creative practice. Much simplified – to Burkhardt, walking is a means to holistically experience and reflect aesthetics, in particular the aesthetics of landscape. Burkhardt’s research was subsequently supplemented by others, including e.g. the British anthropologist Tim Ingold [1], who extended Burkhardt’s focus on how walking affects the perception of aesthetics towards a notion of walking as a way of generating “meaning” at a level that precedes language.
To walk is to be immersed in the environment, perceiving it, feeling it with your senses and inherently, quasi-automatically attribute meaning to those experiences. For Ingold, Burkhardt and others in this line of research, the power of meaning making is inherent to movement, not settings or objects.
Coincidentally, in parallel to the more abstract, conceptual investigations of Burkhardt, Ingold and others, another strand of quantitative psychological research has been developing in the last decade convincingly suggesting that the activity of walking significantly increases cognitive creativity. For example, when walking, we’re more creative than e.g. while sitting.
Accordingly, the purpose of this course is to consider walking as an activity supporting the processes of reflection, understanding and ultimately coming up with new ideas. From Flânerie, to Dérive and urban wayfaring, to themed walks and walking activities, we will test different walking techniques to inform interdisciplinary creative processes and practice. Based on the materials produced during the exercises, students will build a portfolio of works that facilitate an enhanced sense of where and how we are in place and time. Finally, the experiences will be developed into a personal “walking recipe” for future creative practice.
[1] Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).
We look forward to welcoming you!
The course price includes lunch on course days, a welcome package, excursions and a social programme as well as the farewell and welcome events.
English language certificate: at least level B1 or comparable
The course fee includes lunch in the canteen on course days. In addition, with your Bauhaus Summer School ID card, you can purchase breakfast at a reduced rate. Cafeterias serve a wide variety of meals (including vegetarian dishes, snacks, and beverages). If you prefer to cook your own meals, you can buy fresh ingredients at a number of shops in town. There are also many quaint cafés and inexpensive restaurants in Weimar. For a taste of Thuringia, we recommend buying a Thuringian bratwurst hot off the grill at the Rathausmarkt.
The Bauhaus Summer School has organised an exciting and extensive accompanying programme for its participants. The programme offers excursions (Dessau, Erfurt, Eisenach, Leipzig), guided tours of Weimar and surroundings, visits to Weimar's classical sites and museums, game nights, film screenings, sports, parties, and more. Weimar itself also offers a large selection of cultural events, concerts, and theatre performances. You can plan your leisure activities as you like and experience an exciting summer with your fellow students.
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Master's degree
Language course/short course
