OnCurating Issue 43: Revisiting Black Mountain: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization

The symposium “Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)” asked these questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market? The symposium—from 25–27 May 2018—was organized by Prof Dr Dorothee Richter in conjunction with the exhibition and event programme “Revisiting Black Mountain” (documented under https://blog.zhdk.ch/revisit) initiated by the Zurich University of the Arts (especially through the now retired Head of the Department of Performing Arts and Film, Hartmut Wickert and the Head of the Department of Cultural Analysis, Christoph Weckerle) under the direction of the “Kollegium Kuration” (Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin Jaeggi, Paolo Bianchi), with the aim of opening up projects from different disciplines, of artistic and research-based practices in equal measure, and the idea that it should be open to the participation of all groups at the university—students, researchers, and lecturers.This issue brings together contributions from participants of the conference Susanne Kennedy, Steven Henry Madoff, Raqs Media Collective, and Jeanne van Heeswijk with lecturers of the ZHdK Brandon Farnsworth, Annemarie Bucher, Daniel Späti, and Cornelia Sollfrank and adds further contributions by Andres Janser, Jochen Kiefer, Olga von Schubert, Caroline Adler, Boris Buden, Lucy Bayley, Sascia Bailer, Simon Fleury, Gilly Karjevsky, Asli Uludag, and Mieke Matzke.The interview by Ronald Kolb with Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin Jaeggi, and Paolo Bianchi—all professors or lecturers at the Zurich University of the Arts—provides an internal perspective of today’s curriculum-based universities in relation to an education model like Black Mountain College—which can be seen as the opposite.