UPCOMING COURSES

For this Craftivism workshop we have teamed up with Beatrice Waanders who is an international renowned textiles artist, based in Rotterdam. Together with Beatrice we will explore how wool could help us stay warm in a time when energy prices are rising. Beatrice travels all around the country to find her wool amongst which from the Sheepflock in Rotterdam. The Rotterdam Sheepflock cultivates the green spots of the city like parcs and soundwalls along the highway in an ecological way to restore natural biodiversity. They produce about 4000 kilos wool per year but there’s no market. Beatrice aims to value this wool again into a precious artwork. Beatrice is unique in even using the colored stamps of the ram as part of the design.

Tickets available for 150 euro. Registration deadline 24 November 2023. More info here

In the spring of 2024, the Independent School for the City will organise its intensive 3-month course in contemporary urbanism that takes the modern city as its subject and Rotterdam as its testing ground. Participants in the course are confronted with the inescapable contradictions and complexities of the modern city, while focusing on topics such as social inequality and climate change. We will explore these urban dynamics by bringing together different disciplines, from historical research to artistic expression.

During this thematic block, we’ll dive into the Anthropocene – the geological era marking the dominant human impact on the Earth systems. Climate scientists have predicted that if we continue at the current pace with climate measures, we will still end up on a planet that is between 2° and 3° hotter at the end of this century. In these weeks we will map out the predicted effects of a 2,5°C temperature rise on the Netherlands, on the City of Rotterdam and on a number of very specific places in the city. After exploring these effects, we will then use our collective knowledge and that of our guest speakers and scientific literature, to imagine how we can mitigate the negative effects of global climate change and what is needed to make life livable in a city that suffers its consequences. – This block is part of our 12 week programme This is Tomorrow, but also offered as a stand-alone course. More info here

Because of the port and its connection with the rest of the globe, Rotterdam has always attracted people from all over the world. Nowadays over 170 different nationalities call the city their home. The population has become so diverse that Rotterdam has become part of a worldwide family of Majority-Minority cities – meaning that more than half of the population has a migration background. And, not just the number of nationalities has increased: as generations pass, also the diversity within the different migrant groups has become increasingly complex and as anthropologist call it: Superdiverse. In this workshop we will be working together with sociologist Linda Zuijderwijk, Crimson, photographer Florian Braakman and others. You will learn and develop methods for interviewing people, to record locations and conversations, to interpret what we see and to retell it in pictures, maps and stories, with the aim to get a deeper understanding of the Superdiverse makeup of the population.