Welcome to Bergen School of Architecture

The site of Floating University is a rainwater retention basin serving the former Tempelhof airfield in Berlin, where a diverse range of animals, plants and algae have taken root and given birth to a unique landscape: a human-made environment reclaimed by nature where polluted water coexists with the relatively new presence of the University, forming a natureculture (Haraway) or a third landscape (Clément).

Sarah Bovelett, Licia Soldavini, Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux, Markus Bader of Floating  University  will discuss the various aspects of the project, its cycles, the troubles, the learnings and the perspectives of the basin and its agents.

Floating University serves as a living laboratory where polluted water and diverse ecosystems coexist with academic and community activities. One of these activities is the learnscapes program, which emphasises collaborative knowledge production and fosters a space for unlearning, relearning, and co-learning. Floating University challenges traditional educational models by engaging with the site’s natural and human elements, promoting an integrative approach to environmental and social justice.

Floating University is part of the Bergen Assembly + Bergen School of Architecture cross course program (29. Oct - 01. Nov), sharing the course: muddy puddles, uncanny neighbours, dancing with the future, training unknown muscles, opening unknown eyes, from Floating University to Kristiansholm. Traced by Vilde Salhus Røed.

The public lecture is presented in collaboration with Bergen Arkitektforening.

Floating University’s trip to Bergen is funded by the Erasmus + Teaching Staff Mobility program in connection with TU Braunschweig University.

The event is free and open to all. 

The Bergen Assembly office is universally accessible from street level and our toilets are gender neutral.

www.bergenassembly.no.

In this lecture, artist and educator Sanchayan Ghosh will present the unique history of Kala Bhavana Fine Arts Institute in Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, where he both studied and now teaches. Ghosh will explore contexts and frameworks that have shaped Santiniketan over the past 100 years, while also addressing current concerns related to its ongoing transformation as both a site and a cultural situation.

Kala Bhavana Fine Arts Institute was founded by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1919 as part of a larger education project in rural Bengal, India, to initiate an art programme that is a close engagement with its environment and the neighbouring landscape. It emerged through a critical engagement with the prevalent British colonial academism at that time, adopting an eclectic approach to practise drawing on different folk traditions and other traditions of modernism that fostered creative freedom and intercultural exchange. It proposed an internationalism deeply rooted to its context of the local and dynamic engagement with multiple art traditions globally.

Sanchayan Ghosh is an artist and educator from Kolkata with a background from Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, where he currently works as an associate professor in the Department of Painting. Through his continuous exploration in site-specific interactive art practice, Ghosh has over the years been exploring workshop-based collective community dialogues. Ghosh has participated in prestigious events including Documenta 14 and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and continues to shape pedagogy through collaborations with institutions like FICA (Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art).

Ghosh is participating in the Bergen Assembly and Bergen School of Architecture cross course program (29. Oct - 01. Nov) sharing the course, Exploring Tools for Site-Specific Dialogues: Learning with the Forest Way, with Larissa Fassler and Matskogen at Landås.

The event is free and open to all. 

The Bergen Assembly office is universally accessible from street level and our toilets are gender neutral.