Unknown Grounds: The Public Building

Unknown Grounds is a performative symposium: a stage for collective thinking where a special kind of labor is performed. Unknown Grounds explores the idea that systems (like democracy, education and work) are public spaces we inhabit, and are being built by us at the same time. That makes us not simply passive users, but active makers of the public building.

This northern event brings together a group of (visual) artists, policy makers, scientists – and other thinkers and creates a two-day stage on which we use performative and other innovative tools to think: to critically reassess the existing structures of our society, both the ruins and the systems we regard as unchanging and massive, and imagine anew.

Immersed in a theatrical atmosphere, the participants and guests will be working in a space on the playful border between fiction and reality and in which thinking will become a collective and active experience, and the guests and participants will change roles in experimental workshops. These are the confirmed guests for Unknown Grounds: The Public Building: Nishant Shah, Hamja Ahsan, Nina Glocker, Ribal Khatib, Lila Athanasiadou, Mohamedou Slahi, Anna Moreno and Eef Veldkamp.

Unknown Grounds II: The Public Building is a VHDG project conceptualized and initiated by artistic director and co-curator Flora Reznik, and realised together with co-curator Eef Veldkamp, producer Evelyn Andoh and Kunstinitiatief VHDG, in collaboration with Stadsschouwburg de Harmonie and Arcadia.

For more information please visit the Unknown Grounds website.