→ The Worst Tours → Europa → Brave New Alps → Dk-Cm → Isabel Carvalho → Anna Best → Mário Moura → Project Paper → Ricardo Melo → Nuno Coelho → Tom Spooner → Rosanna Vitiello → Kate Brangan →
The Worst Tours
Springing from 2008’s economic crisis, The Worst Tours is a project by three graduates from Porto School of Architecture that confronts enforced urban displacement, austerity and neoliberal economic destruction. The Worst Tours will guide Travelogue Summer School’s participants on a visit through a number of city sites, usually unseen by tourists, that reveal the city’s most acute social and political urban conflicts — from state housing, hidden sports clubs and abandoned buildings to communal kitchen gardens, former schools and deprived urban districts.
Europa
Europa is a London-based graphic design studio run by Mia Frostner, Paul Tisdell and Robert Solis, all graduates from the Royal College of Art. Europa’s work focuses on creating visual identities, books and publications, exhibition design, signage, art direction, editorial design and websites. Alongside their studio practice, Europa’s designers also lecture at Camberwell College of Art. Europa will join Travelogue Summer School to talk about their contribution to renovation projects in London’s deprived districts. They raise the question of how design can be an agent for social change in the improvement of people’s living standards. Following the talk, Europa will run a graphic design and publishing workshop.
Brave New Alps
Brave New Alps (Fabio Franz and Bianca Elzenbaumer) produce design projects that engage people in discussing and rethinking social, political and environmental issues. By combining design research methods with radical pedagogies, conflict mediation techniques and DIY making, they facilitate project outcomes that combine pedagogical spaces, publications, websites, photographs, videos, guided walks, urban interventions and other public events. Fabio and Bianca both graduated in 2006 from the Faculty of Design and Art at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, and in 2010 from the Royal College of Art. Since 2014, Bianca has worked as a Junior Research Fellow at Leeds College of Art, following the completion of her doctoral degree in the Design Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Fabio is currently a PhD candidate at the Sheffield School of Architecture.
Brave New Alps will join the Travelogue Summer School to talk about their work and the key premises supporting their collective and politically active practice. Following the talk, they will open our series of workshops with an exploration of Porto’s social, political, and economic conditions, with a view to situating our object of study within our collective work group. The workshop will act as groundwork for the practical development of our planned guidebook.
dk-cm
Founded by David Knight and Cristina Monteiro, DK-CM is an architecture and research studio based in London. DK-CM has built a reputation for critical and provocative research projects that question the limits of architectural production and explore new forms of process and communication. DK-CM’s work has been exhibited internationally and in the UK–Venice Biennale, the Shenzhen and Hong-Kong Biennale, at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. In 2007, DK-CM initiated in Porto Conversations, a project that explored local desires and conflicts within the city’s main tourist district, and later on DK-CM edited and published Wallpaper* City Guide: Porto in collaboration with Phaidon Press and Wallpaper Magazine. David is currently undertaking PhD research in urban planning; he is also a lecturer at the Royal College of Art, in London.
DK-CM will present their work on the city and will question the spatial and political significance of guidebooks, analysing their variable structures and configurations.
Isabel Carvalho
Isabel is a Porto-based artist whose work takes the form of a series of collaborative experiences. Exploring a range of practices – drawing, performance, writing and publishing – her work is a means to establish significant relationships between art and economics, politics and sexuality. Isabel co-founded the independent publishing house Braco de Ferro and was responsible for Navio Vazio, a curated artistic space that focused on the book as a three dimensional space and sought to expand publishing as a conceptual practice in artistic creation. Isabel studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto and has been an important presence in Porto‘s artistic activities over the last ten years, especially in the arena of alternative artistic practices.
Isabel Carvalho and Anna Best will run a two-day publication development workshop that will concentrate on collaborative processes in artistic creation.
Anna Best
Anna Best has a process-based practice founded on an investigation into the local and particular, into narrative structures and the complicated process of making art with other people. Her work covers a range of media, publishing books, broadsheets and websites, film and video as well as the ephemeral format of live events. She has collaborated with a number of artists including Neil Chapman Occasional Sights (2003) and composer Paul Whitty on Vauxhall Pleasure (2004+9) and curated events such as Road for the Future (2012). Projects have been made with The Barbican Art Gallery, Danielle Arnaud, The Photographers’ Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and Tate Modern. Anna has taught at Goldsmith’s, Oxford Brookes, Central St Martins and Brighton University. Anna studied at Coventry University and The Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.
Mário Moura
Mário Moura is a design critic and lecturer at Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto. In 2004 he founded Ressabiator, a blog dedicated to design, culture and politics, and in 2010 he published a notable compilation of his blog writing under the title Design em Tempos de Crise (‘Design in Times of Crisis’). In 2011 Mário completed a PhD on Design Authorship.
For his talk Mário has selected from his library the Petite Planéte guidebook no.16. The Petite Planète collection was launched in the 1950s by the French publisher Éditions du Seuil in collaboration with the French filmmaker Chris Marker, Julienne Caputo and Franz Villier. Known for the critical approach it takes to the representation of different national realities, Petite Planète published a volume dedicated to Portugal in 1957. Acting as an experimental pocket documentary, the guidebook presents its reader with a critical gaze at a largely unseen country, living at the time under the rule of a strict dictatorship.
Project Paper
Founded by designers Ana Schefer and Teo Furtado, Project Paper is an editorial and publishing project that has operated since 2012 between London and Porto. Project Paper originated from the discovery of a substantial quantity of paper in a derelict school building in Portugal. Project Paper uses the found blank paper as a space for discussion about the economic crisis and its influence on urban space, the autonomy of art and the means of production. Project Paper, in collaboration with designer Márcia Novais, will oversee the publication’s final phase through a printing and binding workshop.
Currently a designer at Casa da Música, Márcia Novais used to run the Office for Communication and Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto, where she developed print-based projects for a range of media such as posters, exhibition design and editorial design.
Ricardo Melo
Ricardo Melo is a designer, researcher and PhD student from the Doctoral Programme in Design from University of Porto and the Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture (ID+). Ricardo will talk us through his ongoing investigation into the phenomenon of serendipity, which aims to create a methodological structure which will enable the design of interactive systems that allow for serendipitous experiences. Ricardo’s talk will explore how chance and the dérive, or the process of drifting, are observed from the physical to the digital realm and can therefore contribute to the discovery of new and meaningful information. This work is funded by Portuguese national funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).
Nuno Coelho and Tom Spooner
Nuno Coelho is a design theorist, lecturer and curator. He has published papers, curated exhibitions and lectured extensively in Britain and overseas, on topics ranging from aesthetics to social and political design. He currently lectures on critical theory at Central Saint Martins.
Tom Spooner is a London-based illustrator, writer and lecturer. His practice is driven by a fascination with the urban landscape, the socio-political structures of public space, and ideas surrounding place. He has lectured, run workshops and self-published a number of books in these fields.
As part of the Travelogue Summer School, Nuno and Tom will run a series of short daily talks focusing on the historical and theoretical foundations of the dérive and its influence on contemporary practices.
Rosanna Vitiello and Kate Brangan
Rosanna’s work encourages people to see their cities through new eyes. Exploring the sweet spot between culture and its context, she combines experience design, travel writing and placemaking strategies, to create programmes, publications and interventions which capture a sense of place and impact communities in a positive way.
Rosanna holds a BA in Graphic Design from Central St Martin's, London, and an MA in Design for Public Space from Elisava, Barcelona, and has held positions as a visiting tutor at Pratt Institute in NYC and CSM, London.
Kate Brangan is a graphic designer from Dublin, Ireland. She holds an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins. She has worked as a designer and illustrator on a wide range of experimental and collaborative projects, branding projects, exhibition designs and publications for clients and collaborators in London, Barcelona and Dublin.
With an eye for the unusual, the overlooked and the droll, Kate is interested in design as an instigator of change. Her practice explores the ways in which design can get under the skin of cultures, places and behaviours and question norms.
Rosanna and Kate will join the Summer School to work the nightshift, creating an evening programme of workshops and events: the ‘side B’ that explores Porto by night it all its spontaneous glory.
Fees
350€: this can be paid in full (or in 2 instalments*) upon acceptance to the programme via electronic transfer. Studio materials and lunch are included in the fee. Unfortunately, we cannot provide acommodation but we can recommend where to stay.
* 50% before 10 June 2015 and the remaining 50% before 1 July 2015.
Apply
Travelogue Summer School is open to all those who are fascinated by the exploration of urban space. We’re looking for participants who share a genuine desire to work collaboratively, who think in independent, critical and unconventional ways, and who are interested in advancing and reconsidering their work in a unique context.
The criteria for selection won’t be solely based on professional and academic experience. While your CV and portfolio will be an important part of the evaluation process, we will also consider your background, interests and the themes of your work with a view to creating a multidisciplinary and coherent group.
To apply, please send us a short motivation letter explaining why you would like to join Travelogue Summer School, along with your CV and samples of your work (such as website links, PDF portfolios, essays, dissertations etc) to travelogue@fba.up.pt.
The number of participants is limited to 20. Applications are open until 7 June 2015. All candidates will be notified shortly after the closing date.
Contact
If you have any questions please email us at travelogue@fba.up.pt or alternatively at traveloguesummerschool@gmail.com.
Travelogue Summer School is a project by Ana Schefer, Márcia Novais and Teo Furtado, in partnership with the Faculty of Fine Arts. Kindly supported by University of Porto, Câmara Municipal do Porto, and the MA in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects.
