Patching Networks

Academy of Fine Arts Munich
Image and Spatial Politics - Art Education
Prof.in Sandra Schäfer, academic assistant Manuela Unverdorben

What does it mean to love: to give oneself completely, or does it just mean to give a lot? Simply pouring out, always putting new flesh into the mouth of the output. A mouth that speaks when it whispers in your ear, tender and mysterious, but also when it screams at high concrete walls of silent cities.
How do these voices react to each other? What relationships can we read from the echo? The echo that jumps back and forth between the walls of the exhibition space. With every touch, with every hearing – recording, processing, speaking – it deforms. Relationships are created. Relationships that we form with nature when we feel it on our skin or look at it through large windows. Relationships that bounce back and forth in our minds as we chase them with questions, trying to understand them. Paths and branches form a net, form a system.
Reflecting on these ecological systems, how they operate against the backdrop of capitalist society, and to what extent they have an effect on the individual, is what the Schäfer class at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich has set out to do. In various media-based collective and individual works, students of the class reflect on the concept of ecology through different aspects. Using the approach of image and spatial politics, the class explores art production in the context of socio-political references.
Thus, the artistic practice functions as a reflective apparatus and attempts to convey new approaches.