Rob Leijdekkers

Rob Leijdekkers teaches Fine Arts at AKV | St.Joost in Breda and Den Bosch, The Netherlands. He is a researcher at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and technology (Caradt), investigating possibilities for a timely practice of artistic autonomy in art and design. Since 2016 he is also a tutor at the Bildung Academy in Amsterdam and an external advisor at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam (Autonomous practice). In a previous life, he combined an independent design practice in Rotterdam with working for Bang & Olufsen in Denmark as creative director (alongside his brother). In 2018 he cofounded YAFF, together with Mirron Looijmans and Gerrit-Jan Smits.

Future Learning Design: Academy as Übungsraum

Track 3: Learning Spaces
Date: Day 1 – 12:30
Location: Neufert-Mansion, Gelmeroda
Language: English

When it comes to the great 20th-century experiments in Learning Design (and Art), two schools stand out: Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. In spite of the well-founded objections that researchers have leveled against their practices, the two academies continue to be seen as beacons of an ideal-typical learning environment. While enthusiastically touting their commitment to “innovation”, “disruption” and “creativity”, our contempory academies seems to be incapableof developing a comparable Learning Design, i.e., a pedagogic infrastructure out of which the aesthetic and creative avant-garde could emerge that our world so urgently needs. In this opening lecture to the track Learning Spaces, Rob Leijdekkers and Sebastian Olma will discuss some of the ideological obstacles standing in the way of a timely Learning Design. As a prelude to the workshop of the Dutch collective Young Artists Feed Forward (YAFF), they will propose some preliminary principles of a pedagogy of disruption (“disruption” being intended here strictly in the non-Californian sense of the term). The objective is not to develop a new general model of Learning Design, but to sketch the ethical, political and pedagogic contours of a Future Learning Design that has the capacity to empower the young generation of artists and designers to break through the aesthetic misery of our time.