„Hygge Now“
The former flying artist Janina Warnk launched the CAMP workspace during documenta fifteen’s preview days.
From 15 to 17 June 2022, in “Hygge Now” Janina invited students from Kassel and other visitors to a performance, an afternoon disco and an opportunity to hang out together over tea and specially prepared food. After 5pm the Flying Artist’s Room turned into a cinema screening films about the Flying Artist’s Room programme and films coming out of the collaboration between the artists and students.
Food/drinx: Let the space turn into something
Wood rather than straw crunches under your feet, the space is filled with the rhythmic clatter of spinning wheels alongside a dulcimer and a zither. Metal buckets and jugs are there with hand-made sheep milk soap for washing and for potential use as instruments. Eating, drinking, cooking, chopping up fruit and veg, brewing tea, mixing cocktails, making music, watching films, cutting hair, resting, learning, doing crafts, dancing, reading aloud, listening. With her launch of the CAMP workspace for documenta fifteen’s preview days, the artist Janina Warnk explores the question: “What does the excessively romanticised yearning for pastoral life sound like?“
Rituals: The ease of the simple and the accessible
Janina Warnk
The “Flying Artist’s Room” is a place within a place. A little free state in a rules-based institution. An enclave of art, neutral territory. I see it as a platform for encounter and experimentation. A macroverse for turning reality on its head and changing perspectives. A place of transformation and an echo chamber that allows and opens up free spaces in which you can develop your own personality. You can try things out here, reflect, change how you think, improvise, create, fail happily, but also relax, drink tea and be silly.”
The Flying Artist’s Rooms, mobile live-in studios around 80 square metres in size, “land” on school playgrounds in rural Hessen. An artist takes up residence in them to embark on artistic processes with the whole school community. Janina Warnk lived, worked and mediated art in the wooden modular construction for a year, and sees the Flying Artist’s Room as a non-place where only the rules of the space count – with permission to evade the rules of the institution and where a transformation may take place.
With the focus on performative play and opportunities to improvise and actively hang out together, Warnk redefined the space and left traces behind for how it might go on to be used; the space and what is practised there have moved into documenta fifteen as a living/expanded toolkit.
Sounds: Building systems to calm down systems
“We take on different roles – today I’m a sports teacher from the 1930s, tomorrow Marie Curie, and the day after that we’re building a flight simulator with special effects, slime and a chemistry show.”“The ‘teaching in role’ space is designed as a multi-sensory, immersive learning experience and offers visual, auditory, olfactory and haptic charms. In contrast to school – a defined and frequently also limited world of experience – it serves as a controlled testing ground that follows not only its own social rules, but also redefined rules of time and space.”
Janina Warnk
Janina Warnk’s practice feeds on a shift in school spaces and roles. She builds immersive and performative worlds of experience in which things can be conveyed in a fun way in order to overcome inhibitions. ‘Teaching in role’ is an attempt to remove the dividing lines between looking on, attending and participating, and is guided performatively by the appeal of the space and what is offered in it. Warnk translates the shift in the space’s location by interweaving snippets and memories of agrarian utopia: from rural to urban, from the playground to documenta fifteen, from a place of fun learning to a place where everyone can learn something from everyone else.
The barn is the focal point, using role play to think about food production, production methods and the fundamental agricultural principles of our economy; at its margins, utopian and idealised ideas about the collective and moments of care work become something that can be experienced. It is about slowing down and stepping out of the high-pressure environment of school. Warnk builds her own systems in order to calm down other systems.
Overview of the programme for the preview days
Wednesday 15 June 2022
13:30 – 16:00 Plug & play: Walter Lübcke School Wolfhagen: te © rew feat Jaboy87
17:00 – 18:00 Flicker space: films from the Flying Artist’s Room
From 18:00 Open space/tea party
Thursday 16 June 2022
13:30 – 20:00 Open space/plug & play
Friday 17 June 2022
13:30 – 17:00 Plug & play/talk: The guests come from Unterneustadt Primary School. They talk about their visions for sustainable values, flood the Flying Artist’s Room with their ideas, and practise nongkrong together.
17:00 – 18:00 Flicker space: films from the Flying Artist’s Room
From 18:00 Open space/tea party
