Returning from the trip, I decided to organise an event for presenting the publications, arrange a meeting place with the cheapest available materials and collect funds for a student from the fashion department so she can produce a few hammocks for the university garden. All this while cooking food, similar to a VoKü, but called Kantin, something I have been fortunate enough to do with a couple of friends the previous year.
Unfortunately, my professors didn't even want to hear about this. They were very angered by the ”occupy parking lot” action, and also because there had been some bacchanalias in earlier years, which due to unwanted incidents had been stopped from happening again.
So I decided to stir things up again. The pallets had been in place for one month, the meeting place proved to be useful, but people were already getting too comfortable with it. The pallets were gathered and piled up at the entrance of the school, replaced by all the metal sculptures, that could be found in the garden.
The idea behind this little action, which again unsettled the professors who thought I was through with provocation, had been to see if students would dare and take the pallets to arrange them in any space they wish. Furthermore, I wanted to see which spots in the garden they would choose.
Now, at this point, I think I made a mistake not communicating calmly enough with the professors, since these tiny actions were just play and nothing serious from my (and many other students') point of view.
Even though I am still very convinced that my provocations of questioning authority were not insulting, threatening and especially not as serious as an eventual series of political debates on the University Charter, on student rights or professors' obligations and ways of enforcing them, nor leaking outrageous stories in pamphlets, the very fact is that communication between the professors and me had come to a dead end.
Many of the student works out there had been placed in the garden by the professors. In an abstract way, they do not belong anymore to the student but to the professors who had prepared the student and had chosen her/his work as a representative of a certain style, of academic curriculum. My theory on why these actions had been and still are considered insulting is that the professors of sculpture witnessed the ”displacement” of academic orientation, the abolition of a locally canonised type of formalist sculpture, they maybe even envisaged the coming of a new world order. One needs to look at the heated public debates every once in a while a controversial political persona gets a public sculpture, or is removed from public space.
With this action, the idea arose to continue the project on another path, instead of a dogmatic and didactic cultural political agenda. The other path could have been a set of carefully designed, humorous and ironic but not too provocative actions, that would have started to play with the physical space of the garden.
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