• Follow the Sandberg Disarming Design Departmant on instagram

The temporary master’s programme is committed to cooking, making, weaving, screening, giving, talking, playing, mapping, workshopping, sensing, celebrating, reclaiming, documenting, forming, witnessing, juxtaposing, tripping, translating, transposing, sculpting, publishing, and unfolding.

”Disarming” positions design as a cultural tool to oppose authority and create knowledge with affection, desire, and imagination. The curriculum aims to question, challenge, and locate the emancipatory potential of design and other organizational art forms. We uphold artistic practices that deal with conditions of anti-coloniality, activism, and entangled histories, and operate at the intersection of crafts, language, architecture, community, politics, and translation.

The programme focuses on the artistic work of the participants—helping them find their own methods, language, and tools—in addition to participative projects brought in by the team and institution. It is set up as a studio-space-led programme where students receive feedback from peers and tutors on their research, projects, and practices. The curriculum has an open structure and forms its final shape in response to the students’ different initiatives, collaborations, and developments.

• Bilboard of solidarity, by Disarming Design participants, May 2021

• Language cafe, were two zoom-based meetings revolving around language, design, translation, and politics – rooting its conversations within and through contemporary perspectives from the Arabic speaking region and the diaspora. This edition “The Language of Oppression and Resistance” was a collaboration of the Cairography Collective in tandem with the ‘Disarming Design’ Master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam – hosted at Kunsthal Ghent.

About the Sandberg Instituut

As the postgraduate programme of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, the Sandberg Instituut offers Master Programmes in Fine Arts, Interior Architecture and Design.

The five Main Departments aim to deepen the practices of artists, designers and critics. In addition, the Temporary Programmes reflect on specific urgencies in society and the arts, and the Hosted Programmes focus on collaboration with other institutes. Sandberg Instituut’s Main Departments are Critical Studies, Design, The Dirty Art Department, Fine Arts and Studio for Immediate Spaces. An average of only twenty students per programme allows each course to be flexible and open to initiatives from students and third parties. The course directors, who are prominent artists, designers, theorists and curators with international practices, invite tutors and guests who are able to challenge the students to critically reflect on their profession, their work and their progress. The two-year Temporary Programmes are developed according to urgent world issues.

Visit the website of the Sandberg Instituut