CCC Research Master and PhD-Forum
Critical Curatorial Cybernetic Studies

Dear Future Fellow Students

We are writing you this letter as a way to introduce the CCC Research Program (RP) from the students’ perspective; and to share with you what we think the CCC Master offers and facilitates for studying contemporary art practices with a specific focus on research-led making, thinking, imagining and collectivising through art. In this ongoing planetary crisis, everyone and everything remains under severe pressure, which impacts the social imaginary of learning together, hanging out, supporting each other, as well as art-making and curatorial mobilizations themselves.

The decision to join a research-based MA program is never an easy one – and was not for us either. Yet, the pandemic puts even more pressure on what contemporary art and research can do from within this masked future. This decision will be important for you personally in unmasking your own future through your practice-based research process as an artist, curator, musician, architect, writer, designer, coder… Your choice will also shape the modes of collective thinking, shared practices, research, theory as action, creative making, making public across borders and beyond the institution in the years to come.

The CCC RP is the beginning of a great unlearning process. It is an ecosystem of thinking through and thinking with, in order to collectively question our interlocutors as well as the power structures inherent in knowledge production. Through a set of project seminars, our minds are stretched and pulled into unfamiliar ways of thinking, looking and learning: Critical Studies focuses on political ecologies and mobilizes the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx and others, in order to apprehend the ongoing planetary crisis; Theory Fiction focuses on the generative relations between science fiction and contemporary theory through an engagement with the writings of Octavia E. Butler and critical black studies such as Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten; Curatorial/Politics focuses on archival metabolism, transgenerational conversations and the question of violence in exhibiting processes as proposed by thinkers such as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark a.o.

We then rehearse different methods of making research public through the Situated Art Practices and Writing Research Practice seminars. The latter culminates in a collective publication of our research abstracts called Actes de Recherche that trains us in t ways of transforming our practice into words of action. The Propositions for the school of tomorrow, authored by a group of students last year during the first corona-wave, imagines an improved future for art and design education informed by our experiences. These intimate relations and collective endeavours are nourished by moments of collective reflection in the Reading Group and Self Organized Seminar, where we try to situate ourselves in order to shape the program into a complex and exciting space of courage, risk, and support.

The CCC RP operates through a transdisciplinary constellation that enables each participant to develop a situated point of view as an active agent in their own practices. Taken together, all these practices create the condition for realizing your own art-research project. Your graduation after two years will consist of a live-presentation in the medium of your choice within a performative set-up and a written Master Thesis of 7000-14000 words.

This process of unlearning is done in solidarity. We remind ourselves that we can all learn much from each other. The road to the undercommons is an experimental one to share. Each of us contributes to building our community inside of the CCC RP Master and PhD-Forum, across the three Master programs of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD and through negotiating our relations within and beyond the institution with allies, friends, comrades and collectives. We celebrate these carefully built relationships through karaoke, small groups, study trips, online parties and public moments such as the CCC Public Seminar. We practice ways of organizing ourselves to challenge the institution from within.

This attempt to address you, students who will come after us, who will study with us, is our way of offering something that will remain of this community; we invite you to become our future allies and prospective partners, wherever we may meet. Until then, we would like to emphasize that moving your own body through space and time can be an act of resistance; that astrology can be a relevant tool to realize an already existing connectivity between us, beyond normative orders of time, methods and knowledge; that needlework can create a social fabric; that breathing practices, sound, poetry, activism, care… are all tools and practices which allow us to find value and insights that too often have been put aside. There are as many ways of practicing as there are of struggling.

x

We look forward to hearing from you.

Warmly,
The current CCC students

♡ we are here for you ♡

February, 2021

♡

PS: A further resource is the CCC Video Channel documenting the CCC Public Seminar since 2015. The CCCyber Cosmos welcomes your updates as well as visits on our news feed with your projects, observations, recommendations, visualizations, sonifications and textualizations. You can of course reach us anytime about anything, just write us at ccc.head@hesge.ch