Abandoned Practices Institute:
Prague 2012 Summer Study Trip
July 9th - 27th, 2012

Teachers: Lin Hixson, Mark Jeffery, Matthew Goulish

Visiting Scholars 2012: TBA

This 3-week summer intensive looks forward by looking backward, researching, enacting, and embodying practices that for one reason or another have been disregarded in the wake of progress, and relegated to the archives of history. This year, the course relocates to Prague, in the Czech Republic, to explore and study this compact city, with 600 years of visible history, as an urban classroom and an inexhaustible catalogue of abandoned practices and endangered uses. Students will participate in individual and collaborative projects involving writing, installation, documentation, and live performance. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects. Available for credit and non-credit enrollment.

Abandoned practices constitutes an emerging field of inquiry pioneered by Alan Read of King’s College, London, author of Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The course focus will allow a thematic meeting place that confronts the common accelerated temporalities of the 21st century, whether in the form of economic and artistic globalization, technologies ceaseless upgrade, or the general shifts in understanding the word local.

The course does not propose that we share a mutual past, but rather that we might mutually discover a shared strategy of thinking about our pasts, a strategy of reimagining and reenacting the different abandoned practices that once defined the ordinary.

Registration for Summer 2012 Study Trips at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago begins March 8th, 2012.
To register please follow this link: Summer Course Registration