Starting in the Spring of 2019, exactly 100 years after the foundation of Bauhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut transformed into Neuhaus, a temporary transdisciplinary academy for more-than-human knowledge. For a period of four months, this ever-evolving learning environment takes over the institution, occupying and transforming its existing building and facilities, adding new ones, and opening them up – to co-create, co-own, share, and perform the Neuhaus programme of more-than-human knowledge.
From Bauhaus to Neuhaus: Het Nieuwe Instituut joined the worldwide celebration of the Bauhaus centenary not by glorifying the historical achievements of this legendary school, but rather by reactivating and embodying its original spirit through Neuhaus. The contemporary situation of accumulated crises in ecology, economy, politics and society finds a mirror image in the era that immediately followed WW1. In the total burn-out that was the aftermath of that conflict, societal and political orders crumbled, technological developments put great strain on both workers and the environment, and became associated as much with large scale destruction as with emancipation.
The educational format of the first period of Bauhaus focused on the on-going, open enquiry of knowledge production: its initial paradigms embraced the idea of infusing the power of art into the societal and industrial fabric, striving for connective narratives to foster awareness of a new mode of society, a liberated society, based on the motto “reconsidering the world”. The experimental programme adopted a positive, affirmative approach that set out to bypass the unsustainability of the present in search of opportunities to envision it anew.
Het Nieuwe Instituut proposed Neuhaus as a means to host, generate and share other knowledge, to escape the destructive status quo. Neuhaus aimed to explore, investigate and promote knowledge based in marginalized and unrecognized cultures, knowledge that strays far from any traditional reductionist analysis or mathematical modelling, knowledge that lives in plants, animals and machines, and knowledge that relates to the entire physical body and all of its senses, beyond the rational mind.
For more info about the development of the project please visit here
Research: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Angela Rui
Curated by: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Flora van Gaalen, Arianne van der Veen
Exhibition design: Raphaël Coutin
Neuhaus.world and campaign design & concept: Moniker
Visual identity academy: Gaile Pranckunaite & Mislav Zugaj
Scenography consultants: Sanne Leufkens, Sigrid Merx