
Summer Fools builds on the AA’s long history of radical lateral thinking, group-work dynamics, and diagonal social happenings. Each of the sessions will be participatory, hands-on, with simple instructions, facilitated by Stefan, Pati & Jack. The three sessions will function as episodic evenings of relational aesthetics, building in scale and intimacy. This series of foolish episodes looks at how communities form in short amounts of time, like in a summer school. How do social roles become spatial problems? What can the fool do? Mess-making and chaos is healthy, and so is cleaning up and arranging afterwards. We will spend 3 hours over 2 weeks diving into foolish trickery, questioning the architect’s role as designer, thinker and active agent in collective organisms. We will aim at subverting protocol, attachment and authorship. These episodes will involve rope, flowers, sculpture-toys, fairy lights, telephone calls, pencils and utensils, negotiating, building, risk and trust. The first session will look at the inception of group dynamics and sociometry. How do we determine roles? How can a group quickly construct complexity? How can situations be constructed and deconstructed collectively?
Stefan Jovanović is a Serbo-Italian architect, choreographer, and storyteller approaching performance and architecture as intersecting artistic forms, rooted within a deep interest in the body. Pati De is a Brazilian-Swiss event designer, maker, illustrator, and videographer trained at the Architectural Association and California College of the Arts. Jack makes toys, sculptures and performance spaces under Jack Hardy Works. He comes from a pedagogy of live projects and performance spaces and was awarded the inaugural Mark Fisher Scholarship at the Architectural Association in 2015.
Image: Round and Round the Old Kent Road the Radical Rascal Ran by Jack Hardy. AA, London. Photo by Valerie Bennett.