Summer Fools Episode 2

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 3 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. Episode 2 will address what happens after a group settles and relationships begin to arise when working together. In group matrix theory, this is called the chaos phase. How does the act of arranging create avenues for participation? How are opportunities for collaboration communicated through the treatment of ambiguous props and materials? What happens when individuals in a group relinquish authorship, collectively? There will be flowers and found objects, the group multi-authors chaos, to be rearranged back into order. What is left behind and what has changed?