Summer Fools Episode 3

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 3 combines the methodologies of the preceding two episodes into an exercise on scale, communication and blind trust. How a can a group constructively work together despite being in different places? How do we collectively improvise forms of communication for designing and arranging? What happens when we design collectively through different direct experiences of scale? Telephones and choreographies will be used in a bizarre play of life-size chess.

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: Wild Card: Constellations by Stefan Jovanovic. Sadler’s Wells, London. Photo by Camilla Greenwell