Doors of Learning

In the annual Bauhaus Lab, an interdisciplinary research team deals with a topic from the area of ​​global modernism. Under the title "Camps for Liberation", the participants in the Bauhaus Lab 2022 spent three months researching the role of education in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Finally, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation invites you to the opening of the exhibition "Doors of Learning: Microcosms of a future South Africa" ​​on Thursday, August 4, 2022, in which the international participants Igor Bloch, Joyce Lam, Essi Lamberg, Nokubekezela Mchunu, Esther Mbibo, Michalina Musielak, Lucas Rehnman and Jordan Rowe present their results.

The basis for research this year was a UN Habitat conference of the GDR Building Academy, which took place in 1988 at the Bauhaus in Dessau. During the event, a prefabricated building system developed by GDR architects was presented, which was used in education and development centers in rural Tanzania. Here they were set up by the African National Congress (ANC) with international support. People fleeing the apartheid regime in South Africa and racial segregation found in them innovative spaces of refuge and development.

The Somafco and Dakawa ANC centers, built in the late 1970s and 1980s, were the focus of the research program. Together with researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Bauhaus Lab examined these settlements, which were both places of exile and places of liberation, from different perspectives. The exhibition focuses on the following questions: What were the immediate educational needs in these temporary learning environments? What alternative ideas, programs and solutions have been developed in Tanzania, and how have the educational priorities been implemented spatially and creatively by the ANC and international actors?

In a symposium that is part of the opening program, the participants of the Bauhaus Lab will discuss with international guests. Invited are Nolan Oswald Dennis (Johannesburg), Ola Uduku (Liverpool), Jakob Marcks (Prague), Anja Schade (Hildesheim) and Hannah Le Roux (Johannesburg).