Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber in dialog with Ricarda Denzer and Jo Schmeiser

About the publications

Bildungsmoderne entzaubern. Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Between 2013 and 2019, Vienna and Vancouver-based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, together with the Frankfurt urban sociologist Klaus Ronneberger, followed the relocation of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt from the Bockenheim district to the Westend. Their artistic research combines a sociological analysis of the change of location with a particular photographic focus on the 1950s and 1960s campus architecture of the German architect Ferdinand Kramer.

An extensive compilation of images reminds one of the emancipatory potential of these architectures and “spaces of knowledge” of the university that were lost in Bockenheim. Especially today,  in view of the disenchantment of universities after the neoliberal turn, these images and contributions demand an understanding of the university that can deliver on the former promises of modern education for emancipation, democratization and “education for all”.

Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber (Ed.): Bildungsmoderne entzaubern. Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, With contributions by Ruth Horak, Klaus Ronneberger, and Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber (ger.). adocs Verlag & Produktion, Hamburg; Edition Camera Austria, Graz 2021.
Softcover, 172 pages, 17 × 23,8 cm, 95 color illustrations.
€ 25.– / ISBN 978-3-943253-41-2

Unsettling Educational Modernism. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

The iconic architecture of the brutalist modernist megastructure of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada built by architect Arthur Erickson in the 1960s is the site of the artistic research project into the history of this “radical campus” and its built environment by Vancouver and Vienna based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber. The collaborative research group, “Guests and Hosts”, formed by Bitter & Weber and Métis scholar June Scudeler including Métis scholar and student Treena Chambers, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) student Toni-Leah Yake, as well as artists and students Rachel Warwick and Hannah Campbell, has challenged the narrative of the radical campus, so called because it was informed by experimental concepts of learning and teaching. Using the spaces of a settler colonial institution, the project shifts perspectives by unsettling and challenging western-based concepts of pedagogy and knowledge. Combining archival photographic material, architectural photographs by the artists, and interventions into the institutional spaces by Guests and Hosts, the project performs the claim for places rather than spaces for Indigenous ways of knowing and learning.

The artists book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, May 27 – July 11, 2021, HKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Guests & Hosts (Ed.): Unsettling Educational Modernism. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. With texts by Treena Chambers, June Scrudeler, and Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber (eng.). adocs Verlag & Produktion, Hamburg; Edition Camera Austria, Graz 2021.

128 pages, 17 × 23.8 cm, 17 b/w and 80 color illustrations, poster supplement.
€ 25.– / ISBN 978-3-943253-51-1

For the book presentation please use the side entrance at the back of the building.