When making things without prior knowledge of “the material,” how should such naive and potentially brutal behavior be interpreted, and what does it represent and generate?

In the slipstream of conceptual art, the intimate interweaving of meaning and materialization in art and design came to be discredited in the second half of the twentieth century. The master’s program Material Utopias at the Sandberg Instituut put an end to this tradition by abolishing the unproductive hierarchy separating “concept” and “making,” “content” and “process.”

The School of Missing Studies started in 2003 as an initiative of artists and architects who recognized “the missing” as a matter of urgency. Investigating what culture(s) laid the foundations for the loss we are experiencing from modernization and how this loss can talk back to us as a potential site of learning, the School of Missing Studies is calling for a space to turn existing knowledge against itself to affect our capacity to see things otherwise.

It’s easy to rant about the fashion industry. Nowadays, a large part of it is based on producing and consuming vast amounts of clothing. Collections are manufactured at dizzying speeds and sold for extremely low or incredibly high prices.