Studio Bodybuilding - Joost Jansen
We're a hands-on studio with a team focused on the aspects of the fashion system—textile, colour, garments, and pattern design. We have a research-by-making, thinking-by-doing attitude where a material sense is key—we focus less on craftsmanship and more on editing and storytelling. We work with a variety of designers, and collaborators who are active in the field—photographers, fashion designers, material designers—because meeting a lot of different people helps students define what works for them. Usually, we also collaborate with an external company or partner. It’s important for students to get outside input to reflect on what they’re doing within the school bubble and what we might do differently than others. Our students create their own language, their own idiom.
The studio doesn’t have one specific curriculum or fixed direction, but we have a focus on body and building, fashion and interior, textile and material, analog and digital, image and story, unlearning and relearning, critical and reactional, individual and the group. Each semester’s curriculum is defined depending on the group of students—and every group is different. This defines our studio. At DAE, students tend to switch studios regularly, which gives opportunities, but also makes it less common to build relationships with students over multiple semesters. Similarly, we don't have a fixed team of tutors that we work with, instead we have a network which comes together organically, adapted to the groups’ needs. The studio is built to prepare students for their realities after school, where there’s a lot going on at the same time. They learn to prioritise, make decisions, stretch themselves.
An example of our studio’s fluidity is the group agreement, which students and tutors generate collectively three to four weeks into the semester, when the group begins to own the space. It allows us to reflect together on what’s working and what’s not. Our assignments are more like frameworks written with an idea in mind and we challenge the students to find their own focus to create their own assignment within that framework. If students are stuck in the concept phase, we push them towards hands-on making, or vice versa. The students define their own focus and create their own assignments. Someone might make furniture, someone else a collection of textiles, someone else a performance. Because of our network, we can support all of these projects.
We see that this flexibility works to the students’ advantage because we pair it with a structure of education and multiple evaluation moments which focus on the students’ needs, progress and self-reflection: check-in, midterm, presentation term, and the endterm. For teaching, we work with a bi-weekly rhythm: One week, there’s class and feedback sessions with tutors and peers in small groups; the next week is a work week without lessons. This change helps students take responsibility for their work and decisions. In content, our studio build-up is like an onion: From exploring your voice to understanding your place and connections in the world. All those elements give structure to the studio.
We react to each previous semester and adapt our focus and position within the landscape of BA studios at DAE. This way, we stay relevant for the world around us. Our antennas pick up signals of the current now, so we can help students develop a sense of nowness. Part of this also means being open to a shift in the kind of students we attract, which, since a few years, includes students in personal transitions, including gender transitions. Many of our students use these transition moments as fuel for their design practices. That gives a unique supportive energy to the studio, which we’re proud of.
