Visual Assembly in Sommerakademie Paul Klee curated by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou as a part of the programm Shaping What We Owe (One Another) held in collaboration with together with our Kenyan’s partners:
Jamey Ponte and Patrick Othieo are co-founders of House of Friends Kenya and the Kibera Arts District.

Kibera Art District showed us videos of their workshops, studios, and galleries in the middle of one of Africa’s largest informal settlements — maybe the world’s.
Kibera is already a network of educational studios, laboratories, and workshops where people make things. We wanted to see how Swiss students — who mostly work with theory and images — would relate to people doing large-scale, hands-on production, and what each group imagined as their ideal university, what they felt was missing.
In Bern, students studying curating, pedagogy, and other disciplines gathered with curators and teachers to imagine their university. We set these conditions: one hundred students, one hectare of land. How could such an institute work internally? How would it relate to the outside world — to Kibera?
First thing: we design the space to be as decentralized as possible from the start. Someone called it “temporary autonomous zones” — constantly renegotiating space with each other, inside and outside the university. People meet in assembly spaces and decide together what to do with common space. Not top-down. Everyone figuring it out as they go.
We talked about private versus public, connections between outside and inside, where territory begins and ends. How does the university sustain itself? Learning from masters who practice what they teach — not just art but science. Learning by doing, testing and trying, not pure theory.
What emerged:
– Focus on students, not teachers. Map the institution from their perspective.
– Many small public spaces instead of one large one, all temporary.
– Lots of doors. Open kitchens where people cook for each other.
– Self-sufficiency: gardens, animals, compost, toilets, solar panels — managed collectively.
– No surveillance.
– A sheep drawing: “I have no concept of value except the value of life.”
– Connection to the outside world is crucial — to the city and beyond.
– Radically international.
– Library as essential infrastructure.
– Laboratories connecting art, science, engineering, humanities.
– Solutions for floods, storms, sustaining human life.
The recurring question: do we even need to build anything? Could we use existing spaces where people already work and live?