Vibrating Edges
Summer School 26
8th Transdisciplinary Summer School at West Den Haag
18.08.2025 — 22.08.2025

Vibrating Edges: radical cinema and images in movement.

Instructors:
Geo Barcan, Sudeep Dasgupta, Bojan Fajfric, Kwak Yunjoo and Baruch Gottlieb

Applications + info:
chloe@westdenhaag.nl

The summer school is open to artists, theorists, and others of all ages from 18-75 who are interested in developing their practices in a radically transdisciplinary framework, working through their own bodily sensibilities and their social imbrications in an environment of mutual respect and support. The program will be held in English.

Just as physics and chemistry were expected to unveil all the secrets of the material world allowing humanity to refashion it at will, cinema, like photography before it, was promised to reveal reality so undeniably that universal justice would surely follow. It turns out however that reality, though certainly anchored in material conditions, is much more than that, full of human concepts and ideology fraught with human desires and needs.

Jacques Rancière’s book ‘Intervals of Cinema’ is a meditation on the power of cinema to bring us closer in a world which is more aligned with the higher moral principles our nations claim to uphold. He explores the techniques filmmakers use to think mediatically, where the camera, lighting, actors and crew form an apparatus adequate to grapple with the great moral problems of our day towards a project of general emancipation. He compares this with how literature attempts to convey internal thinking and invisible morality, and resolves that neither is superior, and embarks on a fascinating philosophical journey through the relative advantages of each.

The project of emancipation cannot depend on aesthetic practices alone, in fact Rancière identifies in both cinema and literature what he calls ‘aporiae of emancipation’ where there is an impasse between aesthetics and social transformation. Practically everybody today makes photographs and video as a matter of everyday communication, this democratization of media tools has produced a new environment of vernacular creation where the only criteria of quality is in its effects. But drawing on feminist and anti-colonial thinkers we must also attend to what need not be aestheticized to be operative: the ‘minor gestures’, through which collective life is sustained and contested. These often beyond the reach of official politics or dominant media forms, but increasingly made explicit on various media platforms as new frontiers of cultural commerce.

In our 8th international summer school we invite artists, activists, theorists and others to explore the presence and power of moving image and sound in our lives together, moving from theory to practice and back again, in front of and behind the camera. Each day involves a variety of encounters, sometimes reading, viewing and discussing together other times, sketching, improvising, rehearsing, taking pictures, video and recording. Over five days, we build on the work of previous days culminating in speculative synthesis presentations on the last day. We engage experimentally in bodied thought and action in an environment of mutual support and learning. Exploring curator and artist Emelie Chhangur’s notion of ‘Vibrating Edges’ between the limits of the frame and the rest of the world, between the disciplines and between the arts and the communities they create with and for, this school will start off from Rancière’s notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’ towards hybrid and cybrid social aesthetics which challenge us to reimagine what art can be or do.

Participants should expect to engage in discussions and activities in an environment which encourages experimentation, trial & error, listening and mutual support.

The Summer School takes place on location at West Den Haag in the former US Embassy in the center of The Hague. The Summer School is convened by Baruch Gottlieb.

References: Jacques Rancières, Emelie Chhangur, Jacques Derrida, Vilém Flusser and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Keywords: transdisciplinair, embodied learning, practice-based learning, speculative synthesis, image, moving image, emancipation, aesthetics, media ecology, Rancière, mediatic thinking

The West Summer School 2026 is limited to 25 participants. There is a participant fee of € 250,- incl. lunches (student € 150,-). The program will be held in English. We will gather in the garden and auditorium at West in The Hague.

To apply, please e-mail Chloë van Diepen: chloe@westdenhaag.nl before July 1st with a short motivation letter. If successful, you will receive a confirmation within the week. The Summer School is for participants only. For more info about the application process email: chloe@westdenhaag.nl