ARTS AND SPACE.
A Study Program for the Education of Spatial Agents.
Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

Arts and Space (2017–2019) is an institutional project developed at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) to conceive an interdisciplinary study program operating across arts, culture, and design. Rather than introducing a new discipline, the project activates the university itself as a spatial and cultural device.

The program addresses the need for a new figure of spatial agent — capable of interpreting, constructing, and transforming spatial relations through cultural practice. Space is approached not as a neutral container, but as a field produced through social, artistic, and institutional actions.

The educational structure is based on a major–minor system designed to interweave existing curricula from the five departments of the university: Design, Art and Media, Music, Cultural Analysis, and Performing Arts and Film. Instead of replacing established programs, Arts and Space operates by displacing disciplinary boundaries and activating transversal connections among them.

The curriculum functions through a horizontal and modular logic. Students compose individualized trajectories by combining courses across departments, supported by a guiding role conceived as a curator of cultural knowledge. Education is framed as a cumulative and adaptable process, allowing engagement through different formats and timeframes, including CAS, DAS, BA, MA, and MAS configurations.

A key aspect of the program is its emphasis on knowledge transfer as a cultural practice. Teaching, mentoring, and peer-to-peer exchange are integrated into the educational model, fostering a distributed learning environment in which students actively participate in the production and circulation of knowledge.

Developed through a two-year participatory process involving faculty members from all five departments, Arts and Space reflects a collective effort to reconsider the role of the arts within contemporary spatial production. An extract of this research was published as The Knowledge of the Form in Art, Self & System, edited by Donatella Bernardi and published by Sternberg Press in 2019.

By activating existing infrastructures, competencies, and institutional relations, the project positions education itself as an operative field. The university becomes not only a site of instruction, but an active cultural agent capable of generating spatial impact within the city and beyond.

Although conceived prior to the explicit systematization of DEMA, Arts and Space anticipates a central dimension later formalized within Epistemic Design: institutions can be reconfigured as relational fields in which spatial, cultural, and organizational decisions become design material.

Displace — Disciplinary boundaries are shifted by reconfiguring the university as a transversal spatial and cultural device rather than a collection of isolated programs.

Expose — Education is made visible as a form of spatial practice, revealing how cultural knowledge actively produces and transforms space.

Mediate — The project mediates institutional knowledge by translating complex academic structures into accessible, modular configurations that enable transversal engagement.

Activate — Arts and Space activates faculty members, students, and institutional infrastructures as co-producers of spatial culture, requiring collective negotiation and shared responsibility.