Titanstraße: a bridge between cultures: a text photo story

Abstract

This project aimed to engage secondary-school pupils in an experimental open-learning situation. They had to structure the learning process themselves and identify their own artistic strategies and research methods so as to arrive at personal artistic statements. In the intensive, difficult and painful process of becoming exposed to a strange place, pupils were initially disturbed and/or alienated. This internal and external confrontation triggered exploratory processes in which forgotten places that had been experienced differently were associated with a new place and a new self open to, contingent upon and increasingly dominated by personal questions and actions. In artistic research it is possible to achieve multiple results through intensive self-reflection, external observation, investigation, documentation and associations. The results are affected by individual choices in an artistic exploration strategy where methods and knowledge anchored in the pupil's prior understanding are acquired inductively during the process of exploration in a way that resembles scientific research.