Teaching Lies

Abstract

Teaching Lies is a public School of Schools, a workshop about illusory deceptions at work in the designed modern world. Its scope is to identify, expose, discuss and make public these modes, through the collaborative writing of a syllabus for a spurious studio-based class. the workshop is aimed at participative production and play, modulations and dissimulations of designed deceptions in pedagogy and beyond.

Over multiple days, a workshop and exhibition elements develop around several thematics addressing different fabulative tropes, such as concealing (secret origins, hiding, shadowing, masks); camouflage (adversarial, being unmappable, decoys, hiding in plain sight); fabulation (fictionalization, re-narration, imaginaries); reduction (simplification, rules of thumb, common practice, ‘just enough’); misappropriation (metaphors, anecdotes, projection); misdirection (look over here! fakes, hoaxes, sleight-of-hand, puppets, apocrypha, data derives).

For the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, Donato Ricci, Selçuk Artut, Michael Edward Young, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Benoît Verjat, Paolo Patelli and Jamie Allen seek to analyze, explore and re-compose the rhetorical figures and material strategies behind communication, design, media, technology and art, as part of our pronounced post-factual condition; in a context where terms of art and artifice — like ‘fabulation’ — have become main means of doing art, design and by extension, communication, politics and life. A further instantiation of the project is exhibited as part of the 26th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia.