Spatial Performance and Design (AAIS) explores practices of design that reach beyond standard definitions of architecture and performance. The programme focuses on fields such as dance, theatre, music, exhibitions and festivals, with a focus on the sociopolitical effect of works in these fields. AAIS offers 12-month MA or 18-month MFA options within a learning environment that encourages students to communicate and collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to challenge and extend the frontiers of art, architecture and performance.
Individuals who work in the creative industries often define their work as multidisciplinary; AAIS responds to this by encouraging students to develop new methods of collaboration. Participants in the programme research, design and produce a series of spatial performances and installations through which they examine overlaps between creative work and design during the development of projects and events. AAIS reveals unseen networks between professions, products and methodologies, enabling students to develop a language with which to communicate between creative disciplines.
We create pathways for students to learn new skills and techniques. The programme has established connections to other institutions, academics and practices within a wide range of creative disciplines; these contribute to the programme through lectures, seminars, exercises, tutorials and talks. The studio also creates real-world projects that shape the work of the year and enable public participation. Alongside this, students are encouraged to build new professional networks from creative backgrounds as diverse and complementary as performance, design, music, film, photography, fashion, communication and curation.
2025–26 Agenda: Constructing the Not-Yet
AAIS enters the new academic year with a renewed commitment to the politics of imagination, spatial practice and embodied speculation. With reference to Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1954–59), this year we ask: how can spatial and performative design anticipate realities not yet born? Bloch’s conception of the not-yet-conscious will underpin our investigations this year, situating the studio as a site where critical desire meets spatial articulation and where performance functions as a rehearsal for radical forms of life.
Hope, in Bloch’s materialist philosophy, is not passive longing but active construction. It is the substance of future thinking, tethered to a critique of the present. This year, AAIS will function as both laboratory and rehearsal space, engaging the architectural imagination as a mode of refusal and projection. We will explore architectures that speak, listen, move and resist; scenographies that anticipate transformed social contracts; and collective practices that remain in process, unfinished or contingent, like hope itself.
This speculative and political impulse is grounded in a longer cultural and environmental lineage. From Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which imagined spatial and social structures as interwoven forms of critique, to Bruno Latour’s calls for new modes of terrestrial attachment, we recognise that future worlds are never detached from the material limits and ecological urgencies of the present. More’s island republic was both a spatial fiction and a political demand, shaped by a world undergoing displacement and enclosure. Latour, in contrast, asks us to compose without the comfort of detachment, to make alliances with what is already here. These positions frame our task: to create spatial practices that resist abstraction, remain grounded and build imaginative traction in the thick of crisis.
The year will be structured around a series of projects, performances, seminars and workshops with guest tutors working in performance, critical theory, educational practice, spatial politics and sound. These sessions will support students in developing original work that operates across disciplines while remaining materially and politically grounded. Through design, performance and critical writing, students will construct spatial acts that pursue the utopian, the incomplete and the subversively possible. This will lead to a London-based public event in March and will culminate in June with a week-long festival at Verdens Ende – ‘The End of the World’ – as part of the Færderbiennalen in Norway.
Our approach remains collaborative, experimental and fundamentally hopeful. Against the closure of political imagination and the instrumentalisation of design, we continue to develop practices that are interprofessional, improvisational and in perpetual rehearsal.
Terms 1–3
Students develop work in the design studio supported by seminar-based learning about the history and theory of interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration. The group then moves on to the organisation and realisation of applied events and installations that result from these approaches, drawing upon the programme’s network of collaborators.
Term 4–5
The second phase of study is focused on the production of an individual thesis, either in written form in Term 4 (for the MA qualification) or through applied practice during Term 4–5 (for the MFA degree). Alongside lectures, seminars, symposia and workshops, the programme’s applied projects serve as generators for the year’s work and encourage both academic focus and public participation.