The CCC research-based Master of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève is a bilingual (ENG/FR) and full-time postgraduate study programme over the duration of two years in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Specialized in working with students on advanced research methodologies by the means of contemporary art, the study program aims to train students in developing a project-specific research practice by means of images, sounds, matter, movements, bodies, codes, emotions and text. The three CCC stand for the [c]ritical, [c]uratorial and [c]ybernetic, yet, may be extended into communal, conceptual, cosmological, contemporary, computational or cyclonpedic composing the conditions for doing research as a network of practices.
The CCC’s trans-disciplinary environment invites students from all cultural and educational art or non-art background committed to art-led thinking processes for developing new vocabularies by the various means of research for articulating our being in the world of the 21st century. A main motivation for our transdisciplinary pedagogy is to work with the students, collectively and individually, on situating their research in a politics of location and positionality while continuously examining our entanglements with global infrastructures in material, ecological, transhistorical, geopolitical, economic, posthumanist, ontological or xenogenetic terms.
From the students’ perspective, the Propositions For The School of Tomorrow, written by a group of students reflecting on the impact of the pathogen health crisis on the sociability of art and education under conditions of an algorithmic capitalism, suggest core aspects in discussion at the CCC: In which ways do we need art-making and educational infrastructures to change under the conditions of planetary crisis? What can an art academy in the 21st century in Geneva provide us with?
In 2021/22, the CCC Public Seminar is online and organized by the curatorial/politics seminar: What methodologies do artists, designers, architects or curators develop, or have to develop differently today, for confronting the coloniality of display through practices of decolonizing the exhibitionary act? With Christina Varva / Forensic Architecture, Paz Guevara, Saba Innab, among others. Registration for the online CCC Public Seminar under ccc.head [at] hesge.ch.
In 2022/23, the CCC team will be composed of Çagla E. Aykaç, Kodwo Eshun, Alexander Gence, Tarek Lakhrissi, Julie Marmet, Doreen Mende, Anne-Julie Raccoursier, and Gene Ray.
Since 2015, faculty member as well as guests of the CCC include Ramon Amaro, Chino Amobi, Marwa Arsanios, Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Zach Blas, Ray Brassier, Johanna Bruckner, Ghalas Charara, Bureau de Crise. Maïté Chénière, Laboria Cuboniks, Clémentine Déliss, Angela Dimitrakaki, Camille Dumond, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Marina Fokidis, Anselm Franke, Fabien Giraud and Ida Soulard, Caspar Heinemann, Charles Heller, Louis Henderson, Samia Henni, IYAPO REPOSITORY, Armin Linke, Olivier Marboeuf, Michael Marder, Federica Martini and Petra Koehle, Noémi Vanessa Michel, Nayansaku Mufwankolo, Marion von Osten, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Bahar Noorizadeh, Camilla Paolino, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Andrea Philips, Griselda Pollock, farid rakun / ruangrupa, Patricia Reed, Ana Tjé, Susan Schuppli, Jonas Staal, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Vera Tollmann, Sandar Tun Tun, Françoise Vergès, Mawena Yehouessi, Grant Watson, Eyal Weizman, and many more.
The CCC is a transgenerationally grown research-based study program in Higher Art Education in Europe. Since its foundation in the late 1990s the CCC has been committed to transdisciplinary pedagogies intersecting radical politics, feminist movements, critical theory, cybermedia and postcolonial thought. From 2015–21, under the direction of curator-theorist Doreen Mende, it has been extended collectively by cybernetic theory fiction, curatorial/politics, Black Studies, forensic methods in art, new materialism and artistic internationalism rehearsing as well as confronting the limits and liminalities of contemporary art-research practices.
The CCC is a member of the European Forum of Advanced Practices and a partner of Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism (2019–23/24), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Recordings of the CCC Public Seminar can be found here, works of students are accessible via the Actes de Recherche and captured on social media @ccchead.
2022 online applications are now open.
Deadline: Friday, April 8, 2022, at 5pm CEST (Swiss time).
For questions, please contact the Office of Studies:
T +41 22 558 60 75 / +41 22 558 61 51
Email: admission.head [at] hesge.ch