Daniel Giles
In this conversation Danny speaks about establishing a community agreement as a pedagogical and artistic practice, and shares the workshop he uses to introduce new students to the Piet Zwart Institute through collectively writing a community agreement.
Daniel Giles
Daniel Giles is an artist based in Rotterdam. His practice and research explore processes of identification and systems of representation, particularly how personal and collective identities are embedded within visual and material cultures.
Sol Archer (SA): Could you introduce us to the Piet Zwart Fine Arts Masters context, and how the particularities of the program and the location influence your approach to community codification?
Danny Giles (DG): The Piet Zwart Institute has only masters level courses, and these courses are pretty isolated on a logistical day-to-day level. Our students are the only students in this building, so when I talk about community, it is very much centred around this specific space on Karel Doormanhof. Anything that we decide as a course has to do mostly with the 25 or so students in the MFA and the staff here, it won’t branch out and affect anyone outside of that.
There is, however, a new inter-departmental student-led group called Archipelago, where students across the courses are working together to find more cohesion. This was initiated by students and they receive a small fee from all the courses to support their work. They got off the ground in the fall and are working mostly with the coordinators. They want to preserve their autonomy as a student organisation.
A lot of their focus is on preserving the chain of resources and knowledge that exists across groups and generations of students.
I think that it is really important that the students have these networks among themselves, so they can establish support for even very basic practical things, like when you move here, how do you find an apartment? Which is normally through a network of students, but now is a huge problem.
In terms of our course, however, what we have done is to think very basically about terms of relation within our community on a day-to-day basis, and focus on generating a language to come to a common understanding of how we relate to each other and what kind of space we want to create, what things we need as people in order to work together.
We aren’t using the term Code of Conduct. Instead in 2021 we wrote a Community Agreement. We did this in a workshop on the first day of the semester that I led to introduce the students to our communal space. This programme was part mindfulness exercise and part group conversation.
I began with a series of exercises:
In the next phase:
This was quite informal but through it we gained a grounding in the space, a way to start the term together and establish a train of thought that is continuing to actively create space to learn and work together.
One of our students and one of our core tutors are working together to form a horizontal study group around ways of relating and understanding ourselves socially. Our community agreement is the starting point for their thinking together. It is the centre from which they build.
SA: Will you do this again for the incoming students in the coming year?
DG: Absolutely. We will either work from the existing list or start a whole new one, but yes, we will start the year with this. I am in the course library right now and it is hanging on the wall here as a daily reminder.
This is not something that we have put directly in front of guests so far, but it is physically present, you encounter it and read it in the space here. Its main purpose though is for us, the long-term inhabitants of the space, to have a core set of shared terms and language.
SA: And that is procedural. It’s not something you just give to someone as a contract.
DG: Exactly, writing the agreement is as, if not more, important than having it. I don’t want to present it as a rule book.
We already have codes of conduct from our parent organisations, the Willem de Kooning Academy, and Hogeschool Rotterdam en Omstreken (HRO), which is written from a legal basis, in terms of the administration and the kinds of punitive applications that a code may be used for.
As those measures are provided for already, our aim was to create a personal document that is actively focussed on coming together to shape the community.
My onboarding process at the academy was pretty haphazard. I had to search for a lot of stuff on my own, actually, including codes of conduct, all the social safety documents. No one actively oriented me towards that stuff; I had work quite hard to find it.
In the workshop, I introduced the students to these codes of conduct, introducing what is in place and how it is useful for us to know. It runs the gamut from the processes for if you have an issue with a staff member, to the access rules around campus. It’s on the WDKA website and we now include print outs with the orientation material for new students.
It is important to consider that bureaucratic language is written in a certain way and for certain reasons, but what we generate could be something very different. We could enter into this process relationally to serve a different goal. In the introduction to the HRO Code of Conduct, it just says that all staff and students are bound to the university code of conduct and integrity, that all members and staff are expected to observe the social norms prevailing in the university, and that the universities fundamental principles stipulated by the university statues. All staff members and students are also expected to observe generally accepted norms of socially acceptable behaviour.
Danny Giles (DG): The Piet Zwart Institute has only masters level courses, and these courses are pretty isolated on a logistical day-to-day level. Our students are the only students in this building, so when I talk about community, it is very much centred around this specific space on Karel Doormanhof. Anything that we decide as a course has to do mostly with the 25 or so students in the MFA and the staff here, it won’t branch out and affect anyone outside of that.
There is, however, a new inter-departmental student-led group called Archipelago, where students across the courses are working together to find more cohesion. This was initiated by students and they receive a small fee from all the courses to support their work. They got off the ground in the fall and are working mostly with the coordinators. They want to preserve their autonomy as a student organisation.
A lot of their focus is on preserving the chain of resources and knowledge that exists across groups and generations of students.
I think that it is really important that the students have these networks among themselves, so they can establish support for even very basic practical things, like when you move here, how do you find an apartment? Which is normally through a network of students, but now is a huge problem.
In terms of our course, however, what we have done is to think very basically about terms of relation within our community on a day-to-day basis, and focus on generating a language to come to a common understanding of how we relate to each other and what kind of space we want to create, what things we need as people in order to work together.
We aren’t using the term Code of Conduct. Instead in 2021 we wrote a Community Agreement. We did this in a workshop on the first day of the semester that I led to introduce the students to our communal space. This programme was part mindfulness exercise and part group conversation.
I began with a series of exercises:
Everyone closed their eyes, engaged in some mindful breathing and calmed whatever nerves might have been affecting them.
Focused inward, visualised what they are here to do, their individual purpose. Being mindful that half of the students have just arrived and are getting their bearings, and half have been there a year and graduate in less than a year, so ground that moment in individual purpose, visualise that and hold it.
Then came back into the group setting and discussed what values, what conditions, and so on, we have as a small community.
In the next phase:
Everyone paired with the person next to them to have a conversation about the language those values generated.
We then went around in a circle and recapped what they just discussed.
From this we pulled out key terms: language that we could boil down for a more common understanding and produced a list of terms.
This was quite informal but through it we gained a grounding in the space, a way to start the term together and establish a train of thought that is continuing to actively create space to learn and work together.
One of our students and one of our core tutors are working together to form a horizontal study group around ways of relating and understanding ourselves socially. Our community agreement is the starting point for their thinking together. It is the centre from which they build.
SA: Will you do this again for the incoming students in the coming year?
DG: Absolutely. We will either work from the existing list or start a whole new one, but yes, we will start the year with this. I am in the course library right now and it is hanging on the wall here as a daily reminder.
This is not something that we have put directly in front of guests so far, but it is physically present, you encounter it and read it in the space here. Its main purpose though is for us, the long-term inhabitants of the space, to have a core set of shared terms and language.
SA: And that is procedural. It’s not something you just give to someone as a contract.
DG: Exactly, writing the agreement is as, if not more, important than having it. I don’t want to present it as a rule book.
We already have codes of conduct from our parent organisations, the Willem de Kooning Academy, and Hogeschool Rotterdam en Omstreken (HRO), which is written from a legal basis, in terms of the administration and the kinds of punitive applications that a code may be used for.
As those measures are provided for already, our aim was to create a personal document that is actively focussed on coming together to shape the community.
My onboarding process at the academy was pretty haphazard. I had to search for a lot of stuff on my own, actually, including codes of conduct, all the social safety documents. No one actively oriented me towards that stuff; I had work quite hard to find it.
In the workshop, I introduced the students to these codes of conduct, introducing what is in place and how it is useful for us to know. It runs the gamut from the processes for if you have an issue with a staff member, to the access rules around campus. It’s on the WDKA website and we now include print outs with the orientation material for new students.
It is important to consider that bureaucratic language is written in a certain way and for certain reasons, but what we generate could be something very different. We could enter into this process relationally to serve a different goal. In the introduction to the HRO Code of Conduct, it just says that all staff and students are bound to the university code of conduct and integrity, that all members and staff are expected to observe the social norms prevailing in the university, and that the universities fundamental principles stipulated by the university statues. All staff members and students are also expected to observe generally accepted norms of socially acceptable behaviour.
“You can positively codify for the kind of community space you want, writing the agreement is as important as having it.”
SA: I have seen references to ‘social norms’ in a number of administratively provided codes, which doesn’t really mean anything as far as I can understand. In the Netherlands, for example, there is an ongoing argument because acceptable ‘social norms’ for some people include blackface, so I find it consistently amazing that ‘norms’ are the basis for any guidance document.
DG: Absolutely! Yes! It’s pretty wide ranging but really aims to be used for policing boundaries around transgressions on identity, inappropriate contact, and so on which have legal grounds for enforcement.
Because English is my first language, it is hard for me to specify the comprehension level you would need to understand the document. It is written in a fairly bureaucratic but simple language. I think most of these terms would translate easily.
For example, the first line is ‘staff member and students treat each other with respect.’ And: ‘Staff members and students remind each other where necessary to refrain from inappropriate behaviour.’
SA: How did the call for a different kind of document emerge at the MFA? Was this rooted in conversations you were having or was it rooted in your own experience?
DG: It came out of both—my personal experience and working with educational communities. Prior to working at the Piet Zwart I was the academic director at a residency program in the USA. This intentional community—for lack of a better term—consisted of a big group of people—students, staff and visiting staff who sustained the community over different time scales. And a lot of the community values and norms were enacted in place.
Here the community outside of the students, who are transient, is quite small. Our core tutors are not here all the time because of the nature of their contracts, so it is much harder to have a strong sense of community continuity. When I started, there was a strong desire for community and a shared set of understandings, but many of the things necessary to make that possible were lacking.
So, it ended up landing on the course director and the coordinator to do that work. What I was interested in was redistributing the authority for shaping the space that students are part of, and recognising that the school can be a community not just as a service or a studio.
What I wanted to do was to create space to recognise our humanity outside of being a teacher, student or staff member and recognise that we are sharing space and that we need to centre that sharing component.
SA: And do you think that the construction of this community agreement has impacts on how your communal spaces work or created the visibility of these spaces being necessary?
DG: I think in an indirect way. They were introduced together and are playing off each other—not in an explicit way, but it is part of an ethos which I am hoping to foster that is not only focusing on our individual needs, but actively working to create community in a holistic way. Not just stating that simply because we are in the same building we are a community, but being active about shared responsibilities, hosting, cleaning, and care for the space.
We have house rules for the shared spaces: explicit rules and expectations for how to use the building. And as we have 24-hour access to the building, and there is a shared responsibility for overseeing the building at night.
SA: I think this is a really interesting approach, that you have the interacting or nesting processes which produce forms of collectivity that are responsive to one another.
DG: It was really apparent to me from the beginning that we needed to make a concerted effort to shape the social fabric of the space because that trickles into everything else. It’s an ongoing effort and I am seeing it manifest in ways that I think are really meaningful and will continue. And hopefully that is something that I can leave here. You can positively codify for the kind of community space you want, in addition to documentation codifying protections and regulations provided by the academy. Intentional framing of language will affect the process of teaching and the shared use of knowledge and resources.
DG: Absolutely! Yes! It’s pretty wide ranging but really aims to be used for policing boundaries around transgressions on identity, inappropriate contact, and so on which have legal grounds for enforcement.
Because English is my first language, it is hard for me to specify the comprehension level you would need to understand the document. It is written in a fairly bureaucratic but simple language. I think most of these terms would translate easily.
For example, the first line is ‘staff member and students treat each other with respect.’ And: ‘Staff members and students remind each other where necessary to refrain from inappropriate behaviour.’
SA: How did the call for a different kind of document emerge at the MFA? Was this rooted in conversations you were having or was it rooted in your own experience?
DG: It came out of both—my personal experience and working with educational communities. Prior to working at the Piet Zwart I was the academic director at a residency program in the USA. This intentional community—for lack of a better term—consisted of a big group of people—students, staff and visiting staff who sustained the community over different time scales. And a lot of the community values and norms were enacted in place.
Here the community outside of the students, who are transient, is quite small. Our core tutors are not here all the time because of the nature of their contracts, so it is much harder to have a strong sense of community continuity. When I started, there was a strong desire for community and a shared set of understandings, but many of the things necessary to make that possible were lacking.
So, it ended up landing on the course director and the coordinator to do that work. What I was interested in was redistributing the authority for shaping the space that students are part of, and recognising that the school can be a community not just as a service or a studio.
What I wanted to do was to create space to recognise our humanity outside of being a teacher, student or staff member and recognise that we are sharing space and that we need to centre that sharing component.
SA: And do you think that the construction of this community agreement has impacts on how your communal spaces work or created the visibility of these spaces being necessary?
DG: I think in an indirect way. They were introduced together and are playing off each other—not in an explicit way, but it is part of an ethos which I am hoping to foster that is not only focusing on our individual needs, but actively working to create community in a holistic way. Not just stating that simply because we are in the same building we are a community, but being active about shared responsibilities, hosting, cleaning, and care for the space.
We have house rules for the shared spaces: explicit rules and expectations for how to use the building. And as we have 24-hour access to the building, and there is a shared responsibility for overseeing the building at night.
SA: I think this is a really interesting approach, that you have the interacting or nesting processes which produce forms of collectivity that are responsive to one another.
DG: It was really apparent to me from the beginning that we needed to make a concerted effort to shape the social fabric of the space because that trickles into everything else. It’s an ongoing effort and I am seeing it manifest in ways that I think are really meaningful and will continue. And hopefully that is something that I can leave here. You can positively codify for the kind of community space you want, in addition to documentation codifying protections and regulations provided by the academy. Intentional framing of language will affect the process of teaching and the shared use of knowledge and resources.