Crying Classroom

Official Website ︎︎︎

Crying Classroom is an inclusive and collaborative project aiming to exchange methods and strategies for dealing with/and understanding crying within an institution. The project was founded in 2023 by prof. Dr. Birte Kleine-Benne, Nadja Kracunovic and Rand Ibrahim.

About

Crying as a subject of research within an academic art historical and theoretical context has only been marginally examined. Giving space for this topic to be explored interdisciplinarily was the aim of Crying Institute︎︎︎, an art theoretical and historical seminar held at the Bauhaus University Weimar in 2022–23, by Prof. Dr. Birte Kleine-Benne, with assistance from the artists Be Koerner, Tatiana Theo Ilichenko, Nadja Kracunovic, and Rand Ibrahim.

Focused on the research in crying – including perspectives from medicine, biology, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, social studies, cultural studies, politics, history, gender history, religion, semiotics, sociology, and communication theory – the institute compiled key theoretical and historical texts, significant terminologies, suitable methods, and existing artworks and practices that have investigated crying as a topic. The aim was to become operational as an institute of crying experts.

Coming from an urge to move to a physical space, the institute evolved into a new stage of research. The result is the Crying Classroom, a research space for students and art practitioners of all disciplines to instrumentalize new artistic strategies, pedagogies, and research methodologies within a culture of emotions.

The Crying Classroom was founded to explore crying through a variety of mediums and approaches in the contexts of different institutions. Targeting practitioners of art and various disciplines, as well as students, the Crying Classroom functions as a mobile, interdisciplinary classroom. The project has thus far established collaborative classrooms in 2023/24 as with Der Laden and Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany, conducted PCAP (Post-conceptual Art Practices) workshops at the University of Fine Arts Vienna, and an online workshop with The Iceland University of the Arts, Reykjavík.

Up: Crying Handbook, designed by Camilo Londono and Gabriela Parra for the Crying Classroom 2024 (text by Laura Leal)

^{Crying Classroom founders, Weimar 2023}