That involves contemplation, contemplation and more contemplation, and the forces are the elements of a construction. When the construction is right and solid enough, the forces within it are free like the stars in the sky. For a film to exist requires that it be constructed beforehand. And that is exactly the relationships between these so-called forces and then everything within this frame must function freely. Without a rigid structure, there will be no film. And there must be diversity there. What interests us is the diversity of the different small stories that are told and then become part of a web. It is a web. It’s not enough just to set up camera and start rolling. An abstract frame and construction must be developed beforehand that later will be concretized in-situ and that then will operate freely. One needs a rhythm even before one starts shooting the film, or works at the cutting table. One needs to know why one chooses particular angles from which to film, how long the individual shots will last, and then choose another standpoint or an identical one, but nearer, or the same, only a little more distant. One needs to have all that in mind already or written down. If one has nothing thought out, there’ll be nothing on screen, and if one has no feelings, or nothing in one’s heart, there won’t be anything either.
"A Thousand Cliffs," Jean-Marie Straub in conversation with Elke Marhöfer und Mikhail Lylov in: Tell It To The Stones, edited by Annett Busch and Tobias Hering, Sternberg Press, 2021.
I see in this description of the "solid construction" that is needed to enable ways of moving within it freely, as an allegory for creating frameworks for learning.
Centrifugal openness is about actively radiating curiosity, dialogue, and influence from your own practice into the larger ecosystem of ideas, people, and cultures — and letting that flow back to shape you in return. For art students at a university, it’s both a creative survival skill and a way to make the most of the unique interdisciplinary community you’re in. (In conversation with ChatGPT)
“Marxism” is a name for the ensemble of attempts, with greater or lesser fidelity, to draw an “ism” from Marx’s writings. The degrees of fidelity mark the differences between vulgar, orthodox, heterodox, or critical Marxists, all the way to the breaking point that is post-Marxism as the inner or outer edge of Marxism. But while Marx’s writings are centrifugal, the construction of various forms of Marxism tends to become centripetal. Rather than moving outward with an eye on interventions in the conjuncture, they look inward into the systematic theory or philosophy drawn from Marx for Marx.
Theses on Marx by Bruno Bosteels. The concept of "centrifugal openness" was key in a lecture screening series at Cinemateket, during the spring semester, so called Friday Lectures, an attempt to develop a different lecture format, enganging and affective, a montage of clips and an edited lecture. It was very well received by students, despite of the complex content and lengths of the lectures. The cinema setting supported focus and attentiveness. These Friday lectures have different formats, themes and focus each semester.
I had several intertwined starting points, challenges and ambitions that have evolved into an ecosystem approach that I like to call the Mille-Feuille Theory. An allegory to the multi-layered, buttery French patisserie, but also to the actual process of making butter dough as a procedure that requires careful folding, refolding and waiting time, to let the various ingrediences affect and transform each other. One starting point arises from my own teaching experience and challenge, which encompasses different types of teaching commitments, the other starting point is shaped by my role as head of studies (since autumn 2024), which led me to understand my pedagogical approach in a bigger picture, but also sharpened a more critical response, mainly in relation to how creativity or the role of the artist is understood by other disciplines.
Berlant’s impasse describes a state of ongoing stuckness, where time stretches and agency feels uncertain. It is not the dramatic rupture of crisis, but the quieter, slower terrain of affective ambiguity—where attachments linger, desires drift, and transformation simmers beneath the surface. In the context of artistic pedagogy, the impasse becomes a generative space, where students and teachers dwell in the folds of not-yet-knowing, resisting the pressure to resolve or ascend. Creativity, in this model, is not a final product or top-tier skill, but a relational force that moves laterally, diagonally, and recursively through the layers of learning. By embracing the impasse, the Mille Feuille Theory invites a pedagogy of patience, reflection, and affective attunement. It challenges the notion of mastery and instead foregrounds the messy, non-linear, and transformative nature of artistic inquiry—where learning is not a climb, but a composition. In conversation with Copilot, August 31, 2025..
non-linear ways of learning
LW: I wrote, reading isn't so important. Re-reading is important. You can't just bring your own experiences to texts and check in and see where you're at. Years later, you have to reread to understand things and to bring and to see how texts resonate at different times or don't. Or how ideas resonate or how to build communication. Personal, but also, collective rereading. So many times that I've gone to a text, especially about teaching and pedagogy in moments of—architecture school does not prepare you to teach. It doesn't think about creative pedagogy so much. It doesn't think about power relations in classrooms.
How to introduce rereading to first graders? It could be interesting to think about, how to introduce rereading as a method.
JJ: A really interesting aspect of this concept is that it already takes us beyond the point of just gaining knowledge and then becoming something through that knowledge. And that knowledge is a kind of data package that can be stored, whereas what we do by default or almost by definition at the beginning in the creative field, I think, and that would be the argument, is actually the next step. It's re-reading, it's reflecting on something through something else that creates the great complexity and abstraction as a first point, not as “this is how we work”. That's the point where things become interesting, where new knowledge is generated.
In conversation with Liza Walling—colleague, researcher and educator—and Jacob Jessen, Professor for Spatial Practices and Head of Department at KiT/NTNU, April 15, 2025
1) In my role as a teacher / assistant professor
In my many years of teaching, I found it difficult to turn course-related content into a prompt or to structure a course as a series of tasks or assignments for group work or collaborative activities. The idea of students following a prompt ad hoc and engaging with each other—I found that really difficult to imagine. I tend to be too open and rather abstract, mainly because I take everyone quite seriously and feel the need to ask for something meaningful. The openness creates the opportunity for everyone to shape the task according to their own ideas and artistic practices, but there is also always the danger that this openness creates too much confusion, which can become tiring for the students as they spend to much time wondering about what is expected from them.
At the beginning of the year, I developed a new format for a collaborative activity across year-groups. Beforehand, I selected five students to test the prompt, asked them for feedback, and after two rounds of sending the text back and forth, we agreed on a concise, sufficiently open, but very easy to understand version. I received enthusiastic feedback overall, which helped me gain more confidence in the art of prompting.
I always strived to encourage lively and critical debate in class, which was sometimes successful, sometimes not—always dependent on talkative and engaged students. To structure a course, I usually involved students as co-hosts to help prepare a particular session, give a presentation and allocate responsibilities, or participate in discussions. This worked well with an already theoretically orientated course such as ‘Key Concepts in Art Theory’ or with courses on curating or other themed courses.
Four years ago, I was given the task to develop and teach a course called Exploring Artistic Entrepreneurship. The course is closely linked to the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art's overall strategy of emphasising artistic research, particularly at Master's level. The course was initiated and designed with the ambition of questioning and (re)imagining the role of artists in society, their possible field of activity and their potentially widened scope of work. And consequently also the future role of art education. Back then, when I started, there was no syllabus, there were names, ideas, questions and a kind of foundational text: “Entrepreneurship of the Multitude” by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, as part of their book Assembly (2018). It was and still is a great starting point and reading the text at the beginning of the course is still crucial to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the collaborative side of entrepreneurship and the question: What does it mean to create something new? What is innovation?
When I first began teaching the course, we had a truly international class, and it was a key element to the course content and method to find ways, examples and assignments that could speak to the diverse backgrounds of the students, while at the same time the course really benefited from that diversity and was shaped by it —— bringing in and working with the diversity of students, drawing from their multifaceted knowledge, addressing the challenges of visa issues for freelance artists in Norway, all of this made the course entrepreneurial in itself. This changed radically with the introduction of tuition fees for non-EU students, and two years ago the number of students dropped from 22 to 1. This required a different strategy to keep the programme alive: We opened it up to students from the department of Architecture and Design and to exchange students, but also offered the programme in the so-called KUNO network of 18 art academies across Scandinavia and the Baltics—as an art academy without walls. The structure of the course, consisting of two session only with Trondheim based students, two hybrid sessions, together with KUNO participants online, and an intense 5 full days of teaching week in Trondheim with KUNO participants joining in person, responds to this overall set-up and need.
During these four years, I have repeatedly changed the curriculum and adapted it to the teaching conditions in order to be able to respond to the participating students. This is basically how I understand my pedagogical approach, not to repeat or apply acquired expert knowledge, but to create an open and at the same time structured and challenging framework and learning environment. I can't do this alone, I need a team of co-teachers and facilitators that has changed and expanded over the years. It's a mix of PhD students, colleagues from other NTNU departments, former students and other guests who have been able to come for the intensive week of teaching thanks to additional funding from the KUNO network. The development and planning of the course is done in a dialogue way and it is important that everyone involved brings in their own interests, while at the same time I am the one who coordinates/curates and designs the interlinked elements of the course to build a kind of learning dramaturgy. I also see this approach as a networked method of teaching—learning as research—or the students, myself and my colleagues.
This year, in the spring term, I structured the course around three components: Concepts, Mapping, Games. All three components complement each other and allow for experimental group work as well as theoretical exploration and playful, reflective components. I saw how quickly the students picked up all the different tasks and how the different components intertwined, especially during the intensive week when KUNO students also participated in Trondheim. They began to realise how the different elements, tasks, activities and lectures interlocked. This has strengthened my belief that my endeavour to make students aware of the complexity of a particular subject is not necessarily enhanced by reading (alone), but unfolds in a mixture of exploration and play (creating concepts, maps, games) that creates a co-created experience, but can also spark questions and curiosity that can lead to further engagement with theory and reading (which I believe should remain an important component).
Over the summer, I had the opportunity to further develop and test this approach in more short-term settings. A two-day joint seminar with a colleague from the media department and art history students and a one-week intensive seminar with students from the KUNO network who were selected to participate in a biennial exhibition in Trondheim opening in October (again, supported by co-teaching with a colleague). Both workshops were an overwhelming success, the students participated with great joy and commitment—again confirming my assumption that it takes a well thought-out framework that creates the conditions for something ambitious but unpredictable to happen without ‘lecturing’ (I drafted the open call and it’s curatorial concept and co-selected the applicants). But this open approach also requires a committed and engaging presence from teachers, unafraid and open to be responsive, allowing the non-expected to happen. To reiterate that by “open” I don't mean “letting go”, but a fine balance between a strong framing and maximum flexibility.
All in all, I'd say I've had a good learning curve over the last few months, getting over my “fear of prompting”, testing different frame settings and really looking forward to exploring more in this direction in the autumn, teaching “Histories of Contemporary Art” at undergraduate level and “The Art of Seeing Art” at Masters level.
to foster a leap and allow it to happen
2) In my role as head of study
As already mentioned, my other starting point is not in the classroom, but in faculty seminars and gathering for educational leaders. In particular, at the first seminar I attended, I was exposed to Bloom's pyramid model with creativity at the top. The model was presented as an endeavour to introduce creativity into engineering education, which seemed sincerely ambitious to me.
In my view, however, ‘creativity’ must take place throughout the learning journey, at every step, it is not something you ‘achieve’ when all the basics are known. These so-called basics can also change and be challenged by a creative approach. And by ‘creativity’ I don't mean ‘crazy ideas’ or ‘thinking outside the box’, but I would define it as an ongoing and formative process of curiously linking, associating, recombining, realigning, questioning, overlaying, materialising, visualising, marvelling—all along the respective lines of acquiring new knowledge. And I kept thinking about what could counter or replace a pyramid, what could be a visual representation of such a layered approach, where creativity is informed by and influences each step of (non-linear) learning and therefore could drive unexpected leaps. And perhaps because I was craving breakfast in a morning meeting, I kept thinking of the layered and folded structure of a croissant.
To put it shortly, this is the starting point of the proposed Mille-Feuille Theory, which rejects a pyramid model in favour of an artisanal-crafted croissant-structure. Applied to our own department, the KiT environment, it means to understand art education as an ecosystem that genuinely needs mixology. Students who are usually too invested in their own projects and struggles often can’t recognise this mix as a composition of components that are intertwined. Instead, they focus on complaining about what they experience as missing. This in turn led me to a more project-orientated approach, to create frameworks that intertwine different courses or approaches. This has so far led to an attempt to translate the Mille Feuille Theory visually, as presented in Research Catalogue, which in turn can be used for further discussions with colleagues and students, as even colleagues do not necessarily see the bigger picture, but are rather invested in their own teaching area.
Maybe in general, it's more about leaps than iteration?
JJ: What I usually do, when teaching works well for me in this context, I create a space that is challenging. For example, welding and writing is a situation where you have to do one with the other and then make sense of it. To write a reflection and to do something practical, that's challenging. And then you have to figure out how to make sense of it.
LW: Just reiterating some things that have already been said. You have to deal with abstraction in the arts in different ways, actually. It's never the same abstraction, whether it's a line that becomes a roof line of a building or abstracting an idea into some visual representation. And being so good at working with abstraction helps to make leaps, helps to read these understandings into the text, which are maybe not scientific enough for the humanities, but which give the texts meaning and allow them to act in the world.
PB: You can make the shift from reading, rereading and acting much faster in this way, because at the end you will make an artwork. You're already in some strange way translating, transposing what you absorbed into a totally different form where actually you can't even trace it back. We're already able to do such a complex move. But I think that's what this art education or creative education can do and already does. It's just that we don't slow it down enough to zoom into the granularity of how this process works.
In conversation with Jacob Jessen, head of department at KiT and Professor for Spatial Practices, with Prerna Bishnoi, PhD canditate in Artistitc Research at KiT and Liza Walling, colleague and PhD canditate at the Media Department/NTNU, April 15, 2025
to create frameworks for learning
Related Pedagogical Theory
I can see how John Dewey’s pedagogical reflections resonate with aspects of Mille Feuille Theory, particularly in his emphasis on learning through experience and the pedagogical value of “learning by doing.” His notion that experience is both shaped by and shapes future experiences offers a foundation for thinking about education as a dynamic and situated process. However, I would complicate Dewey’s concept of continuity, which he describes as the way in which each experience influences the conditions of subsequent ones. While Dewey does not explicitly frame continuity as linear, his formulation tends to imply a developmental trajectory that privileges accumulation and progression.
Mille Feuille Theory, on the other hand, approaches continuity as a retrospective construction, emerging across discontinuities, ruptures, and leaps rather than through seamless unfolding. Continuity, in this view, is not inherent in the experience itself but is narratively and relationally assembled, often perceived only in hindsight. This reframing foregrounds the poetic, affective, and non-linear dimensions of learning, where meaning is generated in the interstices—between layers, across temporal gaps, and through moments of suspension or impasse.
Dave Cormier’s concept of rhizomatic learning offers a compelling parallel to the layered, non-linear structure of Mille Feuille Theory. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome, Cormier proposes a model of learning that resists fixed outcomes, centralized authority, and predetermined pathways. Instead, it embraces emergence, multiplicity, and decentralization, allowing students to navigate knowledge through self-directed, context-responsive processes.
Central to this is a speculative engagement with and through materials—whether textual, spatial, bodily, or ecological. Materials are not merely passive supports for learning but active agents in the pedagogical process, capable of provoking, disrupting, and layering understanding. This material approach opens up a space for raw-material research, where learners engage with the physical and ecological realities of their environments. It invites inquiry into sustainability, resource ethics, and the entangled conditions of production, positioning materiality as both a site of knowledge and creation and a medium of speculation. In this way, Mille Feuille Theory expands the pedagogical field to include material thinking and making, where transformation occurs through tactile entanglements with the world.
Further affinities can be found with the critical pedagogies of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, whose work foregrounds the transformative potential of education rooted in dialogue, lived experience, and social justice. Their insistence on education as a practice of freedom and empowerment is central to Mille Feuille Theory, though these terms are understood not as abstract ideals, but as situated, relational, and contested processes.
Freedom, in this context, is not merely the absence of constraint, but the capacity to imagine and enact alternative ways of being and knowing—often in tension with dominant structures. Empowerment is not a gift bestowed by the educator, but a co-emergent condition, cultivated through critical reflection and collective inquiry. Mille Feuille Theory seeks to create spaces where these processes unfold through encounters, allowing students to navigate complexity, inhabit contradiction, and generate meaning in ways that are both poetic and politically responsive.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conception of “study” offers a vital resonance with Mille Feuille Theory. Rather than positioning study as a formalized academic pursuit, they describe it as a fugitive, collective practice—improvisational, affective, and rooted in the everyday conditions, struggles, and desires of those engaged in it. In dialogue with this, Jennifer Bloomer’s feminist architectural pedagogy introduces a textual and spatial poetics that further complicates the boundaries of study. Her work foregrounds interruption, fragmentation, and the gendered dimensions of form and language, offering a mode of learning that is not only critical but aesthetically and politically disruptive. Where Moten and Harney emphasize the fugitive collectivity of study, Bloomer brings attention to the poetic density of the in-between—to the ways in which meaning is layered, withheld, or revealed through non-linear, affective, and textual practices.
Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “structures of feeling” and the concept of impasse offers a crucial affective dimension to Mille Feuille Theory. Berlant describes impasse as a state of suspension, where movement is stalled and resolution deferred, yet where affective intensity and potential accumulate. These moments—marked by hesitation, stuckness, or latency—are not failures of progress but conditions of becoming, where new forms of relation and understanding may quietly take shape. In the context of pedagogy, impasse invites a rethinking of learning not as linear advancement but as dwelling with complexity, where the emotional textures of waiting, uncertainty, and endurance are integral to the process.
Together, these perspectives inform Mille Feuille Theory’s commitment to non-linear, affective, and situated learning, where transformation occurs not through mastery or resolution, but through attunement to the folds, delays, and intensities that shape how artistic knowledge can be lived and felt.
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The theory section is a revised version of long conversations with Copilot. There is certainly more to add, and the theoretical framework needs more in-depth reading, exploration and investigation in relation to my teaching practice and the proposed framework - but in the good company of the theorists, educators and authors I have read in various contexts, I am happy and curious to explore further.
References:
Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Autonomedia / Minor Compositions, 2013
Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, Yale University Press, 1995
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011
Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, Bloomsbury Academic, 1974
Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, 1994
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, Routledge, 2004
John Dewey, Experience and Education, Free Press, 1938
Dave Cormier, “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum”, Innovate: Journal of Online Education, Vol 4, Issue 5, 2008.
Painting
and how to get beyond
stop painting
exploring strategic ruptures
a steady process of morphing through an endless number of devices >> Peter Fischli
Collective agency is a really powerful concept. Considering that what we can achieve together is greater than what we can achieve on our own. So it's this belief in the power of togetherness. And you know, this idea that, two plus two is greater than four. It's not just the sum of the individuals. It's also the power of the interactions between those individuals. And I think that's a really important precondition to go positively into an idea about collective agency. Because if you don't think that it's possible to achieve something greater by working together, then the game is lost before you've even got started. So that's really important. But then, these people who are coming to the table, they're all bringing different things, different ideas. But all these different things and these different experiences and these different competencies, all of those have an equal value. So a really important aspect of being able to engage with collective agency is valuing everybody as bringing something to the table. And not being concerned that everybody's ideas are different. Not seeing that as some kind of hindrance, but seeing that as the inherent value of doing something collective. Because if we're not interested in difference, why are we bothering coming together?
In conversation with Mari-Ana Myfanwy Jones, Associate Professor at the Department of Teacher Education, April 11, 2025
In contrast to other theorists of contemporary painting, Fischli is curious and open. And I like to share this gift with the students. Much of the theory training in painting is too know-it-all and authoritarian for me.
Jan Felix Gmelin, Professor for Painitng at KiT
The critical thing to understand if you want to work towards developing collective agency is that you are a worker and creative work is work. If creativity is just some ephemeral thing that isn't work and is related to how much you love doing it, you can't set any value. You can't have conversations with others, whether that's collaborators or institutions or clients, about how to value that. So that's the most important thing.
And then the second thing I would say that one needs to develop collective agency is identifying power structures and also being able to speak together about the conditions of work. And I think to speak together that requires a shared vocabulary and maybe shared commitments or at least some commitments that you can agree on and work from supporting others actively. How might you do that? And then an understanding of the limits of knowledge. So what are the limits of creative knowledge? What are the limits of the knowledge that you have from your own experiences or the experiences of the group and where you have to pass the baton to other specialities, other people, people with different experiences, people working in different contexts. I don't know if any of those can be defined as concepts.
Imagine you would teach this to someone, what are your methods and tools? What would it mean to teach that creative skill set in a different way in relation to what you just described?
I think in one of the theory classes I ran once—It’s really hard to remind yourself that creative practices our work is work, and that's a very difficult thing to teach. It's also a very difficult thing to remember day to day. I think in the same way that for example emotional labor is work. From a feminist perspective, that's a very hard thing to remember day to day and to put boundaries on, because it feels a natural thing. And I think that's the case for a lot of people who are artists and designers or involved in the creative industries. It just feels it's an extension of who you are. It's hard to map and understand how much work you are doing and how it relates to other aspects of your life.
And I think everyone has some situation or experience where they have limits to work, or a structure that they must abide by to work. And thinking more broadly about work itself and then going on to speak about how it might affect someone's artistic practice or ability to do creative work. Ability to collectively act as well, how much you can involve yourself in different kinds of collectives. But I think starting from a place of self reflection and relying on the expertise in the room because students are super aware of these things. They have all of this experience, whether they've been asked to speak on it before or not, about. Maybe certain types of precarity or certain limitations they have on their ability to work in general. I think that can be one successful way.
So I had the students organize themselves in small groups based on their experiences and who they were, where they were coming from. To think about the limits on work in general and not just work as this was an interdisciplinary class. There were architects, artists, landscape architects, urban designers, and one group that volunteered to speak first—and unfortunately, at the current moment, it’s also very topical—they were international students on student visas. So they have all of these limits to work, a very precarious group. And talking through those limits and thinking about how they related to somehow everything in their lives and asking everyone to reflect on how that integrates or intersects with creative work or the possibilities to be creative—that was really interesting.
In conversation with Liza Walling—colleague, researcher and educator, April 15, 2025