School For Civic Action at Roskilde Festival 2018

The School of Civic Action at Roskilde Festival was a ten-day long summer school hosted by public works with Roskilde Festival which explored ideas around temporary use and the making of the instant city. The school is conceived as a three-year long programme which will lead up to an international conference and publication and critically reflect Roskilde’s contribution to the wider discourse on temporary use and city making. This will also conclude and coincide with the 50th anniversary of the festival in 2020.

The first year of the summer school focused on the unique knowledge produced by the festival over the last 48 years in constructing and refining the temporary city. Under the theme of ‘Temporary Commons’ we brought together students, practitioners and academics to explore shared practices and concerns around the notion of temporary use set against the backdrop of Northern Europe’s largest annual music festival. We will explore the festival’s capacity to promote new forms of living and examine how temporality can be understood as a strength enabling us to gain new knowledges and methods to help us shape the way we live beyond the duration of the festival.

The School of Civic Action at Roskilde Festival will develop over a three-year cycle:
1) The first outing of the summer school was focused on understanding the festival from the inside out.
2) The second iteration in 2019 will be dedicated to the large international networks created by the festival which carry the culture of temporary use across the globe.
3) The third and final summer school in 2020, together with the publication and conference will help to reassert temporary use as a positive force to promote the values and ethos of Roskilde Festival at large.

The Summer School took place on the festival site in the week before doors open to the public, while all the venues for Scandinavia’s largest temporary city are being constructed.

Together we designed and constructed components for Scandinavia’s largest temporary city and hosted open fabrication workshops during the first three days of the festival. The hands-on workshops were accompanied by reflective seminars, lectures and discussions exploring the role of temporary use in today’s city making through the eyes of various disciplines such as art, engineering, curating, architecture and geography. The result of the workshop were captured in a contribution to a week long programme hosted by The School of Civic Action at Tate Exchange in London in July 2018.

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