25

Mentoring as a Practice

How to hold the openness of mentoring in an art school context, as the roles of the mentee and mentor are very loosely defined? Could a formalization of the format help in being responsive to the needs of both?
The note-spitting-machine initiates an exchange of mentoring experiences between different mentee/ mentor pairs and explicitly invites mentees and mentors to collectively enact and shape mentoring as apractice. The object offers a structuralization of the mentoring session through randomized circulation of statements, questions, gestures, and methods, offering moments of reflection and questioning of the situation in which both find themselves. A feeding station invites mentees and mentors to feed the mechanism with findings from their own exchange, which will inform upcoming mentoring sessions.

The spitting mechanism is positioned during mentoring sessions between mentee and mentor and functions as a design imperative. It invites both mentee and mentor to reflect on whether the current configuration of the conversation serves the respective intended functional purpose of the mentorship. The object attempts to mediate between the different preconceptions of mentoring that both mentee and mentor bring with them. By physically relating to the slips of paper that address me mentee/mentor (whether by ignoring them, integrating them, or setting them aside), the respective counterpart can perceive and discuss mentee’s/mentor’s preconception of mentoring, which is articulated either through an appropriation of the slips or through a distancing from them.

In this way, the object can take on the role of an accomplice (mentee’s/mentor’s understanding of mentoring takes shape through appropriation of, or distancing from, the slips; the counterpart’s understanding of mentoring is likewise articulated through their handling of the slips and thereby becomes discussable), a disruptor (in cases of entrenched role distributions within the mentorship), or a witness (slips that are set aside leave traces of decisions in the course of the conversation; the mentoring dialogue can inform subsequent mentoring dialogues when mentee or mentor decide afterward to feed slips into the feeding station).

Part of School of Commons 25/26

Concept Object: Nora Sobbe
Realization Object: Johannes Reck, Marcel Rickli