Exhibition: Radical Hospitality - Collaborative Exercise 2026
- Date
- January 08, 2026
- Time
- 5:00 PM EST - 7:00 PM EST
Collective making, sharing meals, and experiential hosting!
With the theme of Radical Hospitality, Collaborative Exercise 2026 takes an exploratory approach to design education through the lens of collective hosting and care. Led by co-instructors Kristofer Kelly-Frère and Vlad Amiot, 170 students – across all undergraduate years – will work collaboratively over four days to create wearable extensions, transform studio spaces, and host a building-wide feast.
This studio asks: What if the party is the curriculum? What if the meal is the learning?
Drawing on feminist and queer pedagogies, new materialisms, and care ethics, this Collaborative Exercise practices design as immanent, relational action beyond representational future-building. Students practice architecture as a lived experience where everyone simultaneously hosts and is hosted.
Here, the design project is not realized at the end, but in every moment, with the gallery becoming a living archive. Large tablecloths serve as open canvases and shared journals, accumulating marks, food stains, collaborative drawings, and reflections throughout the week, becoming material testament to design as a messy, iterative, and collective process.
In the spirit of radical hospitality, members of the DAS community are joyfully invited to observe and interact with students from January 5th to 8th, and to join the opening reception event at 5:00 p.m. on January 8, 2026.
More details about Radical Hospitality can be found (google doc) here (external link) .
About the Instructors
Volodymyr (Vlad) Amiot
Vlad is a Calgary-based designer, award-winning educator, and PhD student researching in queer theory and feminist new materialisms. He studies the emergence of collective posthuman embodiment in affectively charged queer spaces as a mode of performative resistance. Prior to his doctoral work, he founded Picostudio, a practice straddling architecture, installation, industrial design, and craft. Picostudio has collaborated with various Calgarian institutions, including Beakerhead, TELUS Spark, Alberta Ballet, and Lougheed House, as well as with private clients.
Kristofer Kelly-Frère
Kristofer is a Calgary-based systemic designer serving as Team Lead for Innovation Partnerships at the City of Calgary. Originally trained as an architect, he has designed science centres & adventure playgrounds, co-founded the City's Civic Innovation Lab and has worked across sectors—directing the Vivo Play Project, designing healthcare pathways with AHS, and leading creative practice at award-winning J5 Design studio. He teaches globally with the Erasmus Mundus MA in Service Design Strategies & Innovation and brings decades of facilitation experience to systems change work.
About the Collaborative Exercise:
Established in 2008, the Collaborative Exercise (ASC205/605) is an annual all-school charrette with students working in vertical teams to address a design challenge demanding creative collaboration. Past themes have included: Waterfront Stories (2025) and REAL/SurReal (2024).
