teaching lies is a public school of schools, a workshop about illusory deceptions at work in the designed modern world. its scope is to identify, expose, discuss and make public these modes, through the collaborative writing of a syllabus for a spurious studio-based class. the workshop is aimed at participative production and play, modulations and dissimulations of designed deceptions in pedagogy and beyond.

we seek to analyse, explore and re-compose the rhetorical figures and material strategies behind communication, design, media, technology and art, as part of our pronounced post-factual condition; in a context where terms of art and artifice — like ‘fabulation’ — have become main means of doing art, design and by extension, communication, politics and life.

the three days workshop is developed around several thematics addressing different fabulative tropes, such as concealing (secret origins, hiding, shadowing, masks); camouflage (adversarial, being unmappable, decoys, hiding in plain sight); fabulation (fictionalisation, re-narration, imaginaries); reduction (simplification, rules of thumb, common practice, ‘just enough’); misappropriation (metaphors, anecdotes, projection); misdirection (look over here! fakes, hoaxes, slight-of-hand, puppets, apocrypha, data derives).