metropolis m

Today an increasing number of artists are setting up self-organized, experimental schools under names like the School of Echoes and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University. While mainstream educational institutions are burdened by an excess of bureaucracy and the increasing influence of the market, these initiatives are emerging as strategic alternatives, critical of neoliberal interests.

In recent years, there has been a distinct renewal of interest in education as a means of experimentation and as a mode of organization. Artists have engaged in a broad range of self-initiated projects, varying from informal reading groups and seminars to alternative schools, community-based pedagogical experiments and online learning platforms. Some of these projects might at first glance appear to merely carry over the general interest in education and the art school that we have become familiar with in the artistic production of the past decade. However, in their emphasis on autonomy and self-organization, recent artists’ experiments in education seem better understood as political strategies: as creative responses to the general social and economic conditions of today or as alternatives to established art schools and university programmes.

The distinct premise of the projects that take this approach to education is that the process and space of learning becomes a political experiment in and of itself. The organization of schools, seminars, and workshops are seen as a way to build discourses, to identify and cultivate communities, to develop a critical awareness of contemporary problems and possibilities and to learn how to respond to them. While sharing an understanding of education as a political question calling for creative and critical involvement, the form of such practices varies depending on context – as does their specific agenda.

Some of these practices specifically employ experimental modes of learning in order to raise consciousness and facilitate self-organization. Ultra-red, a group of international artists and activists, experiments with such strategies through collective listening workshops they have been calling the ‘School of Echoes’. The London-based Carrot Workers Collective develops workshops and guidebooks for interns in the art world, informing current and future interns of their rights and pointing out common ways in which institutions exploit their labour. Jakob Jakobsen, initiator of the former Copenhagen Free University, is now involved in a year-long research project re-examining the materials of the counter-cultural Anti-University of 1968, organizing workshops, publications, and teach-ins as part of dOCUMENTA (13). In this and many of the other projects, there is a distinct interest in experimental forms of education that have the potential to shape politics and empower local communities, building on ideas about radical pedagogy first popularized in such books as Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971).

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