Thorne, Sam (Frieze Magazine) - New Art Schools

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    New SchoolsA survey of recently founded artist-run art academies and

    education programmes, with contributions from: The Silent

    University, The School of Global Art, The External Program,

    MASS Alexandria, SOMA and Islington Mill Art Academy

    What would an art school fit for the 21st century look like?

    Its become common to note that the last decade has seen a

    rise in pedagogic projects initiated by artists and curators. As

    Claire Bishop, among others, has argued, the cancellation in

    2006 of Manifesta 6 a failed attempt to set up an art school

    in Cyprus, and its afterlife as a series of seminars in Berlin could be seen as the moment when this so-called educational

    turn became more pronounced. In the intervening years,

    countless self-organized night schools, free-to-attend lecture

    programmes and artist-run art academies have sprung up

    around the world. The reasons for this, though complex and

    interrelated, are frequently attributed to escalating tuition

    fees, cuts to university budgets, the creeping

    neoliberalization of education at large, frustration with

    overstretched tutors or inadequate teaching, not to mention a

    lack of academies in a given region.

    There are, of course, important precedents for such projects,not least the activities of artists including Joseph Beuys, Luis

    Camnitzer, Lygia Clark and Tim Rollins, all of whom made

    pedagogy a central part of their work. This past decade,

    artist-led projects have taken forms as various as Khaled

    Hourani and Tina Sherwells International Academy of Art

    Palestine in Ramallah (2005ongoing), Henriette Heise and

    Jakob Jakobsens Copenhagen Free University (200107)

    and Tania Brugueras Ctedra Arte de Conducta (Behaviour

    Art School, 200209) in Havana. In a more established art

    centre, like Los Angeles, a constellation of initiatives has

    emerged, such as Machine Project (2003ongoing), Fritz

    Haegs Sundown Salons (200106), and Piero Golia andEric Wesleys The Mountain School of Arts (2005ongoing).

    Other schools are roving (like Pablo Helgueras School of

    Panamerican Unrest, 2003ongoing), studio-bound (such as

    Lia Perjovschis Centre for Art Analysis, in Bucharest) or, like

    Parallel School of Art or Gerald Raunigs European Institute

    for Progressive Cultural Policies, exclusively online. As is

    clear from the names, one common thread is the claiming of

    institutional status (Gregory Sholette has used the terms

    mockstitutions and phantom establishments), even though

    they remain, for the most part, unaffiliated with any

    traditional institution. Whats obvious is that many are eager

    for an art school today to be self-determined, flexible,

    About this articlePublished on 01/09/12BySam Thorne

    SOMA, Mexico City, 2012

    Back to the main site

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    small-scale and cheap or free to attend. This summer, the

    tendency found a temporary institutional home at Londons

    Hayward Gallery with Wide Open School, a month-long

    experiment in public learning involving more than 100

    artists.

    I invited representatives from three artist-led education

    programmes, each of which was or will be launched this year,to contribute case studies about their projects: Los

    Angeles-based Sean Dockray, co-founder of The Public

    School and Telic Arts Exchange, discusses the background for

    The External Program, an online learning network based on a

    Victorian correspondence course; the Turkish artist Ahmet

    t introduces The Silent University, a multi-lingual,

    nomadic institution organized by asylum seekers and

    political refugees; and the London-based artist collective

    LuckyPDF interview students from their School of Global Art,

    a peer-2-peer meshwork of learning, about debt and

    intellectual property. Additionally, I asked the founders of

    three artist-run art schools SOMA in Mexico City, massAlexandria, Egypt, and Islington Mill Art Academy in Salford,

    UK to sketch out their influences and aims, as well as the

    competing ideologies and practicalities at play in the

    day-to-day running of a school.

    Several shared preoccupations emerge: What are the

    possibilities of and limits to self-organized education? Who

    owns art education in what Tom Holert has called the

    knowledge-based polis? What can be borrowed from

    traditional academies, and what should be jettisoned? And

    whats actually at stake with this self-institutionalizing

    impulse? In a 2009 lecture titled The Academy is Back,Dieter Lesage argued that: The art academy is going to be the

    defining innovative institution within the art field in the next

    20 years, much more so than museums, galleries, biennials,

    whatever. So, if we take this to be the case, what are the

    responses being developed by artists today?

    The External Program, Los Angeles

    Sean Dockray

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    An artist based in Los Angeles, USA. He is the co-founder of

    The Public School, Telic Arts Exchange and The External

    Program, an online education project due to be launched

    this autumn.

    In 1858, a message from Queen Victoria to us President

    James Buchanan was the first official telegraph to cross acable laid under the Atlantic; it was a message applauding its

    own transmission. Within decades, a worldwide system of

    cables was woven beneath the oceans, connecting a quarter of

    the earths landmass the British Empire was at its pinnacle.

    Queen Victoria launched another imperialist project in 1858

    when she chartered the University of Londons External

    Programme, the earliest correspondence learning institution

    in the world.

    Like contemporary online education initiatives such as mit

    and Harvards partnership, edX the External Programme

    was invested with the promise of levelling social andeconomic hierarchies. Charles Dickens characterized it as the

    Peoples University, extending her hand to the young

    shoemaker who studies in his garret. What the institution

    offered were study materials and a degree from London,

    regardless of where one lived, contingent on passing an

    examination based on those standards established in the

    English capital.

    Today, edX has become a model in spite of the fact that it

    has only offered one class, Circuits and Electronics for the

    adoption of online education into many universities business

    plans. A recent Wall Street Journal article on massive onlinecourses noted that: The substitution of technology (which is

    cheap) for labour (which is expensive) can vastly increase

    access to an elite-calibre education. Based on this logic, the

    University of Virginia fired its president in June for being

    sceptical about moving online too quickly; board members

    said they needed a leader who embraced strategic dynamism

    rather than strategic planning. In this dynamic educational

    landscape, the faculty is unbundled into a package of

    services curriculum writing, instruction, advising,

    examination and assessment that are provided by licensed

    content, inexpensive adjunct faculty or graduate students and

    private contractors. If the university has been the lastinstitutional bastion for the Left, that position is being

    absolutely eliminated by this neoliberal restructuring of

    education unsurprisingly under the banner of increased

    access.

    Perhaps there is a parallel here to Marxs double freedom,

    whereby we are free to sell our labour and we are free from

    any control over the means of production. Our free access

    comes with institutions that are increasingly inaccessible,

    dominated by an unproductive administrative class, whose

    primary activity involves firing people and establishing

    lucrative intellectual property arrangements. Look at one ofthe massive open online courses (moocs, as they are known)

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    with one teacher to 100,000 students (competing for

    visibility and grading each others work for free) to see the

    establishment of solid pyramidal structures, managed for

    profit by businessmen, lawyers and technicians.

    A few years ago, the University of London decided that the

    name External Programme sounded out of date, and so it

    was changed to the International Programme. This was afortunate event for us at The Public School because it gave us

    a readymade name for our own new online learning project

    the External Program, abbreviated as exP. The Public School

    was initiated in Los Angeles in 2007 as a school with no

    curriculum, which simply meant that the classes offered

    would not come from an institutional mission or disciplinary

    parameters, but from an open process where anyone could

    propose something that they wanted to learn about or teach.

    It was an engine for bringing small groups of people together,

    face-to-face.

    In the past, The Public School has not only resisted movinginto online education, some reasons for which are implicit in

    this essay, but has conceived of itself as an inversion of that

    very form. Rather than using the Internet to eliminate the

    classroom by broadcasting teaching outwards, The Public

    School uses the same technology as a platform for students

    and teachers to collectively develop a curriculum and

    organize classes, bringing people together into physical

    classrooms. The impulse to document seemed to reinforce

    the idea of a centre or origin, and so class documentation has

    been generally eliminated in favour of the idea that a group

    can collectively produce knowledge themselves without

    appealing to a higher, or central, authority.

    Something now seems a bit self-satisfied by this position.

    After all, millions of people around the world are actually

    engaging with these forms of online learning. But they are

    forms that tend to exploit ones paranoia about future

    employability and teach marketable skills or inculcate the

    viewer-student into the new religion of entrepreneurial,

    technological innovation. Where is the online educational

    space for learning for its own sake? For the development of

    critical thought? For the articulation and circulation of new

    concepts, languages and political possibilities? Contemporary

    distance education, bedeviled by the question ofaccreditation, seems totally incompatible with these

    questions. Instead we witness the survival of 19th- and early-

    20th-century colonial concerns over standardization, filtered

    through the Internet economy.

    We are launching our External Program this autumn not

    simply as another player in the landscape of online

    education, but as a quasi-institution devoted to the study of

    its own conditions, and to externalization in all its forms:

    the remote student body; passwords and profiles; contingent

    faculty; outsourced assessment systems; the move toward

    cloud computing; militarization of campuses; student loandebt; stress, depression and anxiety.

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    Gilles Deleuze observed in his Postscript on Control

    Societies (1990) that perpetual training tends to replace the

    school and that young people strangely boast of being

    motivated. This could not better describe our present

    moment in which one of the new, popular televisual genres

    that have emerged over the last few years is the video lecture

    the elementary building block of online education.

    Interestingly, these videos are not simply broadcast out fromthe institution to the citizens beyond, but with growing

    frequency are consumed within the institutions themselves.

    Perhaps the reason that the original External Programme

    seems out of date is precisely because it is no longer external

    or exceptional, but rather it describes the new normal

    condition of the university itself.

    SOMA, Mexico City

    Yoshua Okn

    An artist based in Mexico City, where in 2009 he co-founded

    SOMA, a non-profit space and art school.

    Sam Thorne What is the background to SOMA?

    Yoshua Okn SOMA is a non-profit space that was

    founded in November 2009. It has an artist council which

    determines content, and a team of art historians and

    administrators who run the day-to-day operations. We havefour programmes: a weekly public programme of

    interdisciplinary talks and performances; an MFA-level

    academic programme for 24 students; a six-week summer

    programme (taught in English); and a residency programme

    focused on inviting art professionals to teach and talk.

    ST Do you have any specific historical models or

    influences?

    YO SOMA mainly comes from the tradition of artist-run

    spaces. Historically, artists have been especially good at

    identifying cultural needs and in making them available

    through the creation of structures. These have usually been

    independent, but sometimes artists have also used official

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    institutions for instance, the MFA programme I attended at

    UCLA was created by artists. Many of the artists involved in

    soma, myself included, played an important role in Mexico

    Citys artist-run scene during the 1990s, which was key in

    transforming the cultural scene and in building a strong

    sense of community.

    ST How are you funded?

    YO SOMA is a non-profit organization and most of ourprogrammes are either completely or

    partially subsidized. For the regular academic programme,

    students pay between zero and 30 percent of the tuition,

    depending on their economic situation. And our weekly

    public programme is completely free. The space is funded by

    a private board of philanthropists as well as by grants and by

    the money raised with programmes like SOMA Summer.

    ST Is SOMA a specific response to something?

    YO We live in societies that are increasingly alienating and

    where there is little room for agency and for meaningful

    human interaction. Art and culture have been turned into

    industries with more and more emphasis on spectacle and

    less on content and discourse. SOMA was conceived as a

    place for creative interaction and dialogue amongst different

    generations and, in its own small way, it tries to compensate

    for the general situation. Also, in the Spanish-speaking

    world theres a strong need for an updated MFA

    programme there is a huge demand. We have students

    from Spain, Peru, Brazil, Colombia and many cities around

    Mexico. Less than 25 percent of the students are originally

    from Mexico City.

    ST Do you award a qualification of any kind?

    YO We are deliberately non-credited because accreditationbrings more limitations than advantages. But we do give

    students a diploma once they graduate from the two- to

    three-year programme.

    ID photos of the 120+ students enrolled in the School of

    Global Art, rendered as a portrait of Yoda from Star Wars

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    School of Global Art, London

    Lucky PDF

    An artist collective formed in 2008 in London, UK. They

    initiated the School of Global Art an online and real-world

    network earlier this year.

    Since the beginning of the year, LuckyPDF have been

    recruiting students to the School of Global Art

    (schoolofglobalart.org, SGA), a project that uses low-cost

    airlines and high-speed Internet to develop a peer-2-peer

    meshwork of learning. More than 120 students have enrolled

    online and at special recruitment events in Birmingham,

    London and Melbourne. Luckypdf interviewed four of the

    students about their experiences of education and the

    Internet.

    Katherine Sullivan (22), lives and studies in New York,

    USA (convoluteface.tumblr.com)LuckyPDF Whats your current level of education-related

    debt?

    KS Im afraid to check, but maybe something like

    US$100,036.21.

    LP How likely is it that you will ever pay this back?

    KS Unlikely, unless I decide to take extreme measures. It

    seems most people tend to take extreme measures in order to

    pay back loans. I feel as though I should make a statement

    about the absurdity of student debt here, but I think a lot of

    us already understand.

    LP Was the fact that SGA is free to enrol an incentive?

    KS Certainly, as well as the graphic design in the promovideo, the Ryan Trecartin and Cory Arcangel screenshots

    from Facebook, not to mention the 100 percent satisfaction

    guarantee.

    LP Should all education be free?

    KS Yes, but ...

    LP Do you value your own intellectual property?

    KS Not particularly, but I am told that I should.

    James Bowen (23), lives and works in Wellington, New

    Zealand (opensurgery.tumblr.com)

    LP Whats your current level of education-related debt?

    JB I graduated in 2011 with a Masters in Fine Arts fromMassey University, New Zealand. My debt has reached

    NZ$60,000.

    LP How likely is it that you will ever pay this back?

    JB I have a huge conscience about it that does my head in.

    Last year I travelled and worked abroad and didnt pay

    anything back. Now Im looking for work in Australia,

    specifically in the mining industry, where I would be able to

    pay it back in one year and still have cash left over.

    LP In the course of your education, have you ever copied or

    downloaded materials, resources or tools without paying for

    them?

    JB Yes.

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    LP Would you have been able to afford the estimated retail

    value of the material?

    JB Im not sure about that. I always download new

    versions of Photoshop, Final Cut and I torrent music and

    movies too.

    LP Would your education have been possible without

    them?

    JB No way. Ive been downloading and ripping contentsince I was a kid and figured out how to do it on the Internet.

    Ive gained a huge skill set and knowledge base from using

    pirated materials.

    Carson Salter (27), studying corporate semiotics and

    operational images at MIT (teachablefile.org)

    LP What made you enrol with the School of Global Art?

    CS I like to know about educational experiments. I am a

    spy and Im a joiner.

    LP Whats your current level of education-related debt?

    CS No debt so far.

    LP Was the fact that SGA is free to enrol an incentive foryou?

    CS I wouldnt have enrolled if it had cost money.

    LP Should all education be free?

    CS Some types of education are speculative investments,

    and should be paid for by the speculator. A costly education

    should prove its value in the industry or domain where it

    pays off, whether it pays off financially, socially, personally.

    Its a problem when educational institutions imply value

    where there is none (whether by deceiving students or by

    shifts in the field).

    LP Do you value your own intellectual property?

    CS I enforce it personally.

    Enrico Boccioletti (28), lives in Milan, Italy

    (http://www.spcnvdr.org)

    LP Should all education be free?

    EB I dont think that would be a conclusive solution. But it

    should be permissible to steal education for yourself.

    LP In the course of your education, have you ever copied or

    downloaded materials, resources or tools without paying for

    them?

    EB It happens all the time.

    LP Would you have been able to afford the estimated retail

    value of the material?EB I wouldnt be able to quantify an amount, but by no

    means would I have been able to afford even ten percent of it.

    LP Would your education have been possible without these

    materials?

    EB Not at all.

    LP Do you value your own intellectual property?

    EB Of course, intellectual property means a lot to

    everybody; thats the reason why it should be free to circulate

    in new production and gain mechanisms to be triggered.

    LP Would you steal a handbag?

    EB Not if there was only one left.

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    Fifth-floor studio of Islington Mill Art Academy, Salford, UK,

    2012

    Islington Mill Art Academy, Salford

    Maurice Carlin & Lauren Velvick

    Islington Mill Art Academy in Salford, UK is a free,

    self-organized art school that was founded by Lusy

    Bernard, Andrew Beswick, Maurice Carlin and Louie Lister

    in 2007.

    Sam Thorne What is the background to Islington Mill Art

    Academy?Maurice Carlin & Lauren Velvick We met in 2007

    whilst on an art foundation course at Stockport College, near

    Manchester, at the time all of us were talking about the

    different universities and courses we might move on to.

    Tuition fees of 3,000 per annum had just been introduced

    in the UK. After attending various university open days, we

    were uninspired by the prospect of spending our time and

    money at any of them. So four of us decided to create our

    own framework for becoming artists, drawing on what

    resources we could muster.

    ST Do you have any specific historical models or

    influences?MC & LV We were aware of well-known schools, such as

    the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, but they seemed

    distant. As we were at the beginning of our art education, we

    didnt yet have the experience that an education might bring

    to draw on, respond to or battle against. But we did have

    the sense that art school need not be onerous, that it could be

    something that any group of willing and energetic people

    could create for themselves.

    ST How are you funded?

    MC & LV We are self-funded each person supports

    themselves through paying for a studio space (if they want or

    need one) and contributing to research trips and residencies.

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    We have invaluable support from individual artists and

    organizations. Many people have become involved on the

    basis of taking part in a mutual exchange of learning.

    ST Is your initiative a specific response to something?

    MC & LV Universities can present too-narrow a definition

    of what it might mean to be an artist in the world; students

    are set up to fail, partly because of this. We realized that

    many artists dont get the skills or awareness needed tofunction and survive in the real world from their education.

    Graduation is presented to them as a crucial benchmark in

    becoming an artist, but weve come to believe that its the

    beginning of something rather than an endpoint the

    process of becoming an artist is an unending one.

    ST Do you address a specific local community?Is there a

    national or international component?

    MC & LV The Art Academy is based at Islington Mill, in an

    area of Salford that is currently undergoing significant

    regeneration, and some of our artists have worked with

    individuals and communities in the area. We have also forged

    links with other experimental art schools throughout the UK

    including the Glasgow Open School, The Free University of

    Liverpool and Department 21, which is based at the Royal

    College of Art in London and have set up artist exchanges

    with arts organizations in Berlin and Barcelona.

    ST Do you award a qualification of any kind?

    MC & LV No, though we have had a graduation party

    where we awarded our own qualification (which is called an

    n/a) for skills, experience and qualities not formally

    recognized by academia. People graduate or move on when

    they feel ready to; some leave formally whilst others drift into

    new areas of practice, sometimes returning further down theline.

    Exterior of MASS Alexandria, Egypt, 2012

    MASS Alexandria

    Wael ShawkyAn artist based in Alexandria, Egypt. He founded MASS

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    Alexandria, an alternative art education space, in 2010.

    Sam Thorne What is the background to MASS

    Alexandria?

    Wael Shawky While studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts

    at the University of Alexandria, I found that there was a huge

    gap between what artists study in the academy and what weface after graduation. Later I worked as a professor there, but

    had to leave after two years as I felt the system was restrictive

    and anachronistic. Emerging from art school I found all

    opportunities for artists to travel, to study etc. were

    determined by Egypts Ministry of Culture.

    After receiving the Grand Prize at the Cairo Biennale in 1996,

    the state made it impossible for me to work in Egypt. For four

    years I was in a sort of exile, and I took the opportunity to

    study in the us, where I dreamt of finding an alternative

    space for education. When I returned to Egypt, William Wells

    had opened Townhouse Gallery and other independent

    spaces began to emerge. The art scene was completelytransformed, but independent platforms for art education

    were sparse. In 2010, with guidance and continued

    contributions from curator and writer Sarah Rifky, mass

    Alexandria was born. The inaugural mass Alexandria Pilot

    Studio Programme was housed in a shared studio to provide

    the facilities and the opportunity for the encounter, study and

    production of art. In 2012, Daniella Rose King joined the

    mass Alexandria family as Programme Curator.

    ST Do you have any specific historical models or

    influences?

    WS One of the most important influences during my

    undergraduate studies was my professor, the artist Farouk

    Wahba. He studied at the Dsseldorf Art Academy, and

    introduced me to the German art education model of the

    master and apprentice. While I was studying I felt this was

    the ideal,as many educators in Egypt do, but eventually I

    found this system extremely egotistical and dictatorial.

    I wanted to find a platform for students,not of teaching or

    receiving knowledge, but of opening a dialogue, where they

    could choose what direction their work would take. I decided

    thatI would bring together 12 to 20 students for each

    programme, through an open call for applications, and work

    with them individually and as a group for seven months,where the students are static and the professors change.

    mass Alexandria aims to complement the practical,

    craft-based skills offered by the university with studies of

    theory and methodologies to enable new channels of

    thinking.

    ST How are you funded? Is mass free to attend?

    WS mass Alexandria has been self-funded as well as having

    received support from The Foundation for Arts Initiative, the

    Goethe-Institut Alexandria, the Arab Fund for Arts and

    Culture, and the Young Arab Theatre Fund. Essential to the

    premise of mass Alexandria is that it is free for artists to

    participate.

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    ST Is your initiative a specific response to something?

    WS It is certainly a response to a lack of art education

    schemes in Alexandria, as well as more generally in Egypt.

    We hope to develop a new approach to art education, in light

    of existing programmes, and in relation to the needs and

    interests of the artists involved.

    ST Do you address a specific local community.And is there

    an external section of activities?WS Activities largely take place in Alexandria, but also in

    Cairo. This year, nine students were invited to work as

    assistants to a number of artists in dOCUMENTA (13) in

    Kassel for a one-month period as part of The Cairo Seminar:

    Studium. The development of an international residency, or

    working opportunity component, is being pursued as a core

    part of the programming at MASS Alexandria.

    ST Do you have a curriculum?

    WS There is no strict curriculum, but it is important for us

    to create an open space in Alexandria that can facilitate the

    discussion of ideas, practices and thoughts, and that

    encourage diverse relationships with art, between artists,

    curators, critics and audiences.

    Stamp for The Silent University, 2012

    The Silent University, London

    Ahmet t

    An artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and

    Istanbul, Turkey. The Silent University a nomadic, multi-

    lingual institution was launched this year in collaboration

    with Tate and Delfina Foundation, London, UK.

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    It is not the case that a man who is silent says nothing.

    Anonymous, quoted in Keith H. Basso, To Give Up on Words:

    Silence in Western Apache Culture (1970)

    In 1873, the writer and educator Anna Eliot Ticknor

    founded the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. This was

    a Boston-based network of women teaching women by mail

    that the literary scholar Harriet F. Bergmann recentlydubbed The Silent University. Almost 140 years on from the

    inauguration of Ticknors society, the urgency for an

    organization of this kind has shifted from women in need of a

    liberal education to marginalized groups such as refugees and

    asylum seekers, in particular those whose professional lives

    have been interrupted by displacement.

    Many people in the UK today are unable to practice their

    previous professions or use their qualifications, for reasons

    that range from insecure immigration status to English not

    being their first language. This situation led to the foundation

    of The Silent University, a collaboration between myself,Tates adult programmes curator Nora Razian and

    community curator Synthia Griffin, with the support of the

    Delfina Foundation. This project is a self-institutionalized,

    autonomous knowledge platform that aims to challenge the

    idea of silence as a passive state; we hope to explore its

    powerful potential through performance, writing and

    reflection. The Silent University aims to address and

    reactivate the knowledge of the participants, inventing

    alternative currencies in place of money or free voluntary

    service. These explorations attempt to make apparent the

    systemic failure and the loss of skills and knowledge

    experienced through the silencing process of people seekingasylum.

    As Mladen Dolar argues very beautifully in his 2006 book A

    Voice and Nothing More: We must not interrupt the silence

    unless we have something to say which is better than silence.

    Working with partners including Southwark Refugee

    Communities Forum, Migrants Resource Centre and United

    Migrant Workers Education Project, a programme has been

    developed that includes lecturers, consultants and research

    fellows. There are currently about 30 participants at The

    Silent University. Our lecturers include a pharmacist from

    Syria, an accountant from Congo, a marketing manager fromZimbabwe and a calligrapher from Iraq. Our academic

    consultants include an astrophysicist from Iran, a union

    learning organizer from Colombia and a journalist from Sri

    Lanka. Course topics will be connected to participants

    specific qualifications and presented in any language. The

    first of these will take place at Tate Modern in November,

    along with a one-day symposium, gathering together

    individuals and organizations engaged in alternative

    education, specifically those initiated by institutions, artists

    or artist groups, and autonomous collectives.1

    Tate will host The Silent University until the end of the year,but ideally the participants will eventually take The Silent

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    University over as their own institution. It will survive as a

    University in Time2 and will mostly be accessible online,

    appearing temporarily where hostedby collaborating

    institutions. We will hopefully manage to have a permanent

    course under the umbrella of larger universities, which can

    provide some sort of curriculum or qualification in the

    future.

    In 1976, the British artist Stephen Willats published Art andSocial Function, which includes analyses of The West London

    Social Resource Project that took place in 1972. As he

    explains, their fundamental concern was the relationship

    between coding structures and patterns of behaviour. Willats

    argues that the ways people code themselves (how they dress,

    how they speak) can reflect their desired or actual position

    within a community he calls these life codes. Whatever the

    barriers are, The Silent Universitys main aspiration is for all

    the participants to stop waiting in limbo, and to take the

    initiative right now by using their imagination, and

    collectively construct their own reality and life codes. As

    Susan Sontag wrote in her 1967 essay The Aesthetics of

    Silence, we must acknowledge a surrounding environment of

    sound or language in order to recognize silence.

    1 To name some of the exemplary practices and projects in

    alternative education: Bank of Ideas The School of Ideas;

    Tent City University at Occupy London; Free University,

    Berlin; The Public School, Los Angeles; Centre for Possible

    Studies, London; zgr niversite, Ankara; Radical

    Education Collective, Ljubljana; The Autonomy Project

    Summer School, Eindhoven; Wide Open School, Hayward

    Gallery, London; Really Free School, London; United

    Migrant Workers Education Project, London; School of

    Missing Studies, Amsterdam; The Faculty of Invisibility,

    Amsterdam; Freie Hochschule Stuttgart; the School of Global

    Art.

    2 In 1992, the Slovenian artist collective Neue Slowenische

    Kunst initiated the ongoing project State in Time, the first

    global state of the universe, which currently has some14,000

    citizens around the world.

    Sam Thorne

    is associate editor offrieze and is based in London, UK.

    Page 1 of 1 pages for this article

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