Other School is an on-going open blueprint for an alternative art, architecture and design pedagogical project.

The initial contributors to this Wiki met during the first edition of an alternative and multidisciplinary creative experiment called The School (TS). The main slogan of TS defined it as “a post-academic and ongoing multidisciplinary festival, residence and happy city experiment”. The backbone of TS consists of a multidisciplinary and collaborative residency, wherein practitioners from different backgrounds would work together on challenges presented by the city of Hasselt (Belgium).

However, from the beginning of the project (Caro and Pablo started ‘working’ on it from March 2017 to draft an Open Call and the first residents arrived on October 2017), we all felt some things were not right. A political instrumentalization of creative work, the little care and hospitality for the reception of residents, a lack of a critical attitude and a missing will to (self-)reflect on the project and its political nature, as well as the opacity of decision making and organization; these reasons, amongst others, led to a breaking point, on the beginning of February 2018, where many participants resigned from TS, while others limited their participation to a specific project or festival.

But this situation also led us to critically reflect on what had gone wrong (and right as well), and translate those thoughts into something that can inform future similar endeavours: collaborative residencies, alternative academic programs, activities of creative (knowledge) production; such initiatives can have insights from our reflections and viceversa. We decided to use this Wiki as a platform to collectively write and publish these reflections, having a sort of ongoing open blueprint for alternative art / architecture / design (post)academic projects.

We envision this initiative can serve to inform future projects, but also be a research / project on its own, which can be shown in relevant exhibitions, included in publications or presented in different fora.