About

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

This Wiki is a collaborative endeavour to draft and design a series of tools and approaches that constitute a blueprint for alternative art, design and architecture education initiatives. We decided to use a Wiki as we consider it the tool par excellence for collaborative writing and publishing, while simultaneously allowing anyone to read and consult the content created.

On the sidebar you will find links to the following pages:

• An About / Home page (the current page), where basic information and background of the project can be found.
• A Dialogical Manifesto, where contributors can add their voices in a choral conversation.
• Case studies of different intra or extra-institutional initiatives where the different contributors have been involved.
• The Models page presents a series of proposals of how a art/architecture/design school might be structured.
• Tools, where you will be able to find elements that might be useful for alternative educational endeavours.
• An archive, where a meta-inventory of alternative educational practices in art, design and architecture will be presented.
• A Lexicon of relevant terms for the project.
• A list, bio and contact of all the contributors to the Wiki.
• A library with resources.

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.

This Wiki is open for anyone who is interested in contributing to it. Follow the following steps in order to do so:

1. Click on the register button at the top-right end of this page.
2. Follow the instructions to register in DokuWiki.
3. Once registered (and in case you haven’t signed in), return to this website and this time click on Log In, also at the top-right end of the page.
4. Now you can edit any page and add new ones. Have in mind that writing on a Wiki is not like writing directly on a blog; but it isn’t rocket science either. Read the basics of DokuWiki syntax → It’s really quite simple. Even if it might seem challenging at the first look, when you get a hold of it you stop thinking about it.
5. On the left you can see the menu for accessing the different pages of the Wiki.
6. If you wish to edit or add content to any of the pages, you should go to that page, hover over the pencil icon at the right of the content frame and click on Edit this page.
7. Adding a new page (from a link in the menu/index) is quite easy. Go to the sidebar page and click on Edit this page. There you can add a new ‘item’ as text. Once done, you should select the text and click on this icon. Once done that, you have created a link, yet the page does not exist. Save the edit on the page and go to the link (on red) you have just created. It will say This page does not yet exist; if you go to the pencil icon you can Create this page.

List (potential) moments for making public this work, as well as moments of collective writing.

Fill in this doodle.