School of Love
SCHOOL OF LOVE: A RESIDENCY IN A SCHOOL ABOUT THE SCHOOL
School of Love is a platform for collective practices – where love as a form of political being – and therefore public interest – is taught at school. This practice was initiated in 2016 by students and teachers of the Autonomous Design department at KASK School of Arts in Ghent as an open research platform for artists and researchers from different disciplines to experiment with forms of society that resist individualistic tendencies. School of Love is formed in meetings, events, workshops and performances.
With a residency in the school, we answer a concrete wish of the School of Love collective, which has reached a point in its trajectory where it wants to test a number of protocols against the reality of learning and is therefore particularly interested in working together with teachers and students. Hosting an artistic residency is one of the different ways in which ‘t Vier in Kortrijk wants to open up their school to different practices that can inspire students. Hosting an artistic practice – and also allowing it to intervene in their operations – is also a first for them.
The School of Love collective’s residency takes this route:
An observation week from 8 to 12 February 2021, to get to know the school, teachers and students.
A shared learning process, in five different sessions over five weeks in February and March 2021 on Friday 26 February and 5, 12, 19 & 26 March 2021.
‘t Vier offers a classroom in the school as a temporary workplace for the observation week and the period of the workshops – and provides time and space for their teachers to participate in workshops.
The trajectory starts from the question: how do you make and be a loving school?
Rethinking and designing new learning formats – from a reflection on love as a pedagogical and political attitude is what often returns in the practice of School of Love. In this residency, SoL wants to maintain the same practice, but at the same time develop a strategy to not only integrate love into a curriculum but to use it as a structuring and guiding premise.
In other words: how to make an institute that loves its residents/members. This means that in this trajectory, it will be necessary to immediately implement the ideas from the workshops so that the learning process itself becomes a School of Love. We will work on what the needs are to install a school of love – in terms of structure, architecture, community, and institute in the current – or an imagined – social context.
HOW?
The workshops will be based on methodologies that allow personal stories to be told and validated as knowledge. It should ensure that the workshops fold around the participants and their expectations.
This means that the context of the workshops must take into account:
Situated Agency – how to grant agency to each individual participant – and how to create a context to activate that
Methodological Distractions – we also allow spontaneous inspirations to interfere with the process or planning, trusting that detours are part of the process.
Exhaustion – physical or mental is not distrusted, but dealt with through a framework that allows you to participate or stop as and when you wish, and according to your own commitment.
Moving, thinking, talking, eating, cooking, complaining, articulating, napping – alone or with many, writing, confessing, unlearning, unfolding, letting time unfold, watching it unfold, daydreaming, collapsing, being playful or silent together, seeking conflict, reflecting on it, valuing each other despite a conflict, failing in efficiency, producing, resisting production, practicing positionality, working hard, being critical about work … Hoping that all these will emerge in the process as a possible way of learning.
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