Over the coming months, e-flux Education will republish a series of texts from the e-flux archive on experimental schools, self-organized education, and other attempts to rethink how and where art can be taught. The series begins with Hicham Awad’s “Navigating Volatility: Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan”, and will continue with texts previously published in e-flux journal and e-flux Education over the past fifteen years.
Since the global financial crisis of 2008, alternative and self-organized modes of education have formed substantial threads within e-flux publishing. Not because we set out to make this a theme. Texts on these subjects appeared for different reasons and at very different moments: some were written when particular programs were just starting; others look back at institutions that became more formal or informal, or closed altogether. There are proposals for schools, accounts of existing programs, and essays that question whether education needs to take the form of a school at all.
I wanted to return to these texts because, read together, they describe something larger than a group of experimental art programs.
One way to understand the proliferation of alternative education is through a broader loss of confidence in institutions. This is not limited to schools and universities; it extends to museums, public agencies, political institutions, and nation states, and to their ability to represent collective interests or provide continuity. The programs discussed in these texts aim to teach differently, but this objective obliges them to decide who can organize knowledge, how resources are distributed, who is admitted, who works, and how its model can sustain itself from one year to the next.
Alternative arts education is often described by what it removes: tuition, degrees, admissions criteria, fixed curricula, permanent faculty. But removing these things does not remove the institution. Someone still selects participants, finds money, organizes labor, rents a space, and decides what counts as study. Refusing accreditation can make a program more flexible, but also risks making it more inaccessible to people who need student visas or recognized qualifications. Rejecting formal hierarchies does not prevent informal authority from supplanting them. A free school can still be very difficult to enter.
These questions appear in quite different forms across the series.
Irit Rogoff’s essay “FREE” begins with the proposal for Goldsmiths Free: a no-fee, non-degree academy that would exist next to Goldsmiths, University of London. The proposal does not imagine that freedom requires abandoning the university altogether. Instead, it immediately runs into very ordinary institutional questions: what would Goldsmiths get from this, and who would pay for it?
The independent curatorial training program L’École du Magasin, which operated in Grenoble, France from 1987 to 2016, steadfastly remained outside the degree system but still depended on public cultural funding. As Michela Alessandrini, Lore Gablier, and Estelle Nabeyrat elaborate in a two-part essay, the school’s nonaccredited status promoted flexibility, but later produced practical difficulties as curatorial work became increasingly professionalized and more students needed visas and recognized qualifications.
The Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France relied on room fees and participants carrying out work that, in another institutions, would probably be done by paid staff. RAT school of ART in Seoul combined public lectures with a membership structure and a small fee. Private donations and annual auctions have enabled SOMA in Mexico City to remain artist-run while compensating its teachers, and to eventually attain the very basic achievement of securing a long-term lease.
I don't think these are secondary questions about administration. They are part of the educational model itself.
The Home Workspace Program—which I co-directed with Jalal Toufic from 2013 to 2014—is another case. Hicham Awad follows the Beirut-based program through several editions and traces how it kept changing in relation to its participants and locale. Disparities in students’ familiarity with theory produced hierarchies within early cohorts. Public programs generated criticism and conflict. The city was not a backdrop for a curriculum designed somewhere else. Conditions external to the program inevitably permeated and changed what it could be.
Some of the texts move much further away from the idea of an art school. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney locate study in the nurses’ coffee room, the campus barbershop, a study group, a squat, the woods, a bed. The university can be formally public despite operating privately, and can also produce forms of public life that the institution does not organize or own.
Karachi LaJamia starts somewhere else as well. According to Pramodha Weerasakera, the “anti-university” in Karachi, Pakistan devotes its coursework to studying the city’s relationship to its land, examining how colonial paradigms enable land grabs, heedless developments, displacement of Indigenous populations, and the severe pollution of the nearby Indus River. Its educational forms include maps, videos, archives, site-based courses, and children’s books. Karachi LaJamia honors the knowledge already being produced within these conflicts and communities, and resolves to enter these relations rather than construct another academic structure alongside them.
Placing these texts next to one another also makes the word “alternative” increasingly complicated.
Alternative to the university? To tuition? To professionalization? To accreditation? To the classroom? To the art market? Many of these programs refuse one institutional form while depending on another. A university, museum, foundation, public agency, private donor, cheap building, volunteer labor force, or preexisting infrastructure often makes the alternative possible.
These dependencies do not necessarily invalidate the experiment. But they do require interrogating what is actually being refused, retained, or rebuilt.
The two texts about SOMA are particularly vital in this respect because they examine the same institution eleven years apart. Chris Sharp describes a relatively young artist-run school trying to work out its structure, funding, governance, and curriculum. Kim Córdova returns to SOMA after the school’s fifteenth anniversary, when continuing to exist has become a central problem. Rising rents forced the school out of its original neighborhood; a ten-year lease offered by a local collector provided SOMA some newfound stability The program recently became tuition-free, although it remains nonaccredited and unable to sponsor visas.
By this point, becoming more institutional does not necessarily mean becoming more conventional. Paying labor, keeping a building, organizing collective governance, and planning for long-term sustainability can all become part of the political work.
The texts we are republishing were never intended to form a single argument. I don't think they should be made to agree with one another now. They describe programs that have disappeared, changed substantially, and/or continue. What interests me in putting these inquiries back into circulation is the possibility of reading them against one another—and against the present.
The question is not whether alternative education has succeeded or failed as a model. There has never been one model. The more useful question is already in the title of this series: alternative to what? What does a program refuse, what does it continue to depend on, who can enter it, and what has to be built in place of the institution it wants to leave behind?
