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Heft 4/26 – Making School
For more than a century, the idea of the school has appeared in art whenever institutions of knowledge and culture have seemed inadequate. From Bauhaus and Black Mountain College to the Anti-University, the Free International University, feminist consciousness-raising groups and traditions of popular education, and on to today’s self-organised academies and nomadic schools, there is no linear genealogy, but there is a recurring question: How might knowledge be organised otherwise? Here, Here, “school” means less a building, degree or curriculum than a social form – a temporary community, a site of collective inquiry and an attempt to reorder hierarchies between teachers and learners, theory and practice, artistic and situated knowledge.
Today, this turn towards school has acquired a new urgency. As public education systems face marketisation and political pressure, and cultural as well as civic infrastructures grow more fragile, new ecologies of learning are emerging within and around the field of art: Summer Schools, Travelling Academies, peer-to-peer programmes, study groups and “schools without schools”. They connect artistic practice with political education, community work, ecology or commoning, treating learning less as the transmission of established knowledge than as the production of relations and capacities to act. This issue asks what is being articulated through this shift. Is the school becoming an institutional form of contemporary culture in which other publics and other ways of working together can be tested? Or is the promise of horizontal learning itself turning into a flexible format of a precarious cultural field? Which forms of knowledge become visible, who is able to participate, who remains excluded – and who performs the often invisible labour that sustains these spaces? Between counter-institution, social infrastructure and artistic experiment, the issue examines school-making as both symptom and possibility: not as a retreat from art, but as an attempt to redesign its institutional conditions.
Release Date: December 15, 2026