How do people shape their surroundings? Which points of reference guide their development? Which potentiality do self-organizing structures entail? How should they structure their relationships to existing institutions? Could they ever replace traditional forms of education? Or can they place enough pressure on institutions to make them get involved in the (auto)didactic process?

Initiated by Radek Community and "Chto Delat?" workgroup
Organisation Soviet: Daria Pyrkina, Pyotr Bystrov, Dmitry Vilensky, David Riff
National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow
06.09.2006 - 30.09.2006 
www.ncca.ru
the project is accompanied by a series of discussions, seminars, workshops and video screenings.

In the frame of the project a new issue of the newspaper "Chto Delat?" - "Self-Education. How can we become?" more is published.

List of exhibition participants: Alterazioni Video (Italy); Bejari (Brazil); "Chto Delat?" (Russia), Communitaria TV (Argentina); Contra File (Brazil); Copenhagen Free University (Denmark); Factory of Found Clothes (Russia); Etcetera (Argentina); Elena Kovilina (Russia); Huan Pablo Macias (Mexico); Marcello Exposito (Spain); Radek Community; Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler; Andreas Siekmann è Alice Creisher (Germany); Zanny Begg (Australia)

How do people shape their surroundings? Which points of reference guide their development? Which potentiality do self-organizing structures entail? How should they structure their relationships to existing institutions? Could they ever replace traditional forms of education? Or can they place enough pressure on institutions to make them get involved in the (auto)didactic process?

1. The theme of self-education flows from the notion of self-organization. What do we mean when we talk about this notion today? Self-organization is a collective process of taking on political functions and addressing tasks that have been excluded from the field of real politics or pushed out of public space. Thus, the process of self-education is inseparable from the positioning of collective dissent with the existing order of things. It demands the transformation of the status quo. Self-organization searches for a form to express the voices of dissenting subjectivity.

"For Marx, enjoyment of the world is not limited to consumption of material goods, no matter how refined, no matter how subtle. It is much more than that. He does not imagine a world in which all men would be surrounded by art, not even a society where everyone would be painters, poets or musicians. Those would be transitional stages. He imagines a society in which everyone would rediscover the spontaneity of natural life and its initial creative drive, and perceive the world through the eyes of a painter, the ears of a musicians and the language of a poet. Once superseded art would be reabsorbed into everyday which had been metamorphosed by its fusion with what had hitherto been kept external to it"
Henri Lefebvre.[1]

This text-dialogue is based on a conversation we [1] held with educator Fátima Freire [2]. At that moment, our background was composed by the questions proposed by the group What is to be Done? [3] and by our common ground developed in the Politics of the Impossible [4], a project that has been carried out in the last year and a half in the city of Campinas (São Paulo State, Brazil) with different groups, both organized in neighbourhood communities and those without ties with a stable ground.Fatima's greatest contribution to our work has been the ceaseless listening devoted to each one of us and to the wider group involved in the project. What we have learned in our meetings is, above all, how to deal with the very deep dimensions of our own knowledges and non-knowledges, reflected at each instant in the knowledges and non-knowledges of the other.

One of the important issues in today's world is the question on how to circumvent dominant assumption and practices of any fixed categories in a society. A possible strategy to that is that we should be creating constructive-productive spaces - spaces of collective resistance that are also meeting places for all peripheralized or/and marginalized subjectivities. In doing so, radically new and different forms of citizenship could be redefined and realized. But it is important, first of all and before any further actions are taken that we recognize what our pre-judgments and our fixed and determined viewpoints are and realize that there exist numerous standpoints and horizons. Which means that we should try and understand "a horizon that is not our own in relation to our own". Of course, this does not mean we should agree on everything; on the contrary, "the less we agree, the more we create an area, a field of vitality in different branches of this phylum of molecular revolution, and the more we reinforce this area." ¹

Our project began as a seminar with five girls, at which we discussed key words from a quote of the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. The seminar resulted in a video and a collection of clothes dedicated to these phrases. The clothes were made by the girls, as in the basic principle in most projects by the FNO Shop of Utopian Clothing.

There is no disjunction between life, work, struggle, politics or education when, in our theory and praxis, we move beyond static and fetishised notions of the world. Even if we have learned otherwise all human creativities develop mutually within the same processes. By considering work, art and education separately, as distinct segments of our lives, we create a fundamental antogonism which cheats us of both life and doing. But this interconnectedness can only be fully grasped by emancipated subjects who are ready to struggle, ready to challenge the enforced reality of day to day life.

Thinking about positive forms of organization and education leads us directly towards recent developments in Venezuela, which have taken place in various social and political spheres since Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in 1998. Venezuela is maybe the most inspiring example to highlight possibilities a State nowadays has in globalized capitalism in order to make the participation of the people in decision-making processes possible or to support existing forms of self-organization throughout the society.

MOVEMENTS
Black Mountain College, New Experimental College,
Drakabygget, the Spontaneous University, New York Free
University, London Anti-University, Berlin Kriticher Universität,
Detroit Artists’ Workshops.

UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS
A motor running in the background.

Schools always teach us to obey our teachers. All schools, colleges, academies, institutes, and universities that teach us to march and walk straight ahead have long since forgotten themselves; they have forgotten where knowledge is to be found. Now, they give us lessons on how to survive contemporaneity, how to outlive the end of history, how to cope with the logic of capital. At school, people learn to make money and how to satisfy their needs.

1.
The Karl Marx School of the English Language (KMSEL) was founded in January 2006. Its most immediate goal was to improve both the spoken language (pronunciation, discussion) and reading comprehension  of its participants. I serve as the "instructor" (native speaker and  art historian Kristin Romberg is the substitute teacher when I am unavailable). The "students" are the philosophers Oxana Timofeeva, Alexei Penzin, and Vlad Sofronov, the curator Konstantin Bokhorov, and the artist Dmitri Gutov. The school meets once a week at Gutov's studio in the center of Moscow. Meetings last between 3-4 hours, with one cigarette-and-tea break, and usually end with a drink or two at a local bar.

ExArgentina found its thematic starting points in the economic crisis and uprisings in Argentina in December 2001. The project lasted for four years, giving us a span of time much longer than the usual haste with which exhibitions and cultural events have to be managed, providing a continuum that provides the precondition for truly critical, complex artworks. The project consisted of several stages: from November 2002 to May 2003 we stayed in Buenos Aires, where we met various groups and artists and started a process of cooperation and discussion, which was to last four years. In the fall of 2003, we returned to Berlin and organized the conference "Plans for Leaving the Overview." The conference was intended to discuss the theoretical and methodological issues that had so far crystallized with people from Europe as well. It was followed by the exhibition "Steps to Fleeing from Work to Action," which was shown at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in March 2004. Part of the exhibition was also shown in September 2004 in the exhibition "How Do We Want to be Governed" at a Centro Civico in in Barcelona. This spring, the final part of ExArgentina took place in Palais de Glace, a city institution in Buenos Aires, and was organized by the Argentine artists, who brought in many new artists and groups. This last part of the project consisted of an exhibition and a 6-week workshop, in which issues important to the project were now discussed in the light of the current political situation.

A.C. Could you briefly explain what sparked the student protests in Germany this summer? Could you describe the situation in higher education?

J.V. The current situation at German institutions of higher education is largely determined by measures taken to restructure the entire educational system. It includes the introduction of tuition fees, and the implementation of programs for the BA and the MA. More and more graduates are being trained to only satisfy the job market, while a small "excellent" elite still receives interest-based support from business. Department on subjects that are socially relevant but unlucrative are simply being closed. The definition of content through neoliberal criteria basically forebodes the end for all critical science and scholarship.
Since the summer of 2005, more and more students all over Germany have been putting up resistance, most of all against the federally organized tuition plans. May 2006 saw the rise of a new wave of student protest. It was triggered by the imminent passage of legislation to introduce general tuition fees of at least 500 € per semester, in addition to administrative fees that are already in effect. The state government of Hesse is even planning to institute a special charge of up to 3,000 € a year for "educational foreigners" (i.e. non-EU-citizens with non-German-higher-education-diploma). With the current reforms, "equal opportunity in education," with its seemingly invisible structural exclusions, is becoming lawful social discrimination. But most importantly, the idea that you as a student would have 1,000 € less per year supplied the necessary protest potential for a "summer of resistance". All the more because it is clear to everyone that the general introduction of fees bring step-by-step increases in tuition in its wake.

In the face of neo-liberal educational policies and the debate on intellectual property, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain that knowledge is a common property and that its production and distribution may not be possessed by a certain group or individual and their or his/her interests. Attempts to democratize the access to knowledge appear to have become historical exceptions in times when knowledge is being economized and patented and education is being privatized and standardized, when discussions on elite universities are on the agenda and copying is made a crime. Today, knowledge based on ownership rights is treated both nationally and internationally as a promising commodity. According to Yann Moulier Boutang, knowledge, as an economic good, must possess two features to establish itself as a commodity: the principle of exclusivity and of rivalry in use: «Exclusivity means that by belonging to one owner everyone else is prevented from utilizing the rights on this economic good. Rivalry in use means that it is not compatible with another use.» (Moulier Boutang, 2003, p. 275)