The full title of the 2022 Summer School was Footnotes: Annotating the futures of arts education. This title describes both a space and a movement that critically engages with the futures of art education in hybrid spaces and over longer durations of time. As such, communication, exchange and knowledge creation took place before, during and after the Summer School, via a dedicated Learning Platform.

In the context of the Summer School, Footnotes can be defined a place for trans-temporal exchange. It recalls various practices that have historically marginalised, be that as forms of resistance found in feminist practices of critical pedagogy, traditions of black radical thought, artistic gestures of the 19th century, or forms of intervention and conversation experienced between different readers as seen in medieval scriptures. This kind of analysis and annotation was mostly used to critically reflect upon and subvert the Learning Platform and the knowledge body that is enlisted there.

It is the year 2045. This year’s Footnotes gathering will be hosted by the School of Commons. This meeting was named after a function within the Learning Platform, a tool devised in 2021 to facilitate knowledge and resource exchange, host digital learning formats (seminars, lectures, etc.), coordinate the use of physical resources (workshops, seminar rooms, technical equipment, etc.) and publish and present theoretical and artistic practices.

Slowly over the last 24 years, the platform was deployed globally across numerous Art and Design Schools. In some places, academies and educational institutions decided to repurpose and cut back on their financing of physical classrooms, studios, and workshops and invest heavily in digital infrastructures such as data centers and connectivity services. The reasoning was that needs-based rentals of workspaces and equipment would be far more economical than the maintenance of often centuries-old buildings. Of course, this was not the case everywhere. Other schools decided to use the Learning Platform ‘lightly’, emphasising the need to meet and study in physical environments. Without a doubt, these different models emerged due to the changing and asymmetric educational policies adopted by regional, national and international governance bodies.

Yet over this same time period, another trend emerged, threading its way through faculties and institutions.

Footnotes, a standardised functionality hard-coded into the Learning Platform, grew into a buzzing place of transgenerational exchange. Initially thought to simply comment and annotate an institutionally canonised corpora of knowledge, over time different working groups formed. In activating the space of the margin, these groups revisited feminist theories of critical pedagogy, black radical tradition, decolonial methodologies, artistic gestures of subversion, and practices found in medieval scriptures, to understand this environment as one with a rich history of emancipatory struggle and resistance.

For more than twenty-two years, the Footnotes function of the Learning Platform has become its own platform for individuals and working groups to discuss and organise around issues surrounding arts education. Over time, many different conversations and threads emerged between the lines. These threads coalesced into working groups, in-person meetings, and larger gatherings of translocal exchange. In April 2045, one of these groups called the School of Commons put out a call for a gathering. It didn’t take long until seven engaged groups signed up. They call themselves: DIS/CONTINUITIES, ORGANOLOGY, CHAOS/MOSIS, COMMONALITIES, RE/PROGRAMMING, SYMBIOSIS, and PLASTICITY. Each group would explore its own unique theme within the Summer School programme.

In a long message thread, the groups decided that there would be 2 ½ days dedicated to workshops, while the last 1 ½ days would host a conference. The latter would be committed to synthesising the many discussions and thought-forms that emerged over the last decades and were processed during the preliminary workshop sessions.

During the workshops, the groups endeavoured to deepen their understanding of their own research and practices, situating them both within their local environments and wider global developments.

Carving out new pathways for arts education and zones to nurture common bodies of knowledge builds on the efforts of many generations. Therefore some of the working groups will be annotating video lectures from future archives of the past. Others have invited remote speakers to share experiences, provocations, and reflections from their own contexts and conditions.

Because not everyone will be able to attend, newfound insights will be shared through the Footnotes Channel, the shared knowledge base of Footnotes. In addition, those who are not able to attend will be remotely embodied by a real-life avatar, who will visit the different groups over the course of the workshops and transmit questions and comments.

DIS/CONTINUITIES:

Clara Balaguer (remote)
Baruch Gottlieb (on-site)

ORGANOLOGY:

Edwin Ramirez, Criptonite (remote)
Noor Abed & Lara Khaldi, School of Intrusions (on-site)

CHAOS/MOSIS:

manuel arturo abreu (remote)
Philip Bergmann and Thea Reifler, Shedhalle (on-site)

COMMONALITIES:

Silvia Federici and Jack Hogan (remote)
Brandy Butler (on-site)

RE/PROGRAMMING:

Marta Malo de Molina (remote)
Lina Dokuzović (on-site)

SYMBIOSIS:

Ama Josephine B. Johnstone (remote)
Klasse Klima, Johann Otten and Lena Schubert (on-site)

PLASTICITY:

Omsk Social Club (remote)
C&, Will Fredo Furtado (on-site)

Year: 2 0 4 5

Conference

August 31 – September 1