Dear Colleges

It’s a day of celebration! Today, we come together for the first meeting of this exciting journey! - And I can't tell you how sad I am not to be able to be present in person. After all these preparations, it would have been an honour to listen to your voices. Under the given circumstances, I am urged to contribute my voice by writing this letter to you.

We all remember those days of the early 2020s when the wave of conferences about the undercommons was about to fade away, and the SoC invited us all to make proposals for a radical Re-Programming of art education. What a journey since.

I’m so excited, we have found a way to convert our academy into a legalised Special Educational Zone, hacking and mimicking its Economic alter ego to the better. This bastard of a juridical outburst within the Humaoplantanimal Rights. It feels so good that we were able to turn it upside down, and create the most free-spirited and engaged zone of learning and unlearning - it’s just what the world would have needed already since we met the first time.

Our proposal needed time to embark, but here is, what I’m so proud of: The Study Program REPROGRAM, and even more proud I am to be able to say it found its safe space in the first Special Educational Zone. Undisturbed by those economic phantasmagorias of the outside, undisturbed by those pychotisms of excluding identity politics; able to focus on what is needed at the ground of our societies and eager to stay with the troubles any true encounter, any not-knowing, and any care needs.

At this point, I would like to thank Lina Dokuzović for the brilliant lecture we just heard, throughout which she was able to draw the painful line - like a cutting scalpel over tender skin - between the system of public education and the visa policy of many countries. The impact such policies have on the bones, heads, and hearts of our education is immense and almost irreparable. Education as a practice of exclusion has to be eradicated and inverted into a practice of migration - migration of thought, and practices, as much as the free migration of people, and other species. Dynamic diversity is what keeps us alive!

Within our Zone, things go differently. What the difference is shall be discussed in this meeting, and I would like to contribute here my key statements:

The marginalised is inverted to the central;

The center shall be particularised and diversified;

The deprived will hold agency;

The curriculum does not teach;

By that I mean, REPRPGRAMING invites for a constant dance of reinvention; the dichotomies between learning and teaching, belonging and not belonging, nature and culture are obsolete. Everything is a transparent part of one learning-body, which we called in the old days „research.“

Of course, in our post-holocratic time, collective self-organisation will here be the anchor, and all copy and author rights will finally - after a long fight - be abolished and replaced with the honourable rights of the commons.

I wish you all an embodied meeting

Aliveness

Your Howoyolitobena, NN