We are happy to open our new space avenue Van Volxemlaan 295, Brussels on 11 of September at the occasion of the Brussels Art Days.

le titre, c'est 'Rien de politique'... Ce sera sur l'idée que le lieu est un prolongement de l'espace public, de la rue, dans l'architecture industrielle d'un dépôt, bloc de béton très lumineux, avec des pièces qui ont un caractère de propagande qu'elle soit politique ou artistique - entre le pamphlet, le manifeste et le poster - et l'aspect participatif lié à The Public School, notre projet permanent: http://brussels.thepublicschool.org

prochaine classe par Sofie Haesaerts.

Opening 11th of September from 12 am to 12 pm
Exhibition open from 12 am to 8 pm on the 12th of September and later by appointment

Vernissage le 11 septembre de midi à minuit
Exposition ouverte de midi à 20h le 12 septembre et sur rendez-vous

Opening 11 september van 12 tot 12 uur
Tentoonstelling open van 12 tot 12 uur om 12 september en later op afspraak

With / Avec / Met
A77 (for the Antakya Biennial), Jofroi Amaral, Félicia Atkinson, Aline Bouvy / John Gillis, Marco Bruzzone, Francisco Camacho, Ellen Cantor, Paolo Cirio, Danny Devos, Chris Evans, David Evrard, Alan Fertil & Damien Teixidor, Patrice Gaillard & Claude, Harrisson, Michelle Naismith, Sofie Nys, Aude Pariset, Pica Pica, Eléonore Saintagnan, Philippe Van Wolputte

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3pm / 15h / 15 uur: The Public School
Sculptural Workshop For Foodies by Sofie Haesaerts
The participants of this workshop will make sculptures with seasonable vegetables, pulses and other edible things.

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11pm / 23h / 23 uur: party until late djs: Alvarez, Arowax, Baleine 3000, Wagner ... This is the party for the Brussels Art Days!

Design: Collerette coco fill lsd

With the support of / Avec le soutien de / Met de steun van La Communauté française Wallonie - Bruxelles, Levis, Vedett/Moortgat, the Antakya Biennial, 

Galila

Image: Félicia Atkinson

One year residents: David Evrard (image), Patrice Gaillard & Claude, Alan Fertil, Filip Gilissen, Damien Teixidor, Nadine Zeidler

Four months residents: Danai Anesiadou, Istvan Ist Huzjan

[…] is one of the latest classes of The Public School Brussels. It is a project that looks at alternative possibilities for the dissemination and distribution of ideas.

[…] works through a process of commissioning new editioned artworks which are then set in motion within a variety of modes of circulation. The duration of the works is never determined, leaving room for an uncertainty in who, how and when a viewer will experience the work.

[…] explores the legacies of conceptualism and mail art with emphasis on the mutability and variability in which ideas exist and evolve in the world, changing their meaning and significance as a result of their modes of distribution, transference and performance.

[…] works as a continuous ‘port’ for the production of artworks and ideas, […] is not anchored to any particular location, medium or network and aims to create new formulations of distribution for every artwork it presents, to find the artwork’s own topology of exchange and movement.

[…] The sharing of ideas through different modes and networks.

[…] Provoking an awareness of the journeys an idea undertakes.

NOTE>
• […] in Brussels from April 20 to 26th is curated by Sepake Angiama, Oliver Martinez Kandt, Thom O’Nions and Adam Thomas who will be responsible for sorting the editioned artworks by Ben Cain, Ruth Ewan and Shahin Afrassiabi.

The Public School was founded in Los Angeles by Telic Arts Exchanges. The project is now spreading in US and Europe... Komplot started The Public School Brussels

in November as a permanent and nomadic project.

What is now theorized in the book 'Curating And The Educational Turn'  editied by Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson or in this article by Iritt Rogoff can be relevant for the contemporary art new practices.

Komplot will be in conversation with Paul O'Neill for The Bristol School, on 22nd May at 6.30-8pm at Spike Island in Bristol.

www.situations.org.uk

In a recent e-mail, Sean Dockray, the founder of The Public School describes the project as such:

How to describe The Public School in 10 minutes? The premise is a school with no curriculum.  Instead of degrees, tests, disciplines, accreditation, goals, and so on, there is an open space for people to propose classes that they want to take or that they want to teach.  These class proposals range from the extremely practical to the impossible and strange.  A majority of the proposals will not happen – they amount to a catalog of possibilities, a compendium of need, desire, and imagination. The school is both real and virtual. Classes actually happen, while proposals for new classes continue to emerge. Always a tension between what is and what might be.

The point is not to have a pre-defined agenda that is expressed through a curriculum; nor is it to avoid having any agenda. Rather, the point is to produce that agenda in the process of the activity of the school and to allow that agenda to be open to contestation and constant revision. A school as a sort of public sphere, not a walled, proprietary institution.

A few notes on its trajectory, without addressing my motives for starting it. We at Telic have worked with various individuals and groups in different places to circulate the project.  Through the normal systems of exhibitions, residencies, fellowships, but also through friendship, shared sensibilities, and resonance, The Public School has multiplied to locations in Philadelphia, New York, San Juan, Brussels, Paris, and Helsinki.  Each school is autonomous and local, yet working in parallel, in sympathy, like coconspirators.

The Public School is open in several ways – there is a sort of musical chairs between teacher, student, and administrator; it does not exclude based on what discipline you come from; people project their expectations onto it and really try to make it their own. At the same time, the classes are usually, somehow, things that can’t happen anywhere and in a sense are minor, marginal, or critical. The classes don’t really “add up”, any more than a group of people with real difference does.

A large part of the project is its use of the internet. Unlike the university, which uses online learning to explode the classroom out into private spaces, The Public School uses the internet as a tool for writing (class proposals) and organizing, and bringing people together into a classroom.  What happens there depends on the people who are present – there’s no real frame, there’s a very real possibility of things not going well, for long, awkward pauses, for questions about what is supposed to take place. Very often, the class discussion bleeds into a discussion of what The Public School should be.

And The Public School continuously remakes itself.  There is a class called The Public School, which is as much an explanation as it is a workshop for operating on the school.  Conversations from classes, generate new classes, and again.  Each school copies classes from other schools.  And eventually, things slow down, the school comes to a halt. Maybe to be re-animated in a couple years, or maybe just left as a set of possible schools.

Michelle Naismith and David Evrard in workshop at La Cambre for The Public School.