Something is happening in the gap between what we know and what we feel.
We know the planet is burning. We know the museums and theatres that shape our imagination are funded by the very industries setting it on fire. And yet, knowing has never been enough. What moves us is not data. It is experience, image, gesture, presence. A different kind of room.
That is what Disobedient Art School is.
A living commons rooted in nearly a decade of disobedient art by Fossil Free Culture NL against fossil sponsorship of Dutch cultural institutions. A school in the classical sense of the word skholē, the Greek word for time freed from labour, time given back to thought, conversation, and care. We understand art as infrastructure for social change. We are shaping what becomes thinkable through it. One step closer to utopia.
In workshops, performances, and gatherings, d.a.s. prefigures the kinds of relations the future will need: anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer-feminist, intergenerational and ecocentric. We do not wait for the world to change. We rehearse, now, the way we want to live. Leadership circulates. Old hierarchies bend, soften, and recompose into something more honest.
We work for and with those most acutely affected by the overlapping crises of our time: climate justice activists and organisers, migrant and queer communities, all those whom dominant cultural discourse has long overlooked. Not as audiences for our work, but as the carriers of the knowledge needed to imagine otherwise.
Disobedient Art School is coordinated by Frida (Daniela Paes Leão), co-founder of Fossil Free Culture NL, and David Limaverde of Home of Participation. Its first publication, Compost for Wild Weeds, is a prologue rather than a finished document: fertile, decomposing, written to be amended, contested, remixed, and grown. It’s messy compost for the wild weeds of imagination and resistance still breaking through the cracks of the present.
The future we want is not yet here. But it can be felt and rehearsed.
Besides the workshops and presentations we are invited to develop and give at other organisations, we gather every last Friday of the month from 16:30 to 19:00 at the FFC NL studio. If you’d like to join, drop us an email at das@fossilfreeculture.nl the door is open.
