With the Disobedient Art School (working title), we aim to create a non-hierarchical structure based on reciprocity, where we bend the notions of teacher and student, knower and learner, master and apprentice; where we experiment with educational methods that do not obey the normative imposed by the dominant western educational system. Instead, we propose an approach to decolonise minds and bodies through unrestrained creative practices and to empower each other to practice disobedience.
The school fosters disobedient art, the bend between disruptive and aesthetic practices, between radical politics and imagination, to open up other places of power that challenge the status-quo. We understand disobedience as the intersection between decolonial praxis and strivings that undo the conditions that built the current crises.
The school aims to increase our capacity for and deepen our understanding of radical and intersectional solidarity. The same fossil-fueled power structures that are causing the climate crisis are also responsible for systemic racism. The same colonial logic that exploits and marginalises lives is also responsible for gender, class, and sexual inequality. All these structures are entwined in a harmful system that is at the root of the multiple crises we face today. The school aims to open up new places of power and response-ability that can subvert the current forces of dominance and supremacy.
The school centers the lived experiences of those referred to by Frantz Fanon as “les damnés de la terre” (the wretched of the earth), the marginalised, undervalued, and oppressed by the colonial capitalist political and economic system we live in.
The school is a community composed of radical educators, facilitators, disobedient artists, and people who want to engage in learning otherwise. It is initiated by Fossil Free Culture NL’s team – Teresa Borasino, Daniela Paes Leao, and Talissa Soto – and co-conspired with:
Ying Que (cultural activist, curator and facilitator)
Hodan Warsame (anti-oppression trainer & moderator)
David Limaverde, (radical educator and participatory performance artist)
Nuraini juliastuti (researcher and co-founder of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center and School of Improper Education in Yogyakarta, Indonesia)
Paula Chaves Bonilla (director, choreographer and queer activist)