This publication introduces Disobedient Art School as a living, experimental “school” grown from Fossil Free Culture NL’s disobedient art practice against fossil sponsorship in Dutch cultural institutions, proposing art not as neutral representation but as political infrastructure for social change.
Written from within overlapping crises of climate collapse, coloniality, neoliberalism and social fragmentation, it frames the school as a space to learn, relate and organise otherwise, grounded in values such as anti-colonialism, anti-racism, queer feminism, anti-neoliberalism, anti-extraction, intergenerational justice, and access-driven diversity.
The publication traces how FFCNL’s unsolicited performances and workshops have used aesthetics, storytelling and collective action to shift public imagination and institutional power, and argues for “making art politically” – centring process, participation, disobedience, and radical imagination over product. It outlines a set of core principles organised into Epistemic Foundations (praxis, art as aesthetics/ethics, situated imagination), Relational Grounds (community care, ecocentrism, intangible commons, solidarity, staying with the trouble), and Organisational Methods (critical facilitation, temporal dissonance, situated commoning) as coordinates rather than fixed rules for how to learn, decide and act together. Throughout, the text emphasises pedagogy as embodied, relational, and rooted in multiple, often marginalised forms of knowing, seeking to cultivate creative resistance and intersectional solidarity across struggles.
Presented as an unfinished, collectively evolving fold-out document and launch event, it positions Disobedient Art School as one node in a wider ecology of art and resistance, offering its concepts and methods as “compost”: messy, fertile matter to be adapted, contested and remixed so that “wild weeds” of imagination and disobedience can keep breaking through the cracks of the present.
Take it, read it, turn it over.
This publication is meant to be handled, contested and composted. Download it and tell us what it stirred up, where it falls short, and what wild weeds it might seed in your own practice.
