Manifesto
Introduction:
A school can be many things, but the kind of school that we are making is one that deliberately exist outside all systems of production and instrumental logics and therefore can offer it’s ‘uselessness’ as the virtue that, paradoxically, makes it valuable and useful. This is a school that insist on the value and existence of those things that cannot be measured and insist on making them felt. We insist on opening up the way we see, think and do. We insist that seeing, thinking and doing are not separate activities. We insist on the infinite potential that each situation and everyone in it holds and we insist on drawing out those potentials. We insist on giving time, space, support and amplification to everyone so that their own language, meaning the way they interact with all material and immaterial circumstances, may be developed and rooted in them and in their lives.
Education for us is a lifelong process of human development. And we believe that the process of development consists of more than just development of your academic knowledge.
A few notes:
1.The school has become and is still becoming. And in this process of becoming it is not only transforming itself and being transformed, it is also radically altering it’s own foundation as well as everyone involved. Seyðisfjörður is not the same. The students do not remain the same. We are certainly not the same. And the school has never been anything other than these constant transformations. This wonderful, living activity which escapes definition in order to be alive.
2.A program here is a composition, a set of arranged circumstances, notes on a string. Each note is in its right place, which could be any place, but then again, it could not. It is where it is. These circumstances have a beginning, but each of them unfold in largely unpredictable ways, filling out the empty space between the notes, creating a totality in the performance of a composition. And each performance is different from the other, though it is easy to recognize the composition as being a particular composition and not some other.
We are conscious while we surrender to unfamiliar logics.
3.Contemporary art education must become an integrated, conscious, social practice of creating environments of experimentation while at the same time dissolving the boundaries of the institution. Art is not a spectacle removed from the viewer, but an integrated experience of the lives we live.
The artist serves a purpose in society not merely by what they produce, but by the way they practice and exist. In this way, the artistic practice is blurring the lines between life and art and breaks down the barriers of the art institutions and transform them into truly cultural institutions that works with the conscious creation of culture through artistic practice.
Here, teaching and learning becomes performative practices that calls for aesthetic appreciation, consideration and alteration.
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We wrote a manifesto and made a score. Download it HERE