HKW-New Alphabet School
Project Manager:
Ezgi Hamzaçebi
Section:
Humanities and Social Science
Research Areas:
Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities , Activism
Project Start Year:
2019
Project End Year:
2022
Phone:
0 (216) 564 9039
E-Mail:
About the Project:
The New Alphabet School is a collaborative self-organized school for practice-based research. Over the course of three-and-a-half years, it has functioned as a colloquium for practice-based, situated approaches in cultural studies, art and activism. Assuming that knowledge is not universal, but always located, or bound to a specific context, one's own position or place, the school aimed to explore critical and affirmative forms of knowledge production in order to create solidarity between different approaches in theory and practice.
Project Finding:
HKW offered a space for research approaches outside of academic, disciplinary or genre boundaries, seeking different methods of learning and unlearning in order to rethink the idea of criticism as a practice of shared responsibility and care.
Having been launched at the HKW in January 2019, the New Alphabet School developed over the course of eleven international editions (Unlearning, Translating, Situating, Coding, Caring, Healing, Instituting, Survivance, Transmitting, Community, Feralizing), which were curated by its participants at their respective locations.The twelfth and last edition, Commoning, will be held at HKW in Berlin in September 2022. Focusing on the question of how local knowledge can be communized, this edition will be asking how the encounters or questions of New Delhi, Dakar, Gaza or Rio de Janeiro can be rendered relatable to everyone, and how the traumatic history of appropriation and the claim to situated knowledge can be factored into the debate.