A New School, A Summer School – (Re)imagining Learning Environments

Together with Destina Atasayar, Katharina Brenner, Lu Herbst, Charlotte Perka, and Lioba Wachtel, I developed and implemented the six-day “A New School, A Summer School — (Re)imagining Learning Environments”, which brought together students and graduates from twelve art universities across Germany and Austria for an intensive exchange on learning utopias. Through workshops with external guests, daily plenary sessions, video screenings, movement exercises, and self-organized working groups, the summer school became a space to collectively imagine alternative forms of learning.

We approached utopia not as a distant, idealized future, but as the act of experimenting with, shifting, and making visible (small) everyday actions in the here and now. In this spirit, sharing meaningful learning experiences and participating in Ren Loren Britton’s Access Rider Workshop — where we collectively gathered our access needs — were just as integral to our shared (un)learning process as doing the dishes, reading from the reader, kneading (and digesting) yeast dough, napping on the picnic blanket, or dancing while singing karaoke. We experimented, dreamed, asserted, paused, reformulated, supported one another, and paid attention to each other — in short, we learned with and from each other. At the end of the week, we celebrated and shared ideas with the public over a curated harvest dinner.

 Textile, social, and graphic designer and artist Lea Kirstein discussed the Summer School in her article “Access is a never-ending process” (2023, pp. 77–81), published in the 68th edition of Lerchenfeld magazine.