What's there to (un)learn? || June 17-19

Free Home is happy to get engaged with the public program of La Foresta Academy - an international learning community that is co-creating experiences dedicated to ecosystems through learning towards multi-layered sustainability mindset. Co-curated by the Foresta collective together with Alessandra Pomarico our program called What's There to (un)Learn will unfold during this week in three acts.

stills from The New Dead'End #17: Summer School of Orientation in Zapatism (2017) by Chto Delat

So, really, what is there actually to (un)learn for us?

Having been cruising together through wide ecologies of things, food, interspecies, as well as personal inner landscapes, we now want to propose you to join us in reclaiming and exploring ecologies of knowledges.

Module 5, our pre-last module in this first season of 'Ecologies' invites to creatively decouple from the conditionings reproduced by the dominant western neoliberal educational system, and explore radically different ways of learning, where knowledge (re)production is not separated from bodies, actions and considerations of how life can be lived, by humans and other than humans, in respect of our interconnected and interdependent relations.

As the current crisis is rapidly showing, our current paradigms are insufficient to preserve life, and constitute rather a threat. A radical shift needs to be produced, and revising the education project is central in this call for a societal transformation.

Becoming Birds || documentation of a workshop hosted by Nikolay Oleynikov, Castiglione d'Otranto, 2018

The program:

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Wednesday 17 June, 7-9pm CET

Session 1. Impulse + Film night: Slow Orientation in Zapatism

with Alessandra Pomarico and the collective Chto Delat

More info and RSVP
Free entry

An initial impulse will come from a radical education frame work, where we can identify how we learn, and what we need to unlearn in order to be part of a living ecosystem and recognise the larger metabolism we belong to. Followed by a learning film and a circle of conversations with artists and co-creators, comments and sharing.

The film New Dead-End Street #17: Summer School of Orientation in Zapatism (2017) is a work by the collective Chto Delat, and part of their long-term program for getting deep in the ideas of the Zapatistas. The film reflects on the process of being together, on how the Zapatistas' way of life could be practiced and questioned outside of their indigenous context – eventually, it is to ask how we as Europeans/Russians, with all the weight of our political and cultural histories, could imagine a change in our lives and society. Realized in the Zapatista tradition of anti-culmination, and with a great deal of irony of the Zapatistas, well-known from the texts of Subcomandante Marcos, those who are depicted in the film participated in an investigation into the meaning of progress, how to live in harmony with the earth, and the ramifications of the famous Zapatista slogan "For everyone, everything. For us, nothing" (Para todos todo, para nosotros nada).

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Thursday 18 June, 4-6pm CET

Session 2. What is there to (un)learn?

Somatic practice and Personal inquiry with Alessandra Pomarico and Barbara Toma

More info and RSVP

This session will offer a somatic practice, in which we will attempt to transform the mediated experience of the screen, to establish a deep contact with our body, to also re-assemble and re-member our collective body, and to play and expand on our forced domesticity. Hopefully with more energy circulating and some connection starting to surface, we will dive in a more personal inquiry, using metaphors, images, stories, playing a game or a guided dreaming session. This session is an invitation to investigate (or just name) our attachments, desires and horizons of hope, to check-in with what refrains us to disinvest from exploitative forms of knowing, being and relating and hopefully to unlock our imaginaries.

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Friday 19 June, 4-6pm CET

Session 3. A temporary transformation into birds

Art thinking and making session with Alessandra Pomarico and Nikolay Oleynikov

More info and RSVP

Artist Nikolay Oleynikov (member of Chto Delat, tutor of the School of Engaged Art, co-curator of Free Home) will lead a hands-on workshop to build masks with simple recycled materials. Inspired by the poem of Paul Laurence Dunbar, we wear the mask,and the different use and function of the mask in different cultural traditions (from rituals to theatre, from political struggles to professional use, including the disposable sanitizing appearing now on every face) the mask has always represented an alterity, a filter, a protection, a disguise, a way to be more visible or invisible, as a way to transform or transcend.