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| The After School constitutes a deschooled educational space. It is an arts and research community that assembles diverse lived experiences and methods for ways of knowing and doing, founded on the creative power of difference—without hierarchy—as essential to effectively challenging the many forms of exploitation, extraction, and violence. The After School is an experiment in translocality that creates enduring links between places and communities through work that proposes new forms of solidarity and care.
Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society makes a powerful argument for forms of learning outside of schooling. His critique of schooling is that it creates dependency on exploitative social forms by de-skilling people. Schooling enforces the idea that knowledge lies outside of us, rather than being already present in people’s lives and minds. Illich writes: “School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” Schooling is a deliberate project of creating knowledge hierarchies that mirror forms of domination.
What lies beyond “School”? The After School is self-organized, convivial, and collaborative, inflected by the experience and concerns of each participant and dedicated to a common practice of equitable global diversity. It will connect people worldwide through research residencies, site visits, artist and researcher presentations, and collaborative working groups. This fosters engagement across geographies, practices, pedagogies, methods, and definitions of art, design, culture, and knowledge. The results will include research projects, artworks, publications, and exhibitions that reflect an overall dialogical process across localities while addressing the complexities of power, identities, places, and resources.
The After School will be facilitated by CAD+SR’s Senior Research Fellows: Dalida María Benfield, Christopher Bratton, Luigi Coppola, Ou Ning, Bruno Moreschi, Neo Musangi, and Pelin Tan. Each brings a constellation of collaborators, projects, knowledge, and practices. They will provide both formal and informal engagement and mentoring, including individual and group meetings. The community will also be led by distinguished Faculty Fellows, including writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and Renan Laru-an, Artistic Director, SAVVY Contemporary.
The After School begins December 15, 2023 with an online meeting, and includes two ten day research residencies; in April 2024 in Tire, Turkey, and October 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya. These convenings will be connected throughout the year with in-person site visits to be scheduled with participants, including, for example, in Boston, US; São Paulo, Brazil; Helsinki, Finland; and Salento, Italy; and regular on-line meetings of working groups that follow shared research themes and collective projects. Visiting artists, researchers, and collaborating collectives and organizations will also join throughout, providing unique opportunities to engage, collaborate, constructively challenge, and learn alongside a truly global community with a wide array of perspectives and experiences.
The After School will be simultaneously structured and informal with ample space for spontaneity and discovery. It builds on CAD+SR’s international research projects and communities, including Technologies of Critical Conscientization, or Con/Crit/Tec (Brazil, 2023); Affecting Technologies, Machining Intelligences (Brazil, 2020); Un-Writing Nature I & II (Kenya, 2020 & Italy, 2023); Cosmological Gardens (online & Italy, 2019–2022); De/Archive East Africa (Kenya, 2020); Indigenous Planetary Ways of Knowing (Mexico, 2019); and Black Planetary Futures (online, South Africa & Senegal, 2019–2022).
Global in mission, outlook, and scope, untethered to a fixed location, CAD+SR represents a new form of research institute. CAD+SR is a non-profit organization that convenes, supports, and collaborates with creative thinkers in imagining—and enacting—responses to urgent challenges.
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