2019–2022
New Alphabet School
#newalphabetschool
Blog: newalphabetschool.hkw.de
The New Alphabet School is a collaborative self-organized school for practice-based research. Over the course of three-and-a half years, it will function 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 aims to explore critical and affirmative forms of knowledge production in order to create solidarity between different approaches in theory and practice.
HKW offers 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.
The New Alphabet School will combine a HKW-based colloquium and site-specific events with partner institutions worldwide. In these cooperations, the school will analyze local infrastructures and institutional frameworks in order to study the conditions and logics of current forms of knowledge production.
Each edition of the school is dedicated to a knowledge practice. Departing from these activities, is it possible to imagine an overabundance of multifarious fields of ways of speaking, knowledge production and learning practices beyond one universal matrix? Can common reference points and collective action be enabled without a potentially hegemonic center? How can knowledge be both locally situated and at the same time produce a new kind of universality?
The New Alphabet School is part of The New Alphabet. It was inaugurated with an (Un-)Learning Place in January 2019 and will continue with ten events worldwide until 2022.
Curated in collaboration with the community of the New Alphabet School. Members of the curatorial board are Gigi Argyropoulou, Alessandra Pomarico, Mahmoud Al-Shaer and Rahul Gudipudi.
