Dream Academy

Welcome to the Dream Academy, a self-organized, experimental art academy for everyone. The Dream Academy is a series of gatherings based around the book Dream Academy that runs from April to August. After that, the Dream Academy will hopefully live on in new forms that we will now figure out together.

The content of this day's program includes a presentation of the book Dream Academy and conversation about radical pedagogy in theory and practice. Contributors are Åsa Sonjasdotter, program leader and professor at the art academy in Tromsø throughout the academy's first years (2007-2014), Henrik Sørlid and Camilla Fagerli, editors of the Dream Academy book, The School of Improper Education in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld. There will be room for conversation and feedback after each presentation.

PROGRAM

14:15 Book presentation by Camilla Fagerli, Henrik Sørlid and Åsa Sonjasdotter

15:15 School of Improper Education in Yogyakarta, presentation by Gatari Surya Kusuma, Nuraini Juliastudi and Rifki Akbar

16:15 Lunch

17:00 'Teaching to Transgress (but not too much?)' presentation by Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld

17:45 Dialogue on how to proceed

Since its founding in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI has been continuously transforming its structure and its ways of working. Initially formed as a cultural-studies study group, KUNCI now seeks to collectivize study through space-making, discussion, libraries, research, publishing, and school organization. The School of Improper Education is a long-term collective learning process initiated in 2016 by KUNCI Study Forum & Collective.

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld is a visual artist and researcher. She is a founding member of the artistic research network Reparative Encounters, and teaches Visual Dynamics and Design Culture at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
H​er presentation works through the aftermaths of the artistic happening by Anonymous Artists at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2020, in which a plaster cast, copy bust of Frederik V was submerged in Copenhagen harbour.

The Dream Academy publication (published by Archive books, produced by Kurant) explores art education policy in Northern Norway, with the establishment of the Art Academy in Tromsø in 2007 as a pivot point. The book documents how the self-organized art field in Northern Norway and Sápmi worked to establish art education in the region from the 1970s onwards, and which dreams formed the basis for the establishment of the Art Academy in Tromsø in 2007. The Dream Academy now looks forward, and explores the possibilities for self-organised art education in Tromsø, through asking fundamental questions about what art education is and can be, and what functions such education can fulfill today.

The Dream Academy builds on the premise that art education is a form of lifelong learning where artistic practice, theoretical reflection and everyday life meet. The Dream Academy is open to everyone to come and go, and everyone is welcome regardless of any academic or professional background, within the arts or otherwise. It is not necessary to follow the entire program to benefit from it.

This introductory meeting is also an opportunity to contribute to the curriculum of the Dream Academy's spring and summer program in 2024, which will be developed in dialogue with those who are interested in participating.

The book is available for order here: https://aee1d7.myshopify.com/