Schools: Editorial

Within this publishing strand readers will find material relating to different schools, pedagogical projects or broader reflections on learning within (extra)institutional structures.

Within the Museum of the Commons, the current four year project of L’Internationale, a number of the confederations partners are hosting diverse forms of schools as places of learning and conviviality. From the six month ‘Non Western Technologies of the Good Life’ (2023-24) at the Experimental Station for Art and Life, hosted by tranzit.ro to the roaming ‘School of Common Knowledge’ (2024, 2025), as well as summer schools in Ljubljana (‘Our Many Easts’,2024) and Dublin (‘Landscape (post) Conflict, 2025) and further interactions of the longstanding Independent Study Programme (PEI) at MACBA, the emphasis on experimental forms of education speaks to the need to rethink how, by and for whom knowledge is produced and shared within institutional frameworks, whilst also centering processes, rather than outcomes, of research and learning.

This section contains a number of reading lists from these different projects compiled by faculty members including PDFs and links to over one hundred texts; keynote lectures and dispatches from the school participants where reflections and notes are shared. The PDFs of the two iterations of the Glossary of Common Knowledge (vol. 1, 2018 and vol. 2, 2022), the precursor and inspiration for the ‘School of Common Knowledge’ are also available for download here, as is the handbook Taking Part: A Guide to Participatory Tools and Techniques (2024). In this way, the Schools strand of L’Internationale Online is itself conceived as a resource for participants of the different schools and a wider public.

Elsewhere in this section readers will find contributions that consider broader questions of education and mediation. For example a conversation amongst curators María Berríos, Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Nick Aikens asks how might education within the museum be approached beyond generational and departmental frames. Elsewhere activists and researchers Dagmary Olívar Graterol, Paola de la Vega Velastegui look to naming techniques and approaches from racialised collectives as a model that might serve as generative tools of mediation with and through the institution. And Fran Cabeza de Vaca in his introductory essay to the publication Taking Part: A Guide to Participatory Tools and Techniques reflects on the (re)turn to ‘participation’ – as term and practice – within the Museum of the Commons programme.