New Publication: The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise — Collective Learning in Practice

The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise: Collective Learning in Practice brings together tools, methodologies, speculations, and play developed in response to the question: ‘What Can It Mean to Survive Together?’

Hosted at Kunstinstituut Melly as the 2025–26 Collective Learning in Practice programme and curated by The Garage School, the programme brought together fourteen co-learners and a range of invited guests. Against a backdrop of polycrises, militarisation, and European governments advising their citizens to ‘prep’, the school explored how we might reject individualism and relate ‘otherwise’ to the question of preparedness and survival.

Drawing from multiple disciplines, the school explored both foundational and unexpected aspects of collective survival including health, infrastructure, archiving, collapse, food, imagination, and relations.

The resulting material not only documents what happened but also offers (pedagogical) tools, methodologies, insights, and games through which we might collectively approach the question of survival with curiosity, solidarity, and imagination.

Contributors to the school include: Aden Mete, Anarcha, August Sturlyte, Camilla Yakupova, Hooi-Ying Ash Zhang, Janey Roanna, Kari Robertson, Leo Rij, Ni(e)k van der Meulen, Pavlos Theodorou, Santiago Pinyol, Sol Muñoz-Baroja Acaso, Sophia Wirth, Urvee Kulkarni, Doe Het Zelf Werkplaats (MB McGregor, Tomi Hilsee, Florian Henschel, Deniz Gülyurt, and Christian Lesmes Mendoza), Garden of Queerdom (Latoyah Burlace and Mandy van Pelt), Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Lilah V, Raffia Li, Dr. Rita Issa, Selçuk Balamir, Snackbar Frieda, Sophie Allerding, Varia (Luke Murphy and Sofia Boschat-Thorez), Yunfan Tian, and Yanfei Li.