Meet Garage School: the new curators for CLiP #7
How do we imagine collective survival in times of crisis?
CLiP #7: The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise, organized by Kunstinstituut Melly and facilitated by Garage School, invites young people to explore this question through a six-month program combining creative methods like speculative writing, movement, and LARPing with practical skills such as foraging, first aid, and mutual aid.
Garage School is a nomadic art and education collective that creates temporary schools in response to specific contexts, blending theory with practice to foster collective learning and community care. In this interview, Santiago Pinyol and Kari Robertson share their paths, their vision for “prepping otherwise,” and how CLiP #7 reimagines survival as a shared, creative process.
Interview with Santiago Pinyol and Kari Robertson
Kari and Santi, could you tell us a bit about yourselves as professionals? What paths led you to your practice in art, education, and collective learning?
Santi
I’ve always been interested in education. I guess frustration is commonplace when you are a student, feeling that what you are learning, and how you are learning it could be different.
In short, my practice in art education has been a long and fun process of collective unlearning (in Colombia) of the artistic practice I was trained for formally (in Spain). In long, is the history of the garage school:
After living abroad for 10 years studying Fine Arts in Madrid I moved back to Colombia. There I found a place in a building with studios for different cultural workers, where some friends and I started an informal study group. We would meet every Friday to read together different texts: post-studio practice, institutional critique, Jaques Ranciere (The ignorant school master), etc. As a result of those readings and gatherings it made sense to us to start an artist-run space: laagencia (roughly translated as ‘the agency’).
The space lasted three very intense years, and from its closing down the school started. At that moment when we were discussing what to do next we started to study together again (by reading together). But at that moment, the discussions of the readings were influenced by the experience of having run a space, talking to the ministry of culture, creating a network of artist-run spaces, having an international residency, etc. Our discussions were no longer abstract, but very situated in what that practice of an artist really looks like in a context like Bogota. From there it became clear that this discussion should be open to others, in other spaces, with other formats. That gave us the impulse to start the school as an open, experimental study group. Eventually that gave us the opportunity to travel around Colombia researching the territory of art education from formal and informal approaches, which was a life/practice changing experience.
Kari
I came a lot later to formally working with art-education and took a bit of a different path to get here. Most of my working life I have been what you call here in the Netherlands an ‘autonomous’ artist but I have always been interested in models and modalities that challenge this positioning of the artist and offer more radical and collective ways of working.
I studied in Scotland (at Glasgow School of Art) and when I graduated I was part of an artist-run members' space there for two years called Transmission Gallery. This is a really interesting cultural space in the centre of Glasgow that has been open since 1983. The gallery at that time operated with quite a large budget but was entirely run by a committee of six young artists, who rotated every 2 years. It was an amazing experience to be given the resources and time to experiment, programme and try things that were genuinely different from what other spaces were doing at the time. We had the freedom to take position, make mistakes, programme provocative and challenging work, produce and distribute zines or posters or to host gatherings and study groups for the community of activists and cultural workers. I owe a huge amount of learning to that experience and my fellow committee members, basically a lot of the experiences I had there (of non-hierarchical collective learning) align with the way the garage schools also function.
Fast forward many years later and I began working at the Willem de Kooning Academy as a teacher and researcher. I love teaching but within a large academy there are a number of institutional constraints on what is possible. For me a lot of this can be expressed through a logic of separability, between institution and context, teacher and student, theory and practice etc. It is not easy to take students out of the classroom into the world, for example, or to do more unconventional activities such as cooking together.
Increasingly, I felt the need to bring my autonomous artist work, research and my teaching together into one practice. It was at this moment in 2022 that Santiago and I began working together as The Garage School of Medicine, a project that brought together my research around community care, environmental justice and radical herbalism and his long standing Garage School Practice.
What is the Garage School, and how does it embody your approach to learning, collaboration, and community building?
Santi
The Garage School is a diasporic art and education project born in Bogotá in 2013 as an open study group. We are convinced that thinking and discussing local issues through theory as a meeting space must be commonplace to be effective; it must include other cultural workers, disciplines, spaces, and agents.
Basically what we do is, without any permanent infrastructure, generate temporary schools in response to specific places, institutions, themes, and theories, exploring knowledge and tools often overlooked or lacking official validity. It is not an art school!
Then each Garage School adopts a particular method or metaphor: a school that took place entirely in public space to investigate the production of the commons with grassroots organizations; a school as a tool that forms territory; a school of fermentation that lasted a lunar cycle; and more recently, a school on deep medicine that took the form of a mobile apothecary (pharmacy) designed to support the social body during critical moments, such as student encampments and community kitchens.
And from each school we produce a publication that is coherent with its subject and approach: a recipe book, a book, a wiki, a bottle of wine, etc.
Our way of doing things (schools) reflects a process of constant unlearning that involves practicing the recognition of situated knowledge and ways of doing. As artists, we aim to be consistent in cultivating spaces that welcome autonomous and relational ways of imagining, rehearsing, sustaining, studying, and inhabiting life together.
As an expanded study group, we are interested in moving from representation to prefiguration, blending practice and theory, forms and methodologies to generate knowledge, for example reading aloud and conversing while we ferment, forage, distill, and listen.
Ours is a project of relational anarchy in the sense that we do not have a fixed group of members; currently, the active members are Mariana Murcia, Santiago Pinyol, Kari Robertson, and María Angélica Madero.
CLiP #7 centers on the idea of “prepping otherwise.” What drew you to this theme, and how do you hope to challenge or expand the mainstream image of survival and preparedness?
Santi
We were drawn into this theme by the recent and very real governmental prompts for households to prepare survival kits. That signaled how ‘prepping’ discourse entered the mainstream and our everyday life. The message is clear: Europe is heading into disaster-ridden times where the goal is no longer to thrive, but merely to survive. By asking each household to ‘prep’, responsibility for survival is placed on the individual, while many nation states are using the same logic to justify rearmament and reinforcement of our borders. The state mirrors the aesthetics and ethics of militarized, right-wing prepper culture: individualistic, exclusionary, and premised on scarcity and enclosure; of bodies, as well as imagination.
Kari
Yes, exactly. In the past I had always thought about survivalist prepping as inherently individualistic or even selfish, that it was about striving to survive instead of, or at the expense of someone else. So, I guess that prepping derives from a logic of scarcity and sacrifice. I think in the stereotypical image of the ‘prepper’ there can be a competitive sense of satisfaction derived from having more than other people; more knowledge, skills, resources, tools, land etc. I was challenged on this perception in a few different ways; through the work of Bayo Akomolafe and David Wojnarowicz for example who in very different ways articulate how we might survive for, rather than instead of, one another. In recent years we have also participated in activist spaces (such as 2.Dh5 festival) where we observed an increasing interest in community prepping and survival. Community prepping comes from a really different set of desires: to protect and sustain the most vulnerable people in our communities On the one hand, this is both because our survival is bound together, and also in acknowledgement that we can learn a lot about how to prep from the most vulnerable people in our societies who are already finding ways to survive under hostile conditions. So between the forms of prepping some methods might be shared, but the intention and relationality is starkly different.
The program is rooted in exploring creative, social, and collective forms of survival. What kinds of skills, tools, or practices are you most excited to experiment with during this edition of CLiP?
Kari
Wow, yeah, all of them honestly! We’ve devised the programme as an expanded version of what we always try to do as the Garage School, which is basically to combine a lot of different practices and methodologies and see what happens. Often learning spaces are divided between being academic, practical, or creative with little opportunity for overlaps. In the school we are bringing all of these approaches together as equally valuable ways to collectively think and learn. We will be doing expanded reading sessions, close reading theory and visionary fiction, in other sessions we will focus on practical skills such as first aid training, learning to forage and repair clothes and bikes. Finally, we will work with LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) as a way to collectively improvise and experiment in real time with the ideas and skills we are learning and developing. I am probably most excited about this aspect of the school, as LARPing is something I have never tried before!
Santi
Another thing that is important to us and that we’re very excited with is that the curriculum is semi-emergent: we’ve only designed the first three months and the second half of the program will be designed together with the participants. In that sense we will manage to make the school permeable to the skills the CLiPers want to deepen in, or others we have not considered. To connect to other communities, to think in public by organizing public events, and many other unforeseen possibilities.
By the end of these six months, what do you hope participants and the wider community will take away from CLiP #7? And how do you imagine the “letters to the future” becoming part of that legacy?
Kari
We have tried to work with participants for CLiP that represent diverse backgrounds and communities. This was with the deliberate intention that the knowledge collectively generated during the school would disseminate as widely as possible. We hope that the school will challenge the way participants and the wider community consider the future and the agency they have in preparing for and partially realizing it. The ‘letters to the future(s) we are preparing (for)’ encompass this. Each participant will work on a ‘letter’ per month in whatever form they like (song, text, performance, collage etc) and will share it with the rest of the group. The idea of this is that the letters present an opportunity for a reflexive dialogue with the other participants, and the future itself and serve as a way to guide the curriculum going forward. By speaking to the future, we can consider what we need in order to prepare for it.
Our hope is that these letters, or some of them, can be shared more widely and offer fresh perspectives on how we can consider, shape and address the future.