Reading Room 53 Jesse van Winden

Practicalities:

When? 29 October 2026, from 18:00 to 21:00.
Where? Agency.

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For this fifteenth session Jubilee coordinator Jesse van Winden proposes to read parts of two books, as an occasion to reflect on Jubilee as a learning environment. 'Notes for an Art School' (2006) was part of the research for Manifesta 6. 'Commons Museums, Pedagogies for Taking Ownership of What is Lost' (2024) is Nuraini Juliastuti’s essay about two initiatives in rural Indonesia to rethink infrastructures for collective practice, learning and survival.

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Notes for an Art School lays the theoretical ground for Manifesta 6, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art that was supposed to take place in Nicosia (Cyprus) in 2006 but was cancelled at the last moment. The curators Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel proposed to challenge the conventional format of the large-scale exhibition and, alternatively, set up an art school – the Manifesta 6 School.

The contributors to the book rethink the goals and structure of an art school, its ideological contexts, the positioning of its students to the art world, its relationship to social and political conditions, and the level of its discursive involvement, drawing on specific examples and on their own experiences to interrogate the appropriateness and validity of existing school models.

In 2022, Jubilee visited documenta fifteen, the exemplary manifestation of collective practice in the world now, co-curated by ruangrupa and many other collectives from around the world. Inspired, Jubilee organised Learning from Lumbung in January 2023, to bring together new ways of thinking about the arts, based on inclusive forms of ownership and a redistribution of value, that can form the fertile ground for the art landscape of tomorrow.

Nuraini Juliastuti, the author of Commons Museums, Pedagogies for Taking Ownership of What is Lost (2024), is a co-founder of KUNCI Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta (founded 1999), which is a lumbung inter-lokal member of documenta fifteen and part of the same Indonesian collective ecosystem as ruangrupa and Gudskul.

In her book, Juliastuti discusses two rural community bases in extraction-affected areas in Indonesia where both crisis and protest are more intense than what we are used to in Northwestern Europe. In an attempt at unlearning hegemonies and their modes that we have interiorized, it seems only logical to turn to farther societies for inspiration. Reading about these contexts where people reappropriate the concept of ‘school’ to redefine their positions in society can give a new dimension to our notions of learning, sharing and resilience. If you would like to read upfront, you will find a PDF of Commons Museums, Pedagogies for Taking Ownership of What is Lost here.

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Guest(s): Jesse van Winden

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Links:

• https://www.jubilee-art.org/news/reading-room-53-notes-for-an-art-school