Jakob Jakobsen will talk about self-organised education in the past and in the present, focusing on the London Anti-University (1968) & the Copenhagen Free University (2001-2007). He is also interested in learning about self organised educational initiatives, past and present, which have developed in Romania.
The Antiuniversity of London was a shortlived and intense experiment into self organised education and communal living that took off at 49 Rivington Street in Shoreditch in February 1968. The Antiuniversity was at its core an experimental process that brought together different fields of theory and practice as part of the desire to open up an unstable space between revolutionary politics, experimental art and radical psychiatry.
The Copenhagen Free University (2001-2007) was an artist run institution dedicated to the production of critical consciousness and poetic language. It did not accept the so-called ‘new knowledge economy’ as the framing understanding of knowledge. It worked with forms of knowledge that are fleeting, fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising, subjective, uneconomic, a-capitalist, produced in the kitchen, produced when asleep or arisen on a social excursion – collectively.
Image source: Jakob Jakobsen’s Antihistory | Antiuniversity research project.
Biography
Jakob Jakobsen
Jakob Jakobsen is a visual artist and political organiser. He ran the Copenhagen Free University (2001-07), cofounded the artist-run TV station tv-tv in 2004, and was involved in setting up the artist’s union UKK in Copenhagen in 2002. With a main interest in education, his practice comes out of struggles of autonomy and self-organisation. He is currently setting up the Hospital Prison University Archive in Copenhagen. He has also participated in exhibitions and workshops all over the world, most recently The Revolution Must be a School of Unfettered Thought together with María Berríos (30 Bienal de Sao Paulo 2014, Gotenburg Bienal 2015, Tratados de Paz, San Sebastian, 2016).