Escuela de Calor was invited by Aformal Academy (Merve Medir and Salvattore Peluso) for their online project and digital conversations: Streamed live on Dec 16, 2015
Guests:
- Esther Planas (Escuela de Calor)
http://estherplanas.com/wp/
- Shiri Shalmy (Antiuniversity of East London)
http://antiuniversity.org/
- The Public School for Architecture Brussels
http://www.psfa-bxl.org/

Escuela de Calor en MACRO, Roma 2013 junto Adelita Husney-Bey, Mark Fisher... curated by Mike Watson

1*) Text for Rome 2013:
Moving towards Calidity: Escuela de Calor as antidote for the Cold of the Capitalist Protestant notion of Education.

Does an artist have any power to make up for change in our school system without leaving his/her place as “author/teacher/producer “and the system that sustains the unfair hierarchy and the state of things that supports the structure in which he/she exist? I don't think so. I like to present my project and the causes that lead me to this practice :

1) Introduction and questioning: the pre-history of Escuela de Calor is my previous workshops as part of my practice not as a teaching-oriented “courses” but understood as joint performative and politico- situationist based experiences. ref: Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala 2011, Encuentros cercanos del Tercer Tipo, Casa Haiku, Barcelona 2010, The BCN Psychotropic Workshops

2) Escuela de Calor starting points at Eme3 Architectural Festival 2011 (Barcelona) and how got selected for The Cali 8 Performance Festival 2012 on a context of radical political proposals.

3) Talking about the essence of my influences as Ivan Illich?s De-Schooling Society and Jaques Ranciere book on Joseph Jacotot and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of The Oppressed.

4) To quote Marys Walling"s Blackburn essay on Institutions at e-flux journal 26:
The artists who make pretend institutions (temporary schools, fake
agencies, and so forth) rarely set out to invent little prisons or workable
nuthouses that serve real people—really crazy, really violent. It is possible
that artists are not equipped. Artists are comfortable making objects that
document institutions, and they make objects (relational or otherwise) that
perform the liberated institution. Another manifestation is the object that
is liberated by abandoning the institution, just as there is the object that
believes it can liberate the institution. As I do, these artists flirt with soft
institutions, playing with the remains of madness—touching it lightly,
quickly, and then moving away. In Paul Thek's notebook he scrawls:
“Institutions were formed for lack of spontaneous love.” To dilate his line
of thought, we could move countercurrent to the institution, not by forming
another organisation, but by saying, as Thek does: Let me nurse you. Let
me defend your body and your spirit. Let me bathe and bury you.

5) To quote De-Schooling Society by Ivan Illich
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The
pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.

Escuela de Calor
scio me nihil scire orscio me nescire
School of Doubt and Des-education

For me to give a workshop is not so much to give a series of lessons, or to position myself as a container of an specific knowledge that I convey. My proposal is basically to create a practice on a context and an experience, based on structures that can go back to basic roots as that of the wandering Socrates, of the Persian storytellers under the starts, or Aristotle with his Peripatetic School walks... Experimenting with ideas and in conversation for daring to doubt. It uses outdoor spaces and the supposed antagonist places to what we would consider now the usual settings for learning.
We can't help to reflect up on:
What is being training?? What is learning??
Esther Planas 2011

"An ignorant master is not just an ignorant person who gets a kick out of playing master. It is a master who teaches - that's to say, who is for another person a cause of knowledge - without transmitting any knowledge. A master, thus, who displays the discontinuity between the master's control and his knowledge, who shows us that what is called "the transmission of knowledge" consists in fact of two intertwined relations which it is useful to disassociate: a relation of will to will and one of intelligence to intelligence."
Jaques Ranciere..

Escuela de Calor vas invited to MACRO Museum, Rome as part of Joan of Art's symposia on free education by Mike Watson in May 2013. 1*)