2012 Cali Colombia

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 knowledge that I convey ......
What is been 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 aims to create a physical /mental aural space that questions in itself the traditional architecture for placing the distribution of knowledge while also dismantling all orthodox notions about education’s verticality. It is free to attend and anyone is welcomed, there is no application to fill to be selected it is open to all sorts of subjectivities. If placed on the space (a classroom) that is made and conceived by architects as a space for learning and teaching as in schools and universities it would make a huge difference to get the teacher out of a Stage or Podium, it is also symbolic of the need of horizontality to take place as the structure of the relations between professor and students. This choreography of power relations and placements of the bodies around a space gets interrupted and questioned. To decide to meet up in spaces that challenge the main idea of the classroom, as in a bar or better an improvised bar terrace and to call for meeting outdoors and even in a swimming pool, etc, is just a small gesture, but never the less modifies the focus on the main issue of how to de-school our ways of learning (free school, horizontal learning, etc)

Escuela de Calor reclaims various itching points:

The Space for Learning and its Symbolism so that is Calor, South (Heat) versus the coldness of North.
The Coldness of Capitalism, of practicality, and the distribution of the Insensible (quoting Ranciere but reversed)

Escuela de Calor looks up to trigger a way of being and seeing, a mental state too so that after one has passed by the experience, it's own “thinking”, its ways of seeing and perceiving would have been altered. Of course, the aim is to derail values that are capitalist towards education, towards the value we give to it (the perversion of a system that places a very high price to get it)and the orthodoxies that sustain such systems. Moving towards Calidity: Escuela de Calor as the antidote for the cold of the capitalist protestant notion of education, discipline, and its cultural implementation.