Universities have become debt traps, turning Education into a tool for financial control. How do we change the education system, and how can we create space for learning that empowers rather than exploits?
Artistic Talk and Visual Assembly by Nika Dubrovsky on 13th of November at 14-30 in the framework of Sommerakademie Paul Klee 2025, which is the final cycle of an international residency program at the Bern Academy of the Arts (HKB), curated by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou (art historian and curator based in Brussels) together with our Kenyan’s partners:
Jamey Ponte and Patrick Othieo are co-founders of House of Friends Kenya and the Kibera Arts District, an underground movement focused on social justice, environment, and wildlife in one of the world’s largest slums.
Nika Dubrovsky, Niloufar Emamifar, Georgia Sagri, and Karen Amanda Moser – will design a workshop program that will then take place November 10-14, 2025 at HKB for students of the Master’s program Contemporary Art Practices (CAP) and Bachelor students of Art Education and Fine Arts.
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou curatorial concept is “Shaping what we owe (one another)”
Visual Assembly Universities of the Future
We begin with the idea of debt. It is through debts that we become social beings, creating the society in which we will live. Debts can be ever-growing obligations that enslave us and ultimately become violence, tearing apart our social fabric.
But Debt can also be obligations that we voluntarily accept toward each other, as free men and women. Debt could be a mutual care, voluntary and joyful commitments to reproducing culture and our humanity itself.
The theme for our visual assembly: what would the university look like that is built on freedom and care for each other, rather than on debt and violence, not on production (of workforce) and consumption (of information)?
A university where knowledge is not sold, where students do not become debtors, where teachers and students need each other, because this is how equal exchange happens and new meanings are born. A university where knowledge spreads horizontally, where there is no need to take loans and pay interest, where we learn from the desire to share with each other, to care for each other, because we are the product of mutual creation.
Key questions for the assembly:
- How will the architecture of such an institution be organized: will it work in small groups or large lecture spaces? How will research laboratories be organized? Will there be production workshops?
- How will the university deal with “non-students”? And the outside world in general?
- How will practices of acquiring specific skills be organized?
- What kind of governance will be there?
- How is the economy of such a university structured?
- Can a university work without exams, without filtering out students, accepting everyone who wants to study, as in Argentine universities?
Let’s talk about our favorite universities: the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where since 1985, instead of entrance exams, there has been a one-year basic course (CBC) open to everyone. In 2024, protesting against funding cuts, professors and students held classes right on the streets for hundreds of participants. Education is completely free—students only pay for materials they use themselves (pencils if they are artists, or chemical reagents if they need to do experiments). Teaching is considered a matter of honor, and many professors continue to work despite low salaries because they themselves studied there. When the state attempted to introduce tuition fees and cut funding, students and professors together occupied university buildings and did not leave until they gained attention to their demands.
Course of the assembly:
As always in visual assemblies, the work begins with each participant’s personal space: everyone individually draws their part of the “dream university” on a sheet, and then groups begin to move toward each other, combining spaces and negotiating how to arrange the common space. Questions arise: how to organize common studios and services? How to distribute resources? How to reconcile different desires?
The result of the assembly is a collective plan connected specifically to the people participating in this process. This can be a utopian university—”a place that does not exist but should appear,” or conversely, a dystopian university—”a place where no one would want to be.” Perhaps the outcome will be a map of social space containing both poles.
The main thing that emerges in the process is the experience of communication, collective decision-making, and creating one’s own social space. Unlike the usual role of “actors in Stanislavsky’s theater,” where everyone is forced to play a prescribed role (student, teacher, curator), here we act more like actors in Brecht’s theater: with the right to comment on our roles, change the course of the play, propose endings, and discuss them with “spectators” who are actually co-authors.
Materials: Texts by David Graeber and Nika (on debt, freedom, and care): museum of care after the pandemic, another art world, David Graeber – mode of production inside out
Focus of the day:
- Public space as a condition
- What liberating theatricalization and horizontal reproduction of knowledge can look like
- Shift from the logic of production/consumption to the logic of freedom and care
And here are the questions we are going to ask ourselves during the Visual Assembly.
If you want a downloadable Visual Assembly design to use it yourself, write to us.
