The Living School

About.

The Living School was first developed as an artistic project in collaboration with the South London Gallery between 2014 – 2016. As a pedagogical and research framework, it initially aimed at addressing the public housing crisis, and how new policies were radically undermining affordable housing in the city center as well as a greater structure of social welfare. This included questioning relations between housing, poverty, community, and urban futures, as well as integrating theoretical discussions and practical workshops. The experiences and conversations that emerged from the project encouraged me in my approach as an artist and facilitator, and which I continue to carry into other situations and opportunities. In my artistic practice, I have often worked at nurturing para-institutional platforms and self-organized contexts that bring theory and practice into greater conversation, and where gathering together forms the basis for new ways of researching and making, as well as envisioning ways of being-in-common. Key to this is experimenting with established discourses, and bringing a poetic imagination to thinking and doing together. I decided to create this website as a way to document these activities, which we might term “pedagogical”, so as to share the different knowledges, methods, and materials that emerge from these scenes of shared research creation.