Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

https://camp-notesoneducation.de/projects/commoning-curatorial-and-artistic-education-2/

A Summer School at documenta fifteen, within the Shared Campus initiative
(City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media, Hong Kong Baptist University, Taipei National University of the Arts, University of the Arts London and Zurich University of the Arts.)
Faculty: Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb, Zheng Bo, Alison Green, Yatin Lin and Cedric Maridet.

Initiated and organised by Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb
23 June–7 July 2022
CAMP notes on education, documenta fifteen, Kassel

With talks and workshop and inputs (in order of appearance) by Hammad Nasar, COMMON VIEWS, David Behar Perahia and Dan Farberoff, Jennifer Deger (FERAL ATLAS), Philip Horst & Matthias Einhoff (ZKU), Gilly Karjevski, Floating University, Bassam El Baroni, Avi Feldman, Oliver Marchart, Ariane Sutthavong & Lara van Meeteren, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Dagmar Pelger & Jörg Stollmann, Dana Yahalomi (Public Movement).

The two-week Summer School Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education explored how artistic and curatorial education might be organised as a shared practice. Held within CAMP notes on education at documenta fifteen, it brought together postgraduate and doctoral participants from the international Shared Campus network in Kassel and online.

Rather than presenting a predetermined curriculum, the Summer School began with proposals from its participants. Each applicant was invited to contribute a “shared moment”—a workshop, walk, performance, discussion, reading or other collective format. These proposals became the material from which the programme was jointly composed. In keeping with the subject of the Summer School, commoning began with the organisation of the learning process itself.

Commoning as an Educational Practice
The programme approached commons and commoning not only as theoretical concepts, but as practices to be experienced, tested and critically assessed. Workshops, performances, exercises in the city, collective readings, “diversity dinners” and informal exchanges created situations in which knowledge could circulate between different disciplines, institutions and geographic contexts.

Participants were encouraged to bring their own artistic, curatorial and educational experiences into these situations. Teaching and learning were understood not as a one-directional transfer of knowledge, but as interconnected activities shaped by the contributions and responsibilities of everyone involved.

The Summer School drew on historical experiments in emancipatory and transdisciplinary education. Reference points included Black Mountain College and its influence on John Cage and Fluxus, Joseph Beuys’s public discussions at documenta, Jacques Derrida’s idea of the “university without condition,” Paulo Freire’s emancipatory pedagogy and bell hooks’s understanding of anti-racist and feminist education as a practice of freedom.

Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education treated the Summer School as an experimental educational infrastructure. Its purpose was not simply to communicate knowledge about the commons, but to examine how shared knowledge is produced: who participates, how a programme is shaped, which resources and responsibilities are distributed, and how collective processes can remain open to difference and disagreement.

In this sense, commoning was understood as an unfinished practice rather than a stable model. It required continual negotiation, care and reassessment—and began with the question of how learning itself could become something held in common.