No Education

  • © Jenna Winter
    (c) Jenna Winter

No Education 2014 is:
Mammalian Diving Reflex: The Childrens Choice Awards
Heiner Goebbels/Mathilde Monnier: Surrogate Cities Ruhr
freitagsküche: doing kitchen
ZEIT Forum Kultur: Education or no education?
Workshop: Mammalian Diving Reflex All Children are Other

Sometimes it is easier to describe what a thing is not. No Education is not foremost about education, but a certain attitude, an attitude that cannot be taught, communicated, or forced, but only practiced.

In the short story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” Franz Kafka developed the image of a utopian society centered around the singer Josephine. The puzzle of her artistry inheres not in the extraordinary quality or the beauty of her singing, but in the effect that it triggers. In Josephine’s auditorium it is quiet as mouse. Particularly in times of political or economic need, the Mouse Folk listen even more attentively than otherwise. Josephine’s recitals, according to Kafka, are “less a singing performance than a general assembly.” We experience an egalitarian society whose wisdom knows no distinction between the stage or the seating for the audience, between ceremonial appearance and standard gesture, between a weak throat and a powerful coloratura. The Mouse Folk practices a culture of mutual acknowledgement that invites people to live together entirely without hierarchy or exclusion. They know of no childhood, no youth, no old age.

The program series No Education is based on the radical faith that each individual, regardless of age, origin, and education, can develop their own direct, unprejudiced relationship to art.

When it’s about defending a sphere in which the human being first has to emerge before understanding, our felt, intuitive knowledge is just as important as explicit, learned knowledge.  No Education doesn’t mean “no training, no cultivation.” No Education is instead an invitation to place our intuition on the same level as our knowledge. The point of departure is the notion of a competent child or the learning energy of independent minds. No Education is a laboratory of aesthetic experience that brings new movement into the all-too-familiar relations between art, children, and education.

Artists of the Ruhrtriennale open a terrain in which non-knowledge and not understanding lead not to a painful or exclusionary experience, but trigger sensual understanding.

Funded by Kemnader Kreis

No Education, Patron — Dr. Gerard Mortier (1943 - 2014) Founding director of Ruhrtriennale
Dramaturgy — Marietta Piekenbrock / Head of production — Cathrin Rose