An interview with Asad Raza, D. Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven about their experimental project “Schema for a school”

Dean Kissick in Spike:

We’re sitting here in the third incarnation of Schema for a School. How did this project begin?

Asad Raza: In 2015, Nicola Lees invited me to do something for the Ljubljana Biennial, and I had a thought of the school, especially experimental pedagogy, as an interesting thing. I asked Jeff and Graham to collaborate on this, as they probably know the subject much, much better than I do. But I was interested in making some formal conditions, let’s say, under which an experimental school could flourish inside an exhibition. I think of these as sketches for an institution that would be up to the 21st century somehow, a multivalent cultural institution that could do exhibitions, that would have education, but the education wouldn’t function in the way that education departments do right now, you know?

D. Graham Burnett: The timing of Asad’s invitation was great, because over the years Jeff and I had developed and taught several experimental courses at Princeton in a graduate programme called IHUM (Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities). We, too, had been thinking about the relationship between art spaces and teaching/learning spaces. In fact, Asad had even come down and done a session with us. So the idea of a collaboration came easily.

More here.