Publications

Set up in 2006, the New International School’s peer-network of fifty members organise events, publications and collaborative works in Finland, France, Serbia, the Netherlands and the UK.

During the New International School's 2010 annual summer workshop, participants turned their attention to structural ideas found in horror films. "We were basically looking at how to design a film through the horror of participation and exclusion." This interrogation of the violence, in itself, of the act of forming a community - of drawing a line - are  representative of the school's implicit concerns about 'how economics and space radically shape community dynamics'.

The New International School, then, is an example of practice from theory, and theory in practice as can be seen in the structural questioning underlying each art work and event. It seems conceptually fitting that the founding seminars and workshops, which sought to discover new educational models and new ways of collective production should have taken place within the huge converted factory spaces of the Treignac project, run by Sam Basu and Liz Murray in rural France.

Alongside these explorations of non-institutional forms of learning, New International School co-founder Shahin Afrassiabi has also written and devised a course for KUVA Academy, Finland, which brings some of these discourses back into the institution, thus re-imagining and reviving its mechanisms.

www.newinternationalschool.org

From an interview with Maziar Afrassiabi, Noah Angell and Craig Cooper.

Pippa Koszerek

Pippa Koszerek is an artist and curator based in London. She co-founded the Independent Art School (www.independent-art-school.org.uk) in 1999 as a student protest.

www.pippakoszerek.com

First published: Research papers March 2011