The Imaginary Border Academy (L'Acad?ie de la fronti?e imaginaire) was initiated at the third [http://artivistic.org/ Artivistic] gathering in Montreal, 25-27 October, 2007;
It is our aim to provide copyleft pedagogical resources for engaging all forms of borders.
As was agreed with the clink of two Caribs by an incomplete decision making body, the Academy is within the tradition of Autonomous Education, Free Universities, Community Education and Free Skools.
The Academy strives to cultivate a non-hierarchical pedagogical approach to understanding, subverting and undermining borders.
The Academy is furthermore a mobile and tactical space where the latter is undertaken.
Of BORDERS we want:
Spaces of clarity, relation, consensus, communication, exchange;
The opportunity to know our limits and push them
The creation of hybrid zones and identities;
Porosity and dynamism, and the opportunistic spirit that allows us to exploit this suppleness;
The occasion to bend them to our will; to navigate them in order to to meet our creative, political, and intellectual desires.
Of LEARNING we want:
The ability to explore and develop our practices without making conclusions, and without needing to anticipate all of our outcomes;
The humility and adaptivity required to love and learn from our failures;
To develop accessible, user-friendly, and open-source tools for learning about and working with borders in practices that are at once creative and political;
An inclusive arena for the exchange of knowledge that can only work when power relations are fluid (so wherein there are no "teachers" or "students").
If you would like more information, want to become a member, have ideas for the curriculum, or wish to participate in the learning, please contact:
imaginary [at] borderacademy.org
Sophie Le-Phat Ho (CA), Anik Fournier (CA), Ralf Homann & Farida Heuck-Yoo as Schleuser.net (DE), Kayle Brandon as Duo.Irational (UK), The Boredom Patrol of CIRCA (US), andrew gryf paterson (SCO/FI), Mushon Zer-Aviv (IL/US), Gina Badger (CA), Nahed Mansour (CA).