The A.C.A.D.E.M.Y project was initiated by the Siemens Arts Program who invited MuHka, Antwerp, the Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven, the Hamburg Kunstverein and Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures to collaborate on a project that would reconsider concepts of learning and teaching in the context of artistic practice and artistic institutions. The project took the form of a series of exhibitions, events and publications, all questioning possible ways of extending the principles of learning and teaching beyond the frameworks and ambitions of formal art education. 'Academy' set out to stimulate reflections on the potentiality of the academy within society and situated itself in the speculative tension between the question of what we need to know and what we aspire to. As co-curator of the Van Abbe exhibition I posed the question "what can we learn from the museum beyond what it shows us?" and brought together 22 philosophers, theorists, architects, planners, performers, activists, artists and students in seven groups, each of whom posed a related question and proceeded to investigate it as a project to be shown in the exhibition. The development process took place over two years and closely involved the museum's staff generating questions about the museum's ability to 'be more'. The exhibition opened in September 2006 with two symposia on 'Radical Pedagogy" (Antwerp and Eindhoven) which I organised; it was accompanied by the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y book (ISBN-10 3865883036) which I co-edited and for which I wrote the opening text "Academy as Potentiality", to articulate the ambitions of the project as a whole and of our exhibition in particular.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2082