May marks our yearly seasonal opening. It is the time of the year when Floating University slowly awakens from the winterschlaf. After the long winter, we look forward to finally opening the gate and to having you on site.

However, this year again, will need to be slightly different, as our financial support has proven to be insufficient to run Floating as we have been doing it the last years. As a non-for-profit and independent organisation we rely on a wide array of public sector endowments, to fund both our basic infrastructure and our programmes.

For now, we keep the site in low power mode. Floating will open only for specific activities. We will be regularly updating our calendar.

“The opaque is not the obscure.. it is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” “We clamour for the right to opacity for everyone” 
Édouard Glissant

When asked to describe the Floating University, as members of this multifaceted venture are often asked to do, the answer starts with an exhale and a pause, followed by a highly personal interpretation – the description of a shared experience as seen from a set of highly individualised viewpoints. That the Floating University allows for that level of complex communication of itself the fact there is no corporate script, that it is a deeply opaque infrastructure for each visitor to project onto, is the political essence of the project. 

The Floating University requires a new language of practice and perhaps a new practice all together. A practice that negates the institutional way of doing things, challenges the need for unified transparencies of meaning, elaborates on processes of making and thinking together and frees spaces in the city to do so collectively.

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