Three years after the first edition, we are happy to host another round of Free Radicals on site. 

Free Radicals is a programme within the Floating Learnscapes especially directed towards teacher-less, self-organised student groups, willing to follow their own interests and ready to research outside the walls of their institution. The groups are implementing interdisciplinary practices or research, and engage with pressing matters of our times: notions of ecologies, solidarity, political and social engagement as well as care for ourselves and our surroundings. 

Between 16th and 29th of September 2024 twelve selected groups will have access to Floating University’s site as a place to freely meet, organise, and invent new formats of (un-,re- and co-)learning, while being freed from the rules and hierarchies of conventional learning environments, academic contexts and institutional bureaucracy.

Assembly of the Unmapped/meandr

We are a newly founded collective called meandr. The four founding members are all Vienna based and have diverse backgrounds ranging from art, architecture, ecology, geography to education. Even though some prior bonds have existed, we have found each other and worked together primarily through Klasse für Alle at Angewandte Wien.

Clemi originally comes from the environmental sciences and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Spatial Research. Clemi dreams of just and green cities in which humans and non-human life forms can thrive. Furthermore, they work with kids and teens in nature education in Vienna’s national park Lobau and enjoy everything outdoors.

Pi studies architecture and is fueled by intersectional approaches to planning spaces. Their main goal is to work collectively in all areas of life towards a just future for all beings. They recharge knowing they coexist with sheep.

Ritchie is an engineer by education, an architect by profession and an artist at heart. His passion ranges from music and light to public space, ecology, livable cities and everything in between. With a special interest in social practice methodologies.

Vickie is an architecture student mainly interested in the intersections of architecture with ecology, politics and collective work. She’s also passionate about gardening and writing and wishes to see a forest city one day.

Since we are still a small collective, we mostly work with open discussions and rotating functions during our meetings. We aspire to be a non-hierarchical organisation and we try to implement consent-based decision making processes as much as possible. In bigger groups, we employ sociocratic methods.

Mourning the Glacier / AWOL (absent without leave)

We are Belén, Eduardo, Giuliana, Santiago, Stefan and Yaman. We come from Lebanon, Mexico, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. We came together due to our intersectional political approaches and contrasting artistic practices, that range from conceptual poetics to material data analysis. We are not a crystallised collective, but we have worked, lived, travelled and eaten together in various frameworks both personally and within the Bauhaus University, where most of us take part in the program MFA Public Art and New Artistic Strategies. 

As it usually goes, we joined forces to fight similar frustrations mostly directed towards the institution and our position as migrants. Taking part in a study program which is approaching its discontinuation due to conservative internal politics and the rise of fascism in the region; where teaching is not ensured and care for students, especially internationals, is always neglected. We have the experience of teaching and learning from each other as we took part in a student conducted course within University called “Cultural Workers Strike!”. Here we developed a project that envisioned different alternatives to the exploitation structures of the current system and creative practices towards self-regulation and organisation, aiming to build a space of both critique and solidarity.

Following that and after a very eventful semester dealing with university politics, we are searching for spaces in which we can further develop our research collectively in a way that the University doesn’t allow us. Not making exhibitions but taking to the streets and working with people and the public sphere, since we believe this is where art operates at a deeper level, when it belongs to everyone and can be done by anyone. This approach normally clashes with the art teaching system, specially the German one, which is mostly centred on individual subjectivities dealt through old-fashioned structures. 

LIOS Labs

https://lios.io/ https://www.instagram.com/lios_labs/

LIOS Labs arrives with a dusty carrier bag of seed-learnings from our 4th edition of the Desert Transformation Lab hosted within modernity’s ruins of Pustynia Błędowska, a man-made desert in Poland. Artists and researchers land at Floating University’s refuge to begin a 3rd landscape dialogue of emergent strategies for queering communities. We curiously open research into multispecies relations; expanding our sense of home-making and community beyond the walls of individualism and the hard edges of the city. 

Our agency inquires into how to cultivate our soft body and the unique capacity 3rd landscapes provide as borderlands of symbiotic relations of mutual care. By creating space within refuges for community co-regulation with our more-than- human kin, we support the wellbeing of our nervous system and the city-exoskleton can be shed. It’s then we experience the entirety of our being in exchange with others that cohabitate our world. 

As important as how to open ourselves is how to use our shell to calibrate to the demands of the city. Learning how to make our shell breathable and adaptive to our needs, teaches us how to work in the liminal space of cultural reinvention.

Using our framework of five thematic labs for reparative world-building: Future food lab, Coexistence lab, Resonance lab, Sand lab, Planetary Movement lab as methodological tools we would like to pursue collective and open site-specific research, and testing of the tools developed during this year’s Desert Transformation Lab in the context of the Floating University. We would like to observe, dialogue and document the exchange and emergent experiments between landscapes. 

We will spend a few days researching within the labs that will match the spaces available, i.e. activating The Kitchen with our Future Food Lab research. We would like to present the findings during a 1-2 day public gathering organised in the spirit of a Council of (3rd Landscape) Beings offering workshops in thematic labs.

InBetween Collective / Eco-Social Synergies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Ecosystems and Decolonial Futures“ 

https://www.theinbetweencollective.net/

The InBetween Collective is an international collective dedicated to nurturing creative expression, storytelling and collective learning. The InBetween Collective aims to provide a space for ideas to sprawl and spawn. We understand that every thought emerges from a context and that every voice is political. The InBetween Collective therefore aims to inform, politicise and bring forth change through knowledge-sharing. Together, we will read, listen, take in, scrutinise, question, create, share, collaborate. We do this by picking a thematic topic which will serve as the focal point of our collective for several weeks. Through workshops, a book club, the podcast, articles, and more, we will explore the topic through different lenses. Our last theme left us asking, how is art used to retrieve what was lost, to recover what was destroyed, and to reclaim what was once ours? At the moment we are working on our first print magazine with the theme of ,Adornment’ Additionally, through the interest of some of our members in Science and Technology Studies, the collective aims to bring this mode of thought outside academia and explore its concepts with a variety of actors to combat knowledge hierarchies and experiment with new modes of knowledge production with a strong emphasis on Decolonial practices.

RE-PEAT (Peatland Justice)

www.re-peat.earth, https://www.instagram.com/repeat.earth/

RE-PEAT is a youth-led collective with a mission to change the narrative around peatlands across Europe and beyond – what we term a “peatland paradigm shift”. We envision an interconnected world where all peatland dwellers are supported culturally and ecologically. To realise our mission and vision, we support the emergence of transformative narratives between people and peatlands. There are two major pathways this happens: expanding the circle of people interested and activated on peatlands and bringing a strong climate and social justice focus into the existing peatland field. We work in a collaborative, creative and holistic fashion, depicting peatlands in novel ways and placing a large focus on the broader context of peatlands. 

We run a number of different activities and projects, including an educational programme for children, a dispersed series of festivals (Peat-Fest, which began as an online festival), and facilitating a youth board for a restoration project. RE-PEAT as a whole consists of about 25 people, organised into working groups, with a flat structure and shared decision-making processes. We place a lot of importance on the way we work together, alongside what we do together. This means we experiment with different ways of organising, engage with networks such as Power Shift community, and reflect on how peatlands can be a guide (e.g., valuing liminality, thinking through deep time, layering). 

With members from across Europe, each with a particular regional tale and/or personal connection to peatlands, we are well-placed to chronicle the history of these ecosystems, explore forgotten aspects of this history and co-create new peatland stories. We take an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and playful approach, which we have found to resonate with peat experts and newcomers alike. 

We work online, which means we really value opportunities to come together to work and engage in different and new ways.

Nearby Plant

Nearby Plant is an interdisciplinary ongoing collective work, focused on finding new possibilities for connections, ecologies, nourishments, metaphors, correlations, co-operations and ways of existing together with plants. 

Nearby Plant started its existence in conversations during the “garden of possibilities”, the global south seminar space in the School for Media Arts Cologne (2023-2024). The 6 members of Nearby Plant are: transdisciplinary artist and political educator Kristina Bublevskaya; video artist and animator Jingyuan Luo; filmmaker Sebastian Jaimes; artist, performer and musician Valeria Oggioni; Musician and sound artist Inwoo Jung and Installation-Video-Performance artist Vanessa Monti. We all were born in different places, such as Colombia, China, South Korea, Russia and Italy. Our migration processes, as well as our ancestry shapes a lot of our collective’s work. We aim to work in non hierarchical structures, caring until everybody feels comfortable with the decision we make. We do not want to be an output based collective, but rather floating in discovery of what we find valuable together.

P.A.S.S. (Post Apocalyptic Skillshare Society)

We are a group of friends with backgrounds in a variety of different fields (design, engineering, hacking, permaculture, textile fabrication and repair, construction, film, and art) who have a shared interest in surviving the future with dignity and in community. We consist of three core members and a number of satellite members who join when they are available. Every person in the group brings a unique perspective and set of skills, and so we are always open to new members joining and enriching the group and our collective learning. Currently, our main areas of interest are built around providing the basics of life: food production, the right to shelter, textiles, transportation, and resilient community building as a mechanism for survival. Previously, our group has primarily had self-contained discussions around these topics based on our individual interests, activism, research, and experience, but we are shifting to a more active, collective research approach. We currently have a loose, non-hierarchical organizational structure but recognize that, with a more directed research approach, we are in need of a more clearly defined organizational structure. 

The three core members are Claiborne McDonald (he/him/they), Charlotte Mitchell (she/her/they), and Kiera Pitts (she/her). Claiborne McDonald, helped run The Public School NY, then started Bay Area Public School/Omni Commons, Place for Sustainable Living, The Square School, and other para-academic projects, and was  involved in many others over the past two decades, in several countries. Charlotte Mitchell was on the winning team of the 2020 Solar Decathlon (a competition to design and build a solar powered housing solutions) and has experience working in environmental education in Alaska and as a gardener. Kiera Pitts transitioned from a career as a costume designer and punk venue organizing in Chicago to one of fine arts in Berlin. She specializes in up-cycling fabrics in community building workshops.

Co-Making Matters 

www.comakingmatters.com, instagram.com/comakingmatters

Co-Making Matters is a multidisciplinary platform at Haus der Statistik that fosters collaborations and partnerships among practitioners from different fields. The project offers a space for exhibitions, discussions, and hybrid events and operates across multiple segments, including making, collaborating, hosting, and linking. Co-Making Matters provides a supportive environment for site-specific projects and temporary interventions, with the goal of creating long-lasting partnerships. The platform is designed to promote cross-disciplinary thinking and encourages open communication, exchange, and learning.

Co-Making Matters is made by many people: it combines its core team (Viviane Tabach, Nicole Candian and Clementine Butler-Gallie), its collaborators (see more on the website), the members of School of Commons Cohort 2024, and is linked to practices by the Master students of Art in Context at UdK as well as by Cultures of the Curatorial at HGB, Leipzig.

Living Room

instagram.com/livingroom.collective/

We are a group of art students using different media. By bringing different kind of sensibilities together, embracing different discourse, we experiment with ways of creating inclusive, safe, and livable spaces. We established the Living Room program in 2022 with guest professors Reza Afisina and Iswanto Hartono. After their teaching terms, we initiated the Living Room Collective a group of 10-ish core members, and some more loose members. We are currently based at HfbK Hamburg and continue our exploration and practices on relational aesthetics. We act according to a principle of decentralization with an approach to raising a gathering point, exchanging and nurturing ideas, and facilitating art events to transmit collectivity and solidarity as our harvest. 

When Reza Afisina and Iswanto Hartono left the school, we were looking for a space to continue our collective practice, and the social design class of Gilly Karjevsky agreed to host us in winter 2023. Since then we are working, cooking and hanging out with and next to Social Design Class. Through this year we organised several workshops, karaoke, cooking sessions and a festival called “We love the smell of mutual support in the morning”. At this festival we invited several other artist collectives to talk with us about collective practices and support techniques. During the HfbK annual exhibition 2024 we curated a program of workshops. This summer our member Ruxin Liu and we as a collective graduated together in one room and won the prize for the best MA work. Publication is also a key focus for us. We have successfully published one compilation of 14 zines, ‘Living Book’, which we showcased at multiple art book fairs to share with the world.

decolonise HU

https://www.instagram.com/decolonise.hu/

We are a collective of students that initially came together in October of 2023, to act in solidarity with Palestine, and organize against persistent repression from the state, media and academia. We recognize that the struggle for liberation in Palestine is interconnected with fights against all systems of oppression and manifestations of colonial violence. As a group of students from different fields of study (mostly humanities), we are united under an anti-colonial political framework that extends beyond the university context, as many of us are active in different forms of political work. We meet weekly for the planning of actions, workshops, protests, developing our collective structures, our political manifesto etc. and this project is part of our political self education. 

As individuals and as a group we have faced innoumerous amounts of repression from HU University as well as other Berlin universities, and for many of us, university is no longer a safe place for learning and discourse. This makes it even more difficult to create space for liberatory forms of knowledge production, which is why we are interested in benefiting from the Floating space.

Wutraeume

Anna-Lena Schmitt and Josephine Schröder, we are students at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle and members of the Information Design and Typography study group. Over the past six months, we have deeply explored the topic of anger from the perspective of women socialized individuals, emphasizing the communal and empowering aspects of this theme.

As the main organizers, we initiated this project and are working closely with various FLINTA* individuals from the Halle-Leipzig area. Our concept involves expanding the group by inviting experts such as rappers, theater groups, punk singers, and graffiti artists. Together with these experts, we have organized workshops that create a space for exchange where everyone feels comfortable. This approach allows us to clarify our position and connect with more FLINTA* individuals through shared anger. Our workshop groups typically consist of three to five people per session.

Our activities include typography, graphic design, performance art, graffiti, embroidery, knitting, language, and community organization. We operate with a flat organizational structure, making joint decisions and placing a strong emphasis on collaboration and mutual support. Although we are the initiators, the hierarchy is flexible; we involve others and welcome changes in collaboration.

We are already in contact with various interested parties and plan to include people such as the rappers from Kleptos, a theater group from Halle, and a graffiti artist with whom we have successfully collaborated before. Our work thrives on our network; although we are the initiators, many people in Halle are eager to continue and contribute to this project. Our aim is to further open up the project and possibly create a consistent group that can develop it into a recurring format with a larger backing.

STRUDELING

Based on the concept of strudeling by Sheila de Bretteville in (see Dirty Art and Fuzzy Theory 1992, Glossary of Undisciplined Design 2021) we come together in spiraling motion to think and move with relationality, care, collectivity, resistance and storytelling.

We — Juliana, Rita, Carmen and Laura — are a group of four students from Colombia, Portugal and Germany, brought together by the search for non-linearity. We collectively tell and embody new stories to counter, unravel and hospice dominant narratives that degrade the respons-ability between the human and more than human worlds.

Familiar with expressing institutional critique, we practise interventions as a method to interrupt the dominant power structures in our home university and Master’s program Non Linear Narrative in The Hague, Netherlands. Imagining and organising at Floating University would give us the chance to work outside of the institution’s walls and to collaborate in and with a place that is home to a diverse community of humans and more than humans.

Three years after the first edition, we are pleased to announce another Open Call for Free Radicals! 

This Open Call is especially directed towards teacher-less, self-organised student groups, willing to follow their own interests and ready to research outside the walls of their institution in the Fall 2024. The groups should implement interdisciplinary practices or research, and engage with pressing matters of our times: notions of ecologies, solidarity, political and social engagement as well as care for ourselves and our surroundings. 

Selected groups will have access to Floating University‘s site as a place to freely meet, organise, and invent new formats of (un-,re- and co-)learning, while being freed from the rules and hierarchies of conventional learning environments, academic contexts and institutional bureaucracy. Please note that although no monetary funds are provided, the site offers a unique and diverse space for collaboration and a great opportunity to implement your research and most imaginative projects. 

Project Timeframe: September 16-29, 2024, with potential flexibility.

You can find all information about the Open Call and the application procedure here.

Applications should be submitted via the application form until August 1st. 2024 – 23:59. 

For all inquiries regarding the application procedure or the programm, contact learnscapes[at]floating-berlin.org .