This year’s Implantieren Festival hosts a physical as well as an online space, the latter including a glossary that gathers entries on the issue of learning in and beyond the university (https://2024.implantieren-festival.de/en/about/glossary). This workshop is an invitation to come together, discuss, and contribute to the festival’s glossary by way of engaging in a collective writing process.

The Oxford English Dictionary outlines a glossary as “a list of explanations of abstruse, antiquated, dialectical or technical terms; a partial dictionary.” We aim to take seriously the idea of a partial, i.e. incomplete, but also partisan dictionary that features all sorts of seemingly outdated, if not untimely explanations about learning and knowledge creation. To this end, we propose to revisit and reuse existing literature on learning in and from the arts that spans from the 1960s to the present and that notably includes Black, Indigenous, and feminist voices. We will try and understand what use we can make of these texts in our present moment, especially as they might contradict and challenge presently dominant understandings of learning. In collectively drafting entries for the festival’s glossary, we will seek to restore traces of the partial and the abstruse from the discourse on artistic learning.

Collectively we will discuss and write about how learning works in and beyond the university, as well as the history and ideas behind it. If the university is in ruins, what should we build on and what should we discard entirely?

We’d love for you to join us in the period from November 29 to December 1, 10am-12pm (Festival Centre, Mertonstraße 30) for a collective reading and writing session, discussion, and writing exercise.