P.S. 1010 - CONCORD

We’re taking Concord on the road to research the connections between art, social spaces, and education. And we’re Kickstarting to do it. We’re going to buy a school bus to convert into a mobile laboratory, gallery, and gathering place, where community organizers, teachers, and artists can connect and create.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/193676915/ps1010

1 yellow Bluebird /// 11 stops /// 20 days /// 1890 miles /// 40 invited artists, performers, and social practitioners

$12,000

For your pledge: We’ll text you a secret from the back of the bus. /// We’ll write your name in every rest stop we visit. /// Invite you to drive your car into Concord for a drive-in movie. /// Give you our travel journals or an editioned work.

VISIT OUR KICKSTARTER HERE : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/193676915/ps1010




Concord’s two main interests have been collectivity—both as a process and an object of inquiry—and participation—our audiences engage and interact rather than witness or view. This collective usership makes Concord a space where learning happens. Here, we learn through exploration, collaboration, and experience. What is learned is both embodied and intellectual, immersive and discursive.

How might we explore this connection between art and education? What is the relationship between the emancipated spectator and the empowered student? If activity and criticality distinguish both radical aesthetics and radical pedagogy, what happens when these contexts not only intersect but merge? P.S.1010 will be a space to investigate these questions.

We will convert a school bus into a mobile laboratory, gallery, and classroom. A roving gathering place for artists, teachers, and communities. We will curate and create workshops, exhibitions, performances, and discussions as modes of collectively building and sharing knowledge—inviting local participants to respond to our mission and providing them with a platform to do so. We will gather the results of this experimental research—scores of dances, transcripts of lectures, documentation of installations—into evolving syllabi to disseminate and share.

The school bus is a figure for horizontal learning. A place where peers trade gossip and their own ideas about things. Where forming relationships happens alongside English Cliff Notes. Where affective labor is as important as intellectual. Where boundaries of teacher and taught breaking down and yield to exchange, sharing, and community building. A school bus operates on the fringes of institutions: between school and home.

Like Concord, P.S.1010 is both an art project and a project space. Collectively built and collectively curated, P.S.1010 will enact our mission in methodology and in form. As a space, P.S.1010 will be a ground for connecting across locations and time zones, and for collaborating across disciplines. The bus itself will be social sculpture, shaped by conversions, installations, and the evolution of our trip.

Some themes that our collective and invited guests will explore: theorizing the politics of imagination, queer afterlife, collective building, problem-posing education, locative writing, landscape archeology, embodied knowledges, and community organizing. In the month leading up to our event, Concord will be offering a Sunday School workshop series, free ride sessions, as well as a massive syllabus share.

The bus has two planned destinations/exhibitions: Good Children Gallery in New Orleans and a Studio Hangar in California City. But if the goal is to let new practices emerge, our approach must be open to detours, contingent re-directions, and mishaps. We will be traveling across the country to communities we want to learn from. We will be gathering methods and materials to teach. And we invite you and your friends to ride with us.