Today, we are facing challenges that radically reshape our relationships with one another and with the world. In various places, prevailing frames of reference, classifications, forms of interaction and the associated exclusionary mechanisms and inequalities are being questioned (e.g. Black Lives Matter, Climate Change, Decolonization, Feminist manifestations....). The modern belief that the passing on of a particular set of knowledge, skills and attitudes that are formulated by scientific and educational experts results in the construction of a shared worldview and common ground ‘where everybody would have become scientifically enlightened’ has proven to be inoperative (cf. Latour 2017). A radical new orientation and compass to recompose our relations to each other and world in terms of ‘public’ engagement is required (Ibid). In this context, we see experiments being set up within contemporary arts that question dominant forms of knowledge production and knowledge distribution, and that try out alternative educational models of resistance. This is a dynamic of practices where arts, education and politics are thought of together, often described as 'self-organised art education', (Thorne 2017), or more recently 'self-organised gatherings of unlearning practices' (cf. Sepake 2021). Rather than rejecting the school, which was common in the arts world in the 1970s, these practices explore how other connections between the arts, education and politics can be established. What is at stake is the creation of 'change through experience', and ‘sensitivity for situations’ rather than the teaching of artistic competences.

This essay aims to intervene in this trend. However, instead of focusing on the alternative goals that these new practices seek to achieve - and which are often mentioned in policy rhetoric and mission statements - we focus on the ‘emancipatory’ and ‘world disclosing’ operations at work within these contemporary practices to expand their significance in addressing contemporary and future societal challenges. We do so by examining a concrete artistic research project, the Para Institute for Arts and Precarity (pKp) that as a collective research practice, explicitly puts contemporary challenges on its agenda. The aim of this contribution is to investigate through an investigations of pKp how contemporary self-organized gatherings of unlearning relate to the question of opening up the world and making it a collective engagement and concern 

pKp is a hybrid collective artistic research practice that is developed as a research tool that questions hierarchies and exclusivity within the art space (but also outside of it). Especially political and art aesthetic issues are of importance, and the role of education to transform these issues into collective gatherings of world disclosure is investigated. Depending on the particular context in which pKp operates, it gets a different form. In this sense, pKp cannot be described as a project or a methodology, but as an experiment that tries out various positions by means of concrete aesthetic interventions that are situation-specific (Haraway 1988). We will present different interventions, and what effect they have in terms of re-shaping the relationship between art, politics and education in an undetermined way. The descriptions are complemented with data from semi-structured interviews.

Through an analysis of pKp, we conclude that these contemporary self-organized gatherings of unlearning practices evoke a requirement (1) to re-conceptualize art in terms of an ecology of practices, and (2) to reinforce the conditions of mutual dependency as guiding and opposing to the ideology of our late capitalist world. In this case study this concerns the bringing together of artists, pedagogues, inhabitants (human and non-human), histories, poems and labor around the question of living together; and the problematization of shared issues with the help of particular artistic interventions that transform mere articulations of opinions into collective moments of unlearning. Hence constituting fruitful moments of hesitation with regard to what 'we' think, say and feel here and now.

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