The Summer School of WHW Akademija is starting
Myriam Mihindou, "Black Honey Manifesto, or I am not a Foreigner in the Forest", performance, 2024, photo: Tawfiq Sediqi

The Summer school of WHW Akademija 2024 is starting next week and we are welcoming participants of the sixth edition in Zagreb!

Željka Aleksić, Damir Avdagić,Sanda Črnelč, Haonan He, Vismayee Karande, Gaia De Megni, Nominis, Aslı Özdoyuran, Andrés Matías Pinilla, Emily Roderick, Áron Rossman-Kiss and Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty will be participating in a series of collaborative exercises, seminars, presentations, discussions, workshops, and collective actions. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from and with an exceptional professorial team of The Summer School, who not only specialize in the topics of care, decoloniality, and radical pedagogies but who actively practice care as a methodology: Andris Brinkmanis, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina/Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care and Kate Sutton.

The public program of the Summer School includes two events:

Monday, May 13th, 2024, Andris Brinkmanis: Pedagogies of Care Youth Cultural Center “Ribnjak”, Park Ribnjak 1, Zagreb, 5 pm

Join us for the conversation with Andris Brinkmanis, which will focus on the legacy of Asja Lācis.

Anna Lāce (born Liepiņa, 1891–1979), internationally known as Asja Lācis, was a Latvian theater director, actress, and revolutionary theorist, pedagogue, and a feminist ante litteram who went on to become the protagonist, the intermediary, and the trait d’union between the German, Latvian, and Russian avant-garde cultures. She was closely linked to Bertolt Brecht, but above all Walter Benjamin, who summoned her early pedagogical experience in his seminal essay Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater. Anticipating many of the strategies of “animazione teatrale”, community theatre and some methods used in Theatre of the Oppressed, the theatrical and teaching strategies used by Lācis remain to be of great significance and inspiration also today. Departing from Asja, Andris Brinkmanis will elaborate on the notion of Pedagogies of Care which is his most recent research topic, to be explored within the frame of WHW Akademija 2024.

Friday, May 17th, Care as a Way of Working:
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina/Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care, Women to Women collective, Youth Cultural Center “Ribnjak”, Park Ribnjak 1, Zagreb, 6 pm, food and drinks

‍Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina/Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care will host an event Care as a Way of Working, with Zagreb´s collective Women to Women as guests. They will speak about practices of care that take place across different regions; a slow, long-term, daily careful work by artists, healers, poets, and thinkers, connected to us through bonds of long-lasting friendship and empathy. They might take different forms: a collective resistant herbarium, a black honey manifesto, or a poetic charging station. It can be a museum of breath that reimagines the liquidity of relations and the restitution of objects that are more than alive and feel imprisoned. It can be a safe space, sustaining the assemblies of bodies who reclaim justice for humans and non-humans made innvisible. Or, it can be a simple gesture of holding hands, feeling the warmth of the other’s fingers in your palm, and thinking of your extended family and love.

Join us for food and drinks after the talk. 

WHW Akademija is funded by Kontakt Art Collection, ERSTE Foundation, Foundation for Arts Initiatives, and Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Additional funds for the program are granted by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, City Office for Culture and Civil Society, Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC), Foundation Kultura nova, Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.

WHW Akademija 2024 is realized in conjunction with the collaborative project Care ecologies, organized between WHW, G&A Mamidakis Foundation, State of Concept Athens and Idensitat.

Talk by Andris Brinkmanis is part of the discursive program History of Art and Society: Conversations on Degrowth, while the event and screening by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina is part of the film and video program Ecologies of Care: New Alliances.