‍

Thursday, 26 October 2023, 18:00
Youth Culture Centre Ribnjak (Big dance hall, 1^st floor), Park Ribnjak 1, Zagreb

WHW Akademija 2023: Gleb Amankulov, Larissa Araz, Kemil Bekteši, Klara Burić, Katja Crevar, Aria Farajnezhad, Đejmi Hadrović, Hu Yun, Mari Kalabegashvili, Ivana Mirchevska, Jelisaveta Rapaić and Rita Süveges

‍

After the intense WHW Akademija summer school program with workshops and collective exercises, the fifth edition of WHW Akademija is continuing by hosting all the participants once again in Zagreb, accompanied by a public event featuring the artist and pedagogue Adelita Husni-Bey.

Adelita Husni-Bey is going to showcase her 2012 film Postcards from the Desert Island, which follows a group of pupils (aged 7-11) from the Ecole Vitruve public school in Paris, who had been tasked with building a desert island in their school hall with no specific instructions or guidelines. During the three-week workshop, they became acquainted with the idea of self-management, the lack of institutions, abolition, immigration, the significance of public space, and disobedience through the practice of anarcho-collectivism.

The screening is going to be followed by an exploration of 'embodied pedagogy' as a method for critically analysing social contradictions and tensions. The WHW participants and Husni-Bey are going to discuss, demonstrate, and engage the audience in using their bodies for learning, based on the Call and Response module they had participated in. Resembling a choir, this module was centered around the participants’ ‘Calls’, and they shared and gathered what had emerged from their individual practices. The questions that structured their time together were: How can we collectively respond to each other’s ‘calls’? How can we listen deeply?

WHW Akademija is conceived as an education model that combines online and physical encounters and explores participatory modes of artistic and knowledge production.

Through collaborative exercises, seminars, presentations, discussions, workshops, and collective actions, it initiates an intense exchange between the participants, the professorial team, and the local setting.

Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theatre, and critical legal studies. She organizes workshops and produces publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using noncompetitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken-word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, her work consists of making sites in which to practice collectively. She was part of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 with a video installation foregrounding anti-extractivist struggles and tarot reading as a pedagogical practice. She is a 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellow with a project centred on the radical changes in social relations brought about by responses to past and current pandemics.

The main funders of WHW Akademija are Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation and the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.

WHW realizes this activity as part of the two-year collaborative project Care ecologies, implemented with partners G&A Mamidakis Foundation, State of Concept Athens and Idensitat.

The event is part of the program Nova u Centru financed by a special public call Culture and art in the Community of the City of Zagreb.

‍

WHW Akademija is supported by:
City Office for Culture and Civil Society
Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
Croatian Audiovisual Centre-HAVC
Foundation for Arts Initiatives
Kultura Nova Foundation
Kontakt Collection/ERSTE Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Trust for Mutual Understanding

‍

‍