The courses at the Warsaw MA are attended by 100 participants and lecturers as well as a further 100 artists, theoreticians and experts for talks, excursions and private lessons. The slogan of the MA: "Constant intensity accompanied by growing doubt" indicates a wish for happy self-dissolving while simultaneously marking the learning strategy for participants: Overstrain and loss of orientation simultaneously accompanied by an increased ability to reflect. And to learn on the part of the lecturers: i.e. to find problems for existing solutions. The courses at the MA are structured as artistic projects, accompanied by field research, debate, excursions and presentations. Less techniques are taught, no possessors of know-how are selected - instead, new conceptual approaches and discourses, contemporary working strategies and artistic practices by international artists and theoreticians are presented.

Every MA watches, gathers and produces for one theme, resulting in a living archive that can be performed in brief at a location and then scattered together with the participants across all countries. The first part of the MA Warsaw took place in October 2005 and was a purely Polish affair - 100 Warsaw experts talked about unknown and ghostly knowledge in the Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge".
Now we are doing an international comparison of the ghostly in architecture, politics, art, theory and our everyday life. At various times of day it is possible to discern different degrees of social phantomization, of oneself and one's surroundings: perhaps one was once haunted by ghostly forces that came from the no-place of utopia and themselves were the phantom of a utopian communist society; perhaps, these days, one is a someone-or-other somewhere-or-other in the realm of facts, a kind on non-person, which almost seems to be a precondition of and economic basis for success anyhow. "The phantom of the market economy has replaced the ghost of communism" (Heiner Müller). So what do the ghosts of the future look like?

Ghosts, avatars, phantoms, the undead, zombies, ghosts hooked on reality and self-phantomized advocates of the real: not living, not dead, not yet born or incapable of dying, neither present nor absent - they put reality on hold, and rob it of matter and provability. That is the terrain of this year's Mobile Academy.

Welcome!
Hannah Hurtzig and Carolin Hochleichter

To read the text , click on the pictures!

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The Spook Goes On
From the Flying University to the Mobile Academy

Stefanie Peter
Artistic Director Büro Kopernikus: German-Polish Cultural Projects

Does anyone still remember Professor Abronsius? He was the tragic hero of Roman Polanski's 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers. Notoriously denounced by his colleagues at the University of Kšnigsberg as 'the old crackpot', Professor Abronsius was a charlatan who had turned his back on the tried and trusted methods of the critical
sciences. He knew better than all others about the essence of being a vampire, and had a sweeping knowledge of the side effects that well-known objects such as crucifixes and mirrors had on the living dead. The fact that 'Vampirology' did not belong to the curriculum of the canonical sciences was of no concern to him, for his thirst for knowledge defied all academic conventions and extended far beyond the bounds of any semester course listings.

The effectiveness of a garlic clove combined with a bat's sense of navigation (vis-à-vis ultrasound) turned Professor Abronsius into a hero of interdisciplinary investigation. And as a representative of those dissident sciences, derivative of Roland Barthes's thinking, such knowledge resonates more as nonsense than any 'knowledge' as such. 'Science' is, according to Barthes, 'that which is taught', and it follows that one acquires a doctorate in the field of aesthetics, psychology, and sociology, rather than in heraldry, semantics or 'victimology'[1].

When the Mobile Academy's first away game takes place they will be reminded - without having wanted or planned things that way - that they are falling back on another form of knowledge transmission based on a very long and established tradition (especially in Warsaw). Indeed, it was because women were denied entrance into the academies that the concept of the 'flying university' emerged in the 19th century; the brainchild of women who organized themselves into loose circles, it yielded no less than a Nobel Prize winner: the physicist Marie Curie. During the 1970s and 1980s, breaking with the university that kowtowed to the prevailing ideology of the ruling regime, dissident intellectuals revived a nonconformist tradition of teaching in their own private homes. So what does the 'flying university' have in common with the Mobile Academy? It undermines the official state pedagogy in that it is neither tied to a particular curriculum nor has any specific regulations for obtaining a degree; nor is it aligned with any traditional architecture, by which the 'organisation' of knowledge normally finds concrete manifestation of its power. When the Mobile Academy sanctions the study of spirits, ghosts, and phantoms, it takes the disapproval of such popular science seriously and pursues uncertain territory. One must proceed as Professor Abronsius would, keeping one's eyes peeled not only for the obvious but also for the incredible. And when one distinguishes between those premature restless spirits, one comes upon the traces of the repressed and the forbidden - confirming that spooks do indeed abound.

[1] Taken from the German translation of Roland Barthes, Das Rauschen der Sprache, Frankfurt/Main, 2006, P.9.