What are the minimum conditions?
—A group of people
—A duration
—A space
—And the minimum protocol
ZDB invites Provisional School For Nothing to go to Marvila to “learn how to lie” as an excuse for the book launch, a publication that thinks with others about this school, its own schools, possible and impossible. We have invited artists featured in this volume to create installations, concerts, performances, and improvisations in a marathon/happening mode—Alexandre Balgiu, Pedro Barateiro, Sara Graça, João dos Santos Martins, Cracked Bolos, Tomás Cunha Ferreira, Maki Suzuki & Lppl, João Polido, Sara Vaz & Marco Balesteros, with contributions from students Elsa Baslé, Beatriz Baião, Chloé Gourvennec, Calvin Kudufia, Frederico Teixeira, Moritz Schöttmueller, Márcia Mendonça, Leyre Léon.
Learning how to lie is a skill that the epistemology of fallacy demands. The book, in turn, crystallizes impossible realities in which beliefs are deposited. We are deceiving, but the question persists: are we simulating knowledge, or, on the contrary, are we acknowledging the value of ignorance? In this intricate game of deception, we associate with friends who share the same fictions, or rather, the same lies. Together, we embark on a p(o)edagogy of the abyss, which focuses not on what is already known but on what is intuited and being constructed.
Paul Feyerabend said: ‘The history of science, after all, is not just facts and conclusions drawn from facts. It also contains ideas, interpretations of facts, problems created by conflicting interpretations, errors, and so on. […] If that is the case, the history of science will be as complex, chaotic, full of errors, and captivating as the ideas it contains, and these ideas, in turn, will be as complex, chaotic, full of errors, and captivating as the minds that invented them.’
Provisional School For Nothing aims to think about the school, not as an institution but as a foundation, a primordial principle for action, for a worldview, for living together, as a broad social construction. The school we imagine is a school of reform, a place of revolution, resistance, participation, a provisional exercise, not effective, in transition, not fixed, for nothing, not productive, and the creative use of leisure through artistic and performative practice. A school that opposes No-How to the instituted Know-how.
