Our Day Will Come | Initiated by Paul O'Neill
Four week-long sessions starting in July, 2014
A Project in the Form of a Free School
In the form of a free school—a participatory, decentralized space for learning and sharing knowledge—this collaborative off-site project will create a space for becoming in Edmonton’s rapidly changing East downtown. New York-based, Irish artist-curator Paul O’Neill challenges ideas of curation and education in his work, and here he invites a roster of artists, locals, visitors, and others to create and reexamine their practices through workshops, school dinners, classes, radio broadcasts, lectures, and dances.
“It is a school within a school as much as a school of schools. It is also not a school at all, but a gesture towards becoming something unknown from its outset. It employs the free school as a construct under interrogation and as an engine of production. Each week artists take up residence within the school and contribute towards the school's programme with performances, screenings, broadcasts, and objects engaging diverse 'publics'.
“What is a School? What is Remoteness? What is Autonomy? What is Usefulness? What is hospitality.
“Each week the school begins with a discussion on these questions and closes with the publication of an issue of the school zine with its contents formed from contributions by school members during that week. The project explores the conviviality of emergent and iterative practice and the nature and value of extant educational formulas. Our Day Will Come explores the implications of encroaching upon educational, academic and other formal structures, by intervening within them and re-framing them: from class to curriculum; from workshop to school dinner; from zine to school radio; from formal lecture to the end-of-year school disco. These are some of the discursive spaces that are being rethought and reconfigured as a means of enabling and supporting emergent forms of co-operative production.”