School of Disobedience

“The OPEN CALL DETOX is for artists who want to stop organizing their work around open calls as the primary horizon, and begin to build conditions in which their work can exist without constantly waiting to be selected.
Stop applying. Start proposing.”

📆 JULY 6-10
📍 BUDAPEST
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"But when we import Western resistance culture too quickly, we risk becoming fluent in a resistance that is not ours. The vocabulary may be powerful, but it comes from other institutional histories, other activist genealogies, other economic conditions, other relationships to public speech, other experiences of democracy, other class structures, other languages of the self. We become internationally understandable, but locally disconnected. Politically correct in a language that does not always touch the reality of our wounds.

And then resistance becomes performance. That’s how artists are conditioned in Hungary. Academies condition them. Western funding systems condition them. Imported curatorial language conditions them. Peer morality conditions them. International visibility conditions them.

Artists here learn that certain forms of critique travel better. Certain pains are easier to translate. Certain positions are more fundable. Certain words open doors. And slowly, resistance becomes a script. The tragedy is that this script can look radical while being perfectly expected."
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"Some organizations today continue claiming “grassroots” status because they operate with unstable funding, unpaid boards, underpaid management, volunteers, interns, or exhausted teams. And that internal precarity is then used as moral proof of authenticity:
“We are still fragile.”
“We are still alternative.”
“We are still one of you.”
But an organization with large visibility, international partnerships, major public reach, curatorial influence, and significant production capacity does not remain grassroots simply because people inside it are underpaid. At best, it remains structurally unsustainable. At worst, it reproduces exploitation."
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OPEN CALL DETOX
This summer intensive (July 6-10, Budapest) is for artists and creative practitioners who want to stop organizing their work around open calls as the primary horizon, and begin to build conditions in which their work can exist without constantly waiting to be selected.
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When does q***r art stop being q***r?
Not when it’s censored. Not when it’s attacked.
But when it is welcomed, funded, programmed.
What I observe (in Hungary, but not only): when institutions include, they also translate. Into curatorial frameworks, funding logics, audience expectations, market circulation... And translation is never neutral.
What was once illegible, excessive, relational, unstable, becomes readable, presentable, collectible.
Queerness shifts from a lived condition to an aesthetic regime.
From friction to to form. From risk to style.
At some point, it no longer needs to be q***r.
It only needs to look like it.
From here my question:
Is inclusion always a victory?
Or can it also be a form of capture?
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Full text unpacking all this (canonization, aestheticization, institutional logic, and what it might mean to refuse inclusion as a horizon...).
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APR. 25: Performance Night!
Free entry – Reservation required
Book your spot here: www.schoolofdisobedience.org/linktree.html

The institution stays stable. The artist absorbs the uncertainty. Risk is celebrated symbolically, but outsourced materially.