The Whole Life Academy is an experimental, collaborative research initiative. It takes on the long-term development of a hands-on methodology of site-specific research. Its participants collectively develop and practice a “nomadic curriculum”, a spatially expanded research setting that develops through a movement of knowledge and its producers, applying questions and methods on-site, within and in-between archival settings, objects, and narratives.
The second edition of the Academy is set to take place in Berlin. In a week-long program of excursions, seminars, and archival viewings the archive is taken up as a space for dialogue, collective knowledge production, and mobilization in the midst of current social and political upheaval. Alternative archival methods and practices are explored in relation to urgent discussions on natural and cultural ecologies, on decolonizing and rereading archival objects, and on the ways that digital and analogue tools can re-open historical narratives and canons.
The call for participation is addressed to scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines including the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences, design, and architecture. The Academy promotes an interdisciplinary working environment and welcomes applications from artists, writers, researchers, curators, journalists, activists, or from professionals working within institutions with collections, archives, or other systems of knowledge.