This issue of e-flux journal is developed in parallel with Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut, led this coming year by Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle as an experimental school open to all. The program’s opening in September was postponed due to the anticipated US strike against Assad’s forces in Syria and the deterioration of security in Lebanon that would have followed. However, the strike never materialized and a number of local and international students arrived in Beirut despite the postponement, starting their own program they call Chapter Zero. We invited them to contribute a letter to this issue the journal.
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
We are a group of people who have gathered in Beirut despite the postponement, due to the political situation in Lebanon, of the program in which we were supposed to participate. Some of us are based here, and some chose to come with no regard for the sudden changes in the school’s schedule.
The activity we have conceived and are about to discuss—a self-proclaimed and self-organized “Chapter Zero” of Home Workspace Program 2013-14—is not only for those but also implemented by those who are willing to participate. It seems that we’ve already found ourselves in a utopia of education: the school is empty, the professors did not show up, but we did, and what we do next is up to us. And it seems that there’s at least one more thing we have in common: an urge, a necessity, to do things with others. Where does this urge come from? (Oleksiy)
Read the full article here.