School Of Love (SOL) is a collective based in Brussels. Members of SOL have various artistic backgrounds, such as performance, dance, visual arts, teaching, participative practices, anthropology and music.
We develop collective artistic practices, which invite people to explore ways and skills of being and acting together. We do this by approaching love as a mode of engagement in political and social spheres, rather than only as a personal matter. Love carries qualities of embodied attention and emotional availability, its more than a feeling: it’s a choice, a practice, an intention.
SOL believes that new forms of collectivity need to be experimented with in order to create future resilient communities with a strong system of mutuality. We wonder if the liveliness, care, commitment and generosity that love evokes in us when we love privately, could claim the space in collectivity and community as a valuable survival skill.
SOL engages with the exploration and dissemination of this notion of love through artistic methodologies and formats for collective learning that bring together elements from art and pedagogy. We trust that both of these fields can cultivate love as a social agent.
We feel called to act upon the fact that individual challenges are often the product of social structures and historical constructions and therefore should be dealt with collectively and not on an individual level. This is why we consider the collective itself as an object of exploration. SOL implements collective governance which we choose to understand as an exercise of love. The challenges that this practice poses are the core learning process SOL is committed to.
SOL’s practices contain co-learning processes, participative events and performances that address diverse people, such as high school pupils and teachers, art practitioners and activists, and the broad public of art institutions.
The current core group of SOL consists of: Shila Anaraki, Olga Bientz, Ychaï Gassenbauer, Laura Oriol, Martina Petrovic, Irena Radmanovic, Adva Zakai.