Take a look at the lectures in International Festival University. Download the videos and learn at home, or check them out in the browser.
The show is going on with four more videos coming up.

Bishop Anton Hurkmans has in his mission created a strong and exceptional social climate in the region. He has opened the church to contemporary society and offered it to his community as a site for hospitality and curiosity. Bishop Hurkmans will focus his talk on how the church is a place for different learning experiences and a prolific site for knowledge production.

Jos de Kroon is Netherlands foremost authority on psychoanalyst with his own practice in Eindhoven. An expert in family therapy, a psychiatrist and with a thorough background both as practitioner and academic in psychoanalysis Jos de Kroon is an exceptional resource in Eindhoven. De Kroon will lead the audience into the wrinnkes of our minds and examine the arts relation to psychoanalysis.

Frank Schipper the fourt guesst to International Festival University took the audience on a journey from road movies to Highway to Hell, from safe paths to way out, from street wise to cruising. Four touch downs offered an adventurous journey from Kamikaze-like early racing, via 30s utopian Italian autostrada with excellent roadside service and to venture for the checkered flag with a flavor of activism and the possible pro's and con's referencing European net-works. The roads mights seem innocent, but Hey hey hey its not a crash now and then that matters - roads are major for how we live our lives. Are you driving on the right or wrong side...

Baby, you can drive my car
yes, I'm gonna be a star
Baby you can drive my car
And maybe I'll love you
Beep beep mm beep beep, yeah
Beep beep mm beep beep, yeah
Beep beep mm beep beep, yeah

Our third guests Hans Schalkwijk has through his work in Eindhoven reinvented law enforcement’s proce-dures to create a safe environment for sex workers. Through consistent and pro active efforts Hans Schalkwijk and his colleagues at the Eindhoven police has created an exam-ple that is revolutionary in Europe in respect of how society relates to prostitution.

Hans Schalkwijk stress that addressing prostitution require strong partnerships, involving a wide range of enforcement and support agencies. Success in delivering safer communities through a significant reduction in street prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation will depend on the will and commitment of local partnerships to address prostitution with confidence and energy – confidence that it really is possible to make a difference, and energy to tackle the many challenges involved. Many individuals and communities already pay a significant price for the existence of a sex market – in those communities we simply cannot afford to ignore the many
problems associated with prostitution.

Second around Kim Weltman plays deep down in history to find the roots to creativity and the starting point of the alphabet. Check out the powerpoint: the tempo is amazing.

Kim Veltman is strongly engaged in Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institutet

Marshall McLuhan explored historical effects of new media on the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, arithmetic and music) - or the arts and sciences - and implications for those effects on knowledge and culture then and today. VMMI proposes to continue these explorations, with a new focus: Knowledge Organization and Cultural Computing.

First out Celine Condorelli architect living and working in London busy with thinking about notions of support.

She is, together with Gavin Wade, the initiator of Support Structure an architectural interface. Support Structure aims to create a space which is continuously reinvented by its users in relation to its context. Support Structure houses artefacts as well as activities and aids reconsideration of existing spaces as an impulse for future change.

Who wants to know?

International Festival University (IFU) in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum celebrates knowledge. This pilot project invites the population of Eindhoven to engage in a series of lectures offered by local and international experts over a two weeks period.

For the first time in history the museum is doubling as a university campus, transforming into a platform for production of knowledge outside traditional learning institutes. As art of the exhibition Academy: Learning from the Museum, IFU changes the user interface of the museum into a place of activation and exchange.

The museum as well as the academy or university shouldn’t just facilitate information but be a place where we can imagine life differently, where new knowledge can be produced.
Learning and knowing carries the potentiality for change, it is IFU’s mission to let all participants release their specific desires and potentials.

IFU raises questions around authorisation of knowledge and learning: Who offered universities monopoly on certain categories of knowledge, and who decided that knowledge is stuff in books disqualifying other modes of being and learning from experience?

This autumn IFU engage in contemporary concepts of public space, its use and authorization, and on the other hand in knowledge and its status and quality here and now and in the future.

IFU invites everybody who wants to know to take an active part in a knowledge community created in Van Abbemuseum. Only together and with an active address can we change and imagine a different future.

International Festival, in Learning From The Museum in Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven.

International Festival University and Archive In The Making has been set up as context specific environment where relations between learning experiences, public space and democratisation processes.

IFU is set up as an autonomous structure that from now on will produce a program for lectures involving local expertice and enaging the local population to perform a manual for alternative learning environments and contexts of knowledge production.

The Archive In The Making is an ongoing collection of items text and object into a archive of differentiating context of knowledge related to authorization and ownership. Here knowledge is to be understood as a multitude of differentiating protocolls and means for distribution.

Academy

15 September - 26 November 2006

Academy is an international series of exhibitions, projects and events initiated by Siemens Arts Program and realised in cooperation with the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London, the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. A continuous project that wishes to prompt reflection on the potential of the academy within society. The start of this project was in 2005 at the Kunst-verein in Hamburg reflecting the situation of students and teachers at art schools in the exhibition entitled Academy. Teaching and Learning Art. In September 2006 the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven take up the subject of this project in a different approach addressing the institution of the museum itself and its educational remit.

Learning from the Museum
While traditionally the museum sets up an idealized notion of what or how one should learn from its presentations, ‘Academy. Learning from the Museum’ wishes to examine the question “What may be possible to learn from the museum beyond what the museum sets up to offer?” Academy is regarded as an ongoing process. It will produce an alternative set of principles for teaching and learning, and view the museum as a cumulative archive of experiences, histories and dynamics that expand beyond the notion of a collection of objects. Groups of activists, theorists, artists, students, archivists, librarians, and philosophers have been invited to contribute and help answer this question. They will work with the collection, the different departments including the staff, and other resources outside of the museum. By doing so they will try to extend the borders of the traditional museum display. Therefore Academy is a pilot project for further investigations
of new possibilities for education and knowledge exchange that the Van Abbemuseum will develop in future, like the award winning programme Be[com]ing Dutch in the Age of Global Democracy.

Video from the opening

Here a first little video shot just before the opening.

During the seminar held during the opening day students already found new ways of using the space. Artistic meeting and chit chatting seems to work excellent.