Bologna to Eindhoven (via London)
November 2-15, 2006

The Ambulator is a question relay that proliferates roaming encounters and public discourses. Since September, 2006 the project has been hosted by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL), part of the exhibition, Academy: Learning from the Museum. In collaboration with the staff at the museum, students and people in the city of Eindhoven, questions and answers have been generated, exchanged, accumulated and lost. One such question will take to the road in November:

‘What Can We Learn from Free Labour?’

The Ambulator Camper Van will dispatch this question on a route that begins in Bologna, home of the first university of the western world and, more recently, of the Bologna Process, an initiative of the European Commission that aims to standardize education across the continent. This ongoing process, while virtually absent from media discourse, has proposed a number of problematic reforms in all aspects of education, including the drastic re-definition of its relationship to labour. The Ambulator expedition wonders:

  • What will it mean to receive credits for all aspects of our participation in public life?
  • How are unpaid internships different from free labour?
  • Why are people being sent to school to get a visa?
  • Are our endless educational experiences suspending the realization that there are actually no jobs for us?

Questions generated from conversations in each city will be delivered to the next one on route. The relay will continue through a modest publication, a reading group and who knows what else. After all, expeditions serve precisely to gain an idea of the morphology of a territory!

If you take part in self-organized knowledge exchanges, have experiences of daily virtuosity, or strategic proposals about resisting the current state of affairs in education that you’d like to share, we’d love to meet with you along this improvised journey.

Itinerary

November 2   Torino, Atipici
November 3   Bologna, University of Bologna & Autonomous Lab
November 4   Rome, Precarious Living Demo
November 5   Munich, TBA
November 6   Antwerp, MUKHA, HISK
November 10 London camper van party
November 15 Eindhoven, Vanabbemuseum

…with the possibility of all stops along the route (Milan, Basel, Bonn, Koln, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Lucerne, Freiburg, Gent, Brussels).

Contact: theambulator@gmail.com for more information or check this blog for postings!!