Introducing the Halifax Free Art School

In terms of “art education”, the institutional model always already limits art’s potential directions and is burdened with: the costliness of tuition, administrative control, rigidity of course offerings and duration, pre-requisites toward a degree, infrastructure dependency, etc.

Alternatively, the idea of a Free Art School is to “free up” these limitations as much as possible through an alternative organizational structure while offering these possibilities as “free” as possible from monetary concerns.

The Halifax Free Art School shall be:
- self-defined and self-managed;
- a “school” as an assemblage open to constant flux and spontaneous content;
- about an engaged community that encourages collaborative learning and action;
- limited only by our enthusiasm along with our will for resourcefulness —— in other words, if the will is there, the resourcefulness can be found; if the will isn’t there, nothing will happen.

Akin to the “anarchist free school” model, a vision for the Free Art School takes the horizontally-oriented rhizome as the model for organization and growth, as opposed to the vertically-oriented “tree-like” institutional model. The definition of a “rhizome” is “a continuously growing horizontal underground stem which puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals, where being “adventitious” means "happening as a result of an external factor or chance rather than design or inherent nature." (Grass is an example of a rhizome.)

In A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, they write: “Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified [i.e. imitating a tree], it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.”

This rhizomatic organizational model allows interest groups to become outshoots from outshoots and so on, always staying connected to one another, expanding organically from which “courses”, “workgroups” and "workshops" can spring up spontaneously based on our multiplicity of interests, curiosities and concerns, as opposed to fulfilling requirements within a restricted program with more rigid and finite options.

The educational possibilities of the Halifax Free Art School will be limited only by our enthusiasm and resourcefulness, and therefore will be completely learner/learning-driven, self-defined and self-managed.

Although we can say the Halifax Free Art School is now taking root, we must seek to maintain its rhizomatical structure over time. Again, to quote A Thousand Plateaus: "The multiplicity necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections."