The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the planetary emergency is no longer an imagined concept, it is part of the world’s colonial history and it will contribute to long-term degradation of human and non-human ecosystems.

During four week-ends taking place every season of the coming year, the Common Dreams School offers interwoven meetings to see, think, discuss, dream and experiment survival kit proposals to adapt to the newness and the unknown that we are facing.

Throughout this series of communal experiments and hands on, we will focus on the essential survival tools dealing with health-care, modes of kinship, environmental and climate justice.

During the gatherings, we will set an intention, to experiment with different methods, as an alchemic transformative process, using new dialogues and vocabulary to resist the entangled mess we live in.

Each session will take place in situ, in a different environment; in the nature, in an abandoned mythic building, in public square…

Session 1 - Autumn

_Shelter – Kinship – Health _

Regenerative activism for mental health, grounding ourselves for the unexpected and the unknown.

Location: Rouge-Cloître Dates: 30-31 October 2020
Guest: Steven Desanghere

Session 2 - Winter

Survie - Endurance - Activation

Valuing the sense of togetherness while accessing the knowledge we inherited to creatively seizing survival.

Location: Maison Uccle Dates: 5-6 February 2020

Session 3 - Spring

Organizing - Climate justice - Ecocide

Dealing with the “im-possibility” of a fair or just climate governance while equipping ourselves with tools in preparation for the recognition of ecocide as a crime.

Location: (exact location to be confirmed)
Dates: 23-24 April 2021
Guests: Marine Calmet

Session 4 - Summer

Possibility - Becoming - Newness

Summing up previous sessions work-in-progress/sharing. Activating the ideas explored in previous sessions in a format to determine collaboratively with the group (reading, live presentation, action in public space…?)

Location: Urban, in situ (exact location to be confirmed)
Dates: 25-26 June 2021

Participants: Artists, activists, researchers, scientists, doctors, farmers, philosophers, climatologists, lawyers, biologists, economists...

Common Dreams School - Kit de survie

Common Dreams: Floatation School, is an ongoing autonomous climate school, taking different formats according to partners and territories, offering workshops on survival, sustainability, climate adaptation, climate grief and loss of landscapes.

First edition (2017-18) Vooruitkunstcentrum, City of Gent, Kask, Urban Meds

Second edition (2019) Contour biennale 9, "Coltan as Cotton”, Straathoekwerk Mechelen, Piraten van de Dijle

Third edition (2020-21) Far Nyon and Head School of Arts

Fourth edition (2020-21) Cifas, Brussels

Fifth edition (2021-22) Dream city, Tunisia

More info:  http://mluciacruzcorreia.com/works/common-dreams-flotation

Maria Lucia Cruz Correia

Correia's artistic work speaks her deep engagement for environmental crises and climate change.
She reacts to the ecological crimes of our times by bringing audiences into a participatory environment that connects the artistic with the voices of scientists, activists and lawyers. Her actions tackle human disturbances by proposing clinical esthetics that unveil human and non-human interconnectivity.
While proposing participatory articulations as temporary and autonomous platforms, Correia's work is informed by contemporary discourses on the anthropocene and environmental justice.
Most of her projects are participatory tools as proposals for utopian public services to disrupt social immunity to environmental pollution.
Since 2013, Correia is artist part of the program city residency in Vooruitkunstcentrum and her work is being supported by Imagine 2020 network. In 2017 she received the Roel Verniers Prijs at the Theaterfestival with her first theater piece Voice of nature: the trial and in 2020 she was shortlisted for Coal prize with her most recent project Kinstitute.

MOSSS

MOSSS (Moving Observations on Surviving Soft Skills) is made up of Mélanie Ganino and Sarah Drapeau. MOSSS is a nomadic research project that investigates methodologies of adaptation, collaboration, survival and care inspired by the living, in an attempt to create new imaginaries in this world in crisis, and to act as a platform for equipping ourselves for instability. By developing hybrid forms of workshop where the boundaries between shared experience, scientific knowledge and fiction become intertwined, MOSSS creates spaces for meeting and co-learning with humans and the more-than-human, combining exploratory walking and sensory experiences. In collaboration with Delphine Mertens, they published the Radical Survival Toolkit following a Brussels edition of the Common Dreams School given by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia in 2020-2021 at Cifas, a collective eco-pedagogical project aimed at exploring, imagining and creating alternatives for coping with climate change. The Radical Survival Toolkit was born out of the desire to create a publication that would serve as a documentation of the shared experience of the project, as well as a toolkit. This publication is a selection of tools and reflections from the Common Dreams School and elsewhere, as well as new writing related to the project's themes. It offers open-ended research on adapting to the unknown and to instability, and questions through different forms the possibilities of a more desirable world.