Through framing the project as a ‘school’ an effective relationship is established with the history of the school as an institution and the problematic, over-commercialised and bureaucratic conditions that it is operating in today. Schools are becoming places that are very isolated from their context.

There is some precision in the use of ‘school’ or ‘escuela’ in Spanish. The negation in its name, Le Escuela Nunca, or the ‘Never School’, plays with the idea of opposing the conservative, neoliberal understanding of what a school is and critiques the main structures that formulate those schools. That’s why we define our school as a non-disciplinary, non-commercial, non-bureaucratic space that allows for the exchange of knowledge in a free, open space. That’s how we’ve chosen to define the word school. Because we know how schools usually operate. We have been living in schools, and working for them, and we know how much the bureaucracy takes out of our soul and time every day. So in many ways, our definition of a school opposes the neoliberal project.

We never think about this project as an alternative space that we can permanently move into. Rather, we think of it more as a parasite of conventional institutions that gives us space to criticise what is happening in the outside world, so there is a constant interaction with conventional and independent space.

I agree that this idea of creating an isolated temporal space with your community has the risk of becoming a bubble that doesn't actually respond to what it’s criticising. What comes to mind is this text by Rosa Luxemburg ‘Reform or Revolution’² Rosa Luxemburg, & Mary-Alice Waters (1973).
Reform or Revolution Pathfinder where she refers to the comparison between unions and cooperatives; unions being the structures that try to reform the state or the system, and cooperatives having the problem of becoming isolated bubbles that only become good models for themselves. So, I totally agree that there is a risk of this happening. In one dimension, the way the school is trying to deal with this contradiction is by creating a space of care. We believe that one of the main transformations against neoliberalism is transforming our way of working, our way of producing knowledge and trying to get rid of the anxiety of overproduction or becoming ‘entrepreneurs’. So that is one of the main battles we have, both individually and as a group. And I honestly believe that that’s as important as the battle with the institution itself. In another dimension, the school is trying to constantly force ourselves to appear outside, to appear in the street, to go to as many events as we could and to invite people from outside to influence our work.

That is one of the key elements of the school. It is about opening up the space for the school to be accessed, judged and criticised. It is about testing, reflecting and transforming in the same way as it is about practising.

For me, it relates to architecture in terms of value, in terms of property, and in terms of theoretical organisation. We also still talk about architecture in the school, or at least what we understand as architecture. We still discuss political problems that are very related to material conditions.

There's so many parts to question about the relation of our school with architecture. I will say that we are in conflict with the architectural discipline. In fact, our relationship with architecture is not a nice one and we are in the process of a breakup. But we are finding new friends, making new connections and are trying to be as simple as possible with this idea. I still believe that there is a struggle inside the architectural field to expand the discipline from the idea of just buildings, parks and the urban. I think that by stealing some methods, processes, actions and performances that are present in art, there are possibilities of creating other forms of knowledge for our discipline. I know that it is easier to define the school as non-disciplinary, or trans-disciplinary. But I prefer to maintain our connection to some sort of architectural condition that we are trying to expand and change. I prefer to try to transform that condition instead of negating it and giving it away completely.

Here, in South America, there are other histories that are not necessarily known to Western societies. In those histories, projects of development and outbreaks of futures exist. We believe that both the role of the future and the role of these ‘other histories’ are related.

For example, when we started at the end of 2019, something very particular was happening in the social movements. The Mapuche flag became one of the most important symbols of what was happening there. A lot of people that were carrying this flag were not necessarily Mapuche themselves, so there seemed to be a project of solidarity forming—a solidarity project that represents a lot of people that are not necessarily under that same level of oppression. In that manner, there are lots of histories that still contain ideas of the future. Therefore, we really believe that we can look back to other projects of society, other projects of organisation, in order to try and deal with the challenges of the present and to also reimagine the future.

We were discussing the idea of references the other day, and very naturally, the school doesn't seem to have any reference. Not in a way that we haven't had any interesting imaginaries to refer to, but more to do with the moment of this project’s appearance. The project is extremely absorbed by the present. I feel that it is almost an obligation to pay excessive attention to what is happening right now, what’s been happening in Chile since 2019, and to all the movements that are happening around the world from COVID-19 onwards. So in that way, the project has the energy and capacity to deal with these subjects. As you can see, in the names of the appearances, the themes or the subjects that we’ve been trying to study, to learn, and to reflect on, are mostly dealing with present or future models of society. So, for the moment, we are not going backwards in history too much. This is something we all relate to in our own personal research projects and it’s also something that we are trying to change in the next format of our operations in an attempt to be more careful with how we do research and how we produce different ways of knowledge.