COOP
DAI's MA in Art Praxis study trajectory offers 4 distinctive curriculum components.
All students are required to take part in all 4 of them:
1. COOP study groups = introduced below
2. How To Do Things With Theory
COOP ~ formal framework 2025-2026:
COOP study groups ~ formal framework
COOP ~ curatorial framework 2025-2026:
COOPs bring makers, researchers, writers, organizers and curators (be they students or tutors) together around well-defined, relevant questions and topics. All are called to active participation in these year-long curated, collaborative, un-disciplined, art research trajectories which are introduced during Confluence#1.
COOPs gather for several days during each DAI Confluence to share research and to develop a group work. Ideally this work comes into being as an entirely collaborative endeavour, but it may also be the umbrella for more or less individually produced works, imaginatively brought together by the study group.
Gatherings can take the form of a seminar, group presentation, workshop, reading group, walk, site visit, boot camp, laboratory, screening, interview, exhibition, ritual, meditation, party, work-out, exercise or otherwise.
COOP partnerships are at the heart of the institution.
Acknowledging since many years that a lot of truly transformative work in art education is done outside the confinement of the university, DAI continues to invite and commission non-academic art institutions and collectives to be the curators of transdisciplinary, collaborative research trajectories.
In the academic year 2025-2026 each member of the DAI’s student body will be able to join 1(one) out of 6 (six) COOP study groups, activated by the following partnering institutions:
*Archive (Berlin, Dakar, Milan)
*Hosting Lands (Copenhagen),
*De Appel Amsterdam (Amsterdam)
*If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam),
*Neringa Forest Architecture (Nida),
*SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin).
These excellent platforms for research and presentation have all been invited because we admire their thoughtful ethics, resilient self-imagination, poetic politics, political poetics and interdependent acting in the world.
DAI's partnership framework is developed by artistic director and head of program Gabriëlle Schleijpen. From the early 2000's onward the DAI has taken up a pioneering role by creating substantial, educational space and agency within its curriculum for headstrong, non-academic partners from the expanded field of contemporary art. Form and output of the COOP as curriculum component have been thought and re-thought, shaped and re-shaped over many years (see our COOP ARCHIVE in the making).
COOPs bring the academic and the vernacular together around pertinent questions.
As an educational program with purpose, we are absolutely thrilled that the COOP partners are willing to share their highly valued, precise knowledges, skills, experiences and networks with our community. In return upon DAI’s investment in each collaboration, we ask them to carefully curate tutorial teams with a compelling vision on study and non-extractive forms of research, while eager to collaborate with our student body. All COOPs acknowledge the hybrid nature of current praxis wherein roles can easily co-exist in one person or be swapped among the members of a collective or otherwise.
How to do things as COOP:
COOP education leader 2025-2026 is Philippa Driest; in charge of the management of the organisational and formal aspects of this curriculum component. For the academic year 2025-2026 students and tutors direct all their questions in regard to the modus operandi of the COOPs to her.
As said: over the course of one academic year every DAI-student will join one of the COOPs. Thus, during the two years of study at DAI a student participates in two different year-long COOP study group trajectories.
Each COOP's modus operandi is guided by an overarching question or proposition to which all (so including the tutors) can respond with aural, visual, tactile, performative, digital, cinematographic, choreographic, architectural, curatorial, textual, theatrical, theoretical, and practical contributions (embedded within the framework created by the tutor team). Students can be asked to prepare and lead specific sessions.
The tutorial teams offer support to every student to help create meaningful connections between the student's praxis and the specific field of enquiry of the study group.
Students are asked to invest generous time, in-and outside DAI Confluences ( see the formal framework for the required number of hours). Next to artistic, theoretical, and curatorial vision, practical skills and knowledges will be of crucial importance to:
COOP SUMMIT 2026
The annual more or less 'GRAND' finale of the 2025-2026 COOP trajectory is envisioned as a thoughtful intra-action between students, tutors, guests, and the general public, all those who are interested and happen to be around. On the 15th, 16th and 17th of July, COOP SUMMIT 2026 will be enacted in Matera, a city in the South of Italy, famous for its ancient cave dwellings, or "Sassi," carved into the limestone rock. Matera is considered the third oldest city in the world, after Aleppo and Jericho, with evidence of continuous habitation dating back over 10,000 years.
COOP SUMMIT OVERVIEW since 2018
CHRONICLES
CHRONICLES are containers, curated, moulded, sculpted and choreographed by the student participants in our COOP study groups. Here textual, visual and aural notes echo day to day encounters during the DAI's monthly study group gatherings. Taking shape by diverse forms and styles of mediation, they exist as fragmented, artistic and lively modes of archiving how knowledge was produced and shared; thus building a student led mnemonic reservoir of and for our fleeting community and beyond.
