We feel that art education can only generate relevant communality if its institutions are at the same time both protective as well as porous: staunchly resistant to the 'flexible' supermarket model of the neo-liberal edu-factory, while purposefully 'leaking' unpredictable knowledges inside out and outside in. To achieve this, DAI has chosen to operate in intricate, organic entanglement with external partners from the expanded field of contemporary art. Our partners (continue to) share their compelling curatorial and urgent visions on study and non-extractive forms of research as well as their transnational kinship networks with our community.

Over many years DAI has been inviting relatively small but absolutely seminal platforms, collectives and art institutions (all of them highly invested in 'instituting otherwise') to curate collaborative study trajectories within the configuration of our COOPs or our Roaming Assemblies. We commission substantial curricular contributions capable of gently co-shaping our ways of thinking and doing as distinguished educational program. We thus embrace our partners as co-drivers of our program's ongoing transformation towards an 'education as the practice of freedom' (bell hooks).

Partners are public institutions, committed to actively presenting their (artistic) research findings to the world. Most of them are not formally part of an academic infrastructure. At DAI we feel that their non-aligned praxes at the intersections of research, pedagogy, activism and presentation are potentially of huge inspirational relevance to the positioning of our students as practioners and researchers. Our partners ooze that making sense as artist, curator, researcher, means to always be 'in relation'. 

We are deeply grateful for the generosity and warmth with which all the 'humans of the institutions', mingle and merge with our 'learning movement'.