Communality within art education can only be achieved if institutions dare to be 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. The DAI operates in intricate, organic entanglement with external partners from the expanded field of contemporary art. Our partners (continue to) share their compelling and urgent curatorial visions on study and non-extractive forms of research as well as their transnational kinship networks, with our community.

Ever since 2006 DAI has been teaming up with relatively small but seminal art research platforms and collectives (all of them highly invested in 'instituting otherwise') and inviting them to curate and tutor collaborative study trajectories within the configuration of our curriculum, most notably practised through our COOP study groups. There we commission substantial 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).

Our partners all actively produce and publicly present artistic research. In contrast to the DAI itself, they are in general not part of formal academic infrastructures. At DAI we feel that their non-aligned praxes at the intersections of research, pedagogy, activism, curation and publicness are of huge inspirational relevance to the positioning of our students as practitioners and researchers. Our partners radiate that our identities as art workers are constantly being shaped by our connections to others and the world around us. 

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