KUNCI Study Forum

Since its founding as a cultural studies group in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective has experimented with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of collective study at the intersections of affective, manual, and intellectual labor. This pamphlet is a collaboratively authored epistolary essay that narrates the discourse behind the development of KUNCI’s School of Improper Education, an initiative that posits studying together as a tactical approach to creating the conditions for social movement. Founded in 2016, The School of Improper Education is an avenue through which unlearning can be practiced, where unknowingness can be transformed into a series of productive tools for understanding the contemporary social ecosystem and articulating the resourcefulness of an independent art and cultural organization.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

KUNCI Study Forum & Collective experiments with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of studying together at the intersections between affective, manual, and intellectual labor. Since its founding in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI has been continuously transforming its structure, ways, and medium of working. Initially formed as a cultural studies study group, at present KUNCI’s practices emphasize collectivizing study by way of space-making, discussion, research, publishing, and school-organizing. KUNCI traverses and connects institutional, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. KUNCI’S membership is informal and based on friendship, as well as principles of self-organization and collaboration.

The first volume in a series devoted to Marion von Osten's archives, around the MoneyNations project, transversing between art, theory, and activism.

MoneyNations was an exhibition, a webzine, a radio, a conference, a video archive, a printed publication, an infrastructure, a counterpublic, an ongoing discussion, a transnational network of friends. Initiated by Marion von Osten as curator at the Shedhalle Zurich, the project evolved from an urgency to act against the hegemonic forces of "the West" within the radically changing condition of post-Cold War Europe. MoneyNations addressed—and intervened in—the interrelatedness between racist border policies and media representations, exploitative economic relations, and identity-forming processes. The applied methods of critique and organizing, transversing between art, theory, and activism, are made accessible in this volume through images, correspondences, and other ephemera, revealing their political potential for the present. It is contextualized by a conversation between Sezgin Boynik (Rab-Rab Press), Ferdiansyah Thajib (KUNCI Study Forum & Collective), Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camila Willis (Divided Press) and the editors.

The Material Marion von Osten series periodically publishes selected archival documents from von Osten's projects and contextualizes them with new contributions. Correspondences, drafts, scripts, photographs, videos and printed matter serve as the starting point for the publication series which maps the complexity of Marion von Osten's transversal cultural production in its details and specifics.

The artist, curator, researcher, and educator Marion von Osten (1963-2020) lived in Berlin since the early 1990s. Her always collaborative approach manifested in exhibitions, conferences, installations, as well as films, discussions, texts, teachings, or self-published journals. Her projects were all intertwined and carried by her specific way of working: through artistic research and feminist organizing, transnational and committed to the project of decolonization. Amongst her works are the international exhibition series bauhaus imaginista (2018-2020), Viet Nam Discourse (2016-2018) at Tensta Konsthall, Project Migration (2002-2006) in Cologne, and Sex & Space (1996) at Shedhalle Zurich. As collective infrastructures, her collaborations included Labor k3000, kleines postfordistisches Drama (Minor Postfordist Drama, kpD) and the CPKC Center for Postcolonial Knowledge and Culture.

Edited by Lucie Kolb, Jonas von Lenthe, Max Stocklosa.

Conversation between Sezgin Boynik, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camila Willis and the editors.