Modstand fra neden. Det Fri Universitet i København og muligheden for et kritisk (re)engagement i kunstinstitutionen

The artist run anarcho-collective Copenhagen Free University that unfolded from 2001 to 2007 in the private apartment of Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen was an attempt to create a free and autonomous university for alternative and marginalized forms of knowledge outside the profit oriented, neoliberal knowledge economy. The article starts out with a presentation of Copenhagen Free University’s project and its attempt to develop a strategy of self-institutionalization fusing collective knowledge production and radical pedagogy. Hereafter follows a discussion about the similarity between Copenhagen Free University and New Institutionalism, a strategy adopted by medium-sized art institutions in an attempt to put the art institution to a progressive end. As the article points out, Copenhagen Free University could be said to have ended in a paradoxical position where it mirrored a broader development taking place within contemporary capitalism where notions like autonomy, participation, creativity, temporality and openness played a significant role in the breaking down of the barriers between work and life. The article ends by asking whether the economic crisis could result in new experimental attempts to take over the art institution, putting it to anti-capitalist purposes.