A school can be many things, but the kind of school we are making is one that deliberately exists outside all systems of production and instrumental logics and, therefore, can offer its 'uselessness' as the virtue that, paradoxically, makes it valuable and useful. We are a school that insists on the value and existence of those things that cannot be measured and insist on making them felt. We insist on opening up the way we see, think and do. We insist that seeing, thinking and doing are not separate activities. We insist on the infinite potential that each situation and everyone in it holds and on drawing out those potentials. We insist on giving time, space, support, and amplification to everyone so that their language, the way they interact with all material and immaterial circumstances, may be developed and rooted in them and in their lives.

A few notes

1

The school has become and is still becoming. And in this process of becoming, it is not only transforming itself and being transformed, but it is also radically altering its own foundation and everyone involved. Seyðisfjörður is never the same. The students do not remain the same, and we are certainly not the same. The school has never been anything other than these constant transformations—this remarkable, living activity that escapes definition in order to be alive.

2

A program here is a composition, a set of arranged circumstances, notes on a string. Each note is in its proper place, which could be any place, but then again, it could not. It is where it is. These circumstances have a beginning, but each of them unfolds in largely unpredictable ways, filling out the empty space between the notes and creating a totality in the performance of a composition. And each version is different from the other, though it is easy to recognize the piece as being a particular composition and not some other.

We are conscious while we surrender to unfamiliar logic.

3

Contemporary alternative education must become an integrated, conscious social practice of creating environments for experimentation while simultaneously dissolving the institution's boundaries. Art is not a spectacle removed from the viewer but an integrated experience of our lives. An individual's contribution to their communities and societies is not merely what they produce but how they practice and exist with and along their fellow beings, human and otherwise.

Within our Art program, artistic practice blurs the lines between life and art. It breaks down the barriers of art institutions and transforms them into genuinely cultural institutions that experiment with collective ways-of-being through artistic practice.
We believe that ‘school’ is not a place or a program, but rather a collective practice and quality that we all make and nurture together when we are gathered here in the fjord. The school only exists when it exists.