alternative education programme

Rupert is excited to announce the open call for the 13th edition of the Alternative Education Programme, which will take place between 16 June and 28 November 2025.

Being an artist today means developing new sensitivities, systems of care, working conditions, and forms of kinship. We steer our ship through rough waters—navigating institutional and market pressures, financial uncertainty, and a polarized political landscape. Today’s artists are expected to be not just creators, but also administrators, producers, financiers, and strategists of their practice, constantly shifting between different modes of labor. Yet, do we have the tools to embrace the many roles we must play in order to sustain our work, with confidence?

José Esteban Muñoz, a foundational thinker in queer theory and performance studies, describes disidentification as a strategy of resistance—one that allows marginalized communities to navigate dominant social and ideological structures without fully assimilating or outright rejecting them. Instead, they negotiate, subvert, appropriate, and reinterpret. Perhaps artists, too, employ disidentification as a way of working—moving within and against the systems that shape their practice, adapting and repurposing the tools at hand. But how does this actually work?

Let us begin with looking at the overlooked spaces of artistic labor—the kitchen, the toolbox, the Excel sheet, the backyard, the storage room, the delete-folder—the backstage mechanics of artistic survival. Yet these less visible aspects of practice are rarely acknowledged, let alone compensated. The Secretary, the Shaman, the Scholar, the Lobbyist, the Publicist, and the Virtuoso seeks to highlight artistic practice as a complex whole, one that requires a range of skills, and to help less experienced artists find their way through it. This year’s AEP invites a constellation of fantastic accomplished tutors whose research fundamentally rethinks the self-organisation structures of artistic life and practice, the artist’s relationship to institutions, and artistic practice as a form of labour.

Andrea Fraser is one of the visionaries to offer a bird’s-eye view at the artistic self within a larger ecosystem, in order to detect whether, with our choices, we resist or reproduce the status quo. She deconstructs the contemporary art field, proposing that it has fragmented into relatively segregated subfields (art market, exhibition, academic, community-based, and cultural activism)—each operating under different economies, discourses, and systems of value. Instead of a singular art world, we are agents of a complex ecosystem where struggles over power, legitimacy, and value define an artist’s position and practice.

A close-up view of a practice reveals that the kitchen, the backstage, or the spreadsheets may each be art forms unto themselves. But how do we embed administration into the practice or, how do we, as Kate Rich suggests, radicalise it to the degree of practice, finding magic within it? How do we resist the authority of museums, galleries, and the media whose focus almost exclusively lies on the final product? And what determines whether we remain stuck in the carousel of never-ending “boring” tasks—is it a question of class4? What conditions would allow us to work as artists differently? Perhaps, as Vijai Maia Patchineelam insists, it requires an entirely new job position, one that does not yet exist?

We need to learn from one another, to displace and exchange contexts in order to reimagine our own practices anew. This year, the Alternative Education Programme is focused around nine condensed weeks of workshops, presentations and events in Vilnius, spread across six months. Additionally, the group will embark on a research trip to Brussels, to collaborate and exchange with artists’ collectives active in Belgium, including Level 5, Établissement d’en face, KASK Curatorial Studies, A.pass, and others. The programme will culminate with the final event and Rupert Journal publication in late November. We are looking forward to dedicated interdisciplinary applicants with a certain degree of experience in their practice, yet those who feel a need to question and re-invent what they know and do, and to experience collective experimental forms of learning. There are no formal requirements for the applicants’ education or experience.

Finally, artists need time off too—to detach themselves from the struggles of the art world and reshape their immediate contexts into something entirely different, perhaps into looser structures. Shall we cook some potatoes over an open fire? Or build a ship together, as an alternative floating space, a place for escaping the system while continuing to practice coexistence?