I believe that schools began with a man under a tree, who did not know he was a teacher, sharing his realisations with others, who did not know they were students. — Louis Kahn, Form and Design, 1960.

‘The Tree School’ is a project initiated in 2014 by two groups that share a common interest in decolonising knowledge, Palestinian initiative of Campus in Camps and Brazilian-based art collective Contrafilé. The project, part of the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, aims to cultivate / strengthen community-based knowledge in the global South and share / learn from each other’s experiences of resistance to colonialism — a common history that connects all peoples in the region. In this experiment, education plays a vital role in imagining and materialising new forms of decolonised knowledge to challenge dominant forms of political subjugation.

The project explores a radical pedagogy to make possible new forms of knowledge production wherein the teacher-student contradiction is resolved. Abandoning institutional (colonial) architecture, the school gathers under a tree to create open spaces of critical production that overcome hierarchies where adults teach, children and youth learn, and elders are isolated. The Tree School has been held in Brazil, Mexico and Palestine.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 2nd, 2015

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