Video and Audio

Here you can find the latest videos about School activities, teachings, events and progress in building our concrete utopia.

In Praise of Oral Communication

A group of people here and now, in a “classroom” under an olive tree, is a perfect example of the impact of orality. The drawbacks are obvious: it is small-scale and limited in scope. But everyone can respond; everyone can answer. Without pressure and with a common goal, the learning experience is not an exchange…
Reconstruction of the Old Stone House

The Material Arrives With a clear vision in our minds, we spent the last summer carrying bags of sand and cement uphill, but that was not the end of our own little “Fitzcarraldo” episode. As the spring of 2023 approached, we continued with our “happy Sisyphus” work: the construction material for the restoration of the…
Momo

(or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people) Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. ― Michael Ende, Momo Michael…
Permaculture

ISSA aims to be a place for exploration of sustainable living, as we would love to distance ourselves as far as possible from unsustainable, extractive, and pollutive methods that are endangering life on our planet. As the blurb for Terry Leah’s Politics of Permaculture states: “Permaculture is an environmental movement that makes us reevaluate what…
Isonomia: Thoughts on equality

In his ground-breaking work, published in English only in 2017 under the title Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy, the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani convincingly shows that taking Athenian democracy as a model will never allow us to solve the problems modern democracy is facing. Being the composite of liberalism plus democracy, it is not…
Why DIY

The system has always had its gatekeepers. Especially efficient—quiet, tame, and decently seated in tweed jackets with elbow patches—were the ones operating in the realm of the ideological apparatus of the state, mass media, and the vast, vastly ideologized cultural field. What were we taught in our schools and universities, what was served for us…
Happy Sisyphus

“The struggle itself […] is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” ― Albert Camus We never quite fully understood Camus’ famous quote from the end of his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus until we began this crazy radna akcija (“work action”) that lasted from May to September 2022. It…
The Mediterranean

The Mediterranean is no less than thousands of things together. Not merely single sceneries, but countless ones. Not a single sea, but a succession of seas. Not a mere civilization, but heaps of civilizations piling on top of each other. The Mediterranean is a historically old crossroad: for several millennia, everything centered around it, muddling,…
Mutual Aid

Peter Kropotkin, a staunch critic of the Hobbes’ doctrine on the state of nature where “each man lives for himself” or where homo homini lupus est, but also a skilled zoologist and geographer, who was observing kinds of cooperation existing in nature long before today’s climate movement took shape, developed his own views on what…
Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is…
Pedagogy of the Opressed

In his seminal work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argues for a pedagogy that treats the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. He dismisses traditional pedagogy as the “banking model of education” which approaches the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, and instead proposes a problem-posing model wherein…
ISSA Garden: Hibiscus and Cypress

A big part of our school is our ISSA Garden. The garden, like the rest of our plans for the school, awaits our learning, experimenting, and exploring, while dealing with the climate crisis – lack of rain, prolonged droughts, and stronger storms. This is a long-term project, but also one that by its nature never…
Water Tank Reconstruction

People have been creating reservoirs for thousands of years. Some 5,000 years ago, craters of extinct volcanoes in Arabia were used as reservoirs by farmers for their irrigation water. Climate conditions also forced the ancient Greeks to develop advanced hydraulic technology to capture, store and convey water already in the times of the Early Minoan…
Ivan Illich on Education

Ivan Illich, whose work is one of the sources of inspiration for the ISSA, talks with Jean-Marie Domenach in Paris in 1972. The conversation focuses on the myth of Pandora, Epimetheus, and Prometheus, on the replacement of hope by expectation, on compulsory schooling as the “organ of reproduction” of capitalist values, on the need for…
ISSA – Bird’s Eye View

When we saw ISSA for the first time from a bird’s-eye view, we were at the same time overwhelmed with a sense of excitement and we felt a sort of a “Fitzcarraldo” moment. That excitement about the progress we have made in only a few months – cleaning the terraces and above the house seems…
No Friends but the Mountains

Even before ISSA was founded – interestingly enough, the School is now located nearby – we have been visiting Tito’s Cave. There is a famous Kurdish proverb saying “NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS” that has also reverberated in the hills of Vis. Back in October 2019, on the Global Day of Action against Turkey’s occupation…