The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise: Collective Learning in Practice
The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise: Collective Learning in Practice brings together tools, methodologies, speculations, and play developed in response to the question: ‘What Can It Mean to Survive Together?’
Hosted at Kunstinstituut Melly as the 2025–26 Collective Learning in Practice programme and curated by the Garage School, the programme brought together fourteen co-learners and a range of invited guests. Against a backdrop of polycrises, militarisation, and European governments advising their citizens to ‘prep’, the school explored how we might reject individualism and relate ‘otherwise’ to the question of preparedness and survival.
Drawing from multiple disciplines, the school explored both foundational and unexpected aspects of collective survival including health, infrastructure, archiving, collapse, food, imagination, and relations.
The resulting material not only documents what happened but also offers (pedagogical) tools, methodologies, insights, and games through which we might collectively approach the question of survival with curiosity, solidarity, and imagination.
Colophon
Editor
Kari Robertson, Pavlos Theodorou, Santiago Pinyol
Copy Editing
Cannach McBride
Proofreading
Wendy van Slagmaat-Bos
Transcriptions
Kari Robertson, Pavlos Theodorou, Santiago Pinyol
Design
Santiago Pinyol
Cover Design
Santiago Pinyol
Image Editing
Pavlos Theodorou
Contributors
Aden Mete, Anarcha, August Sturlyte, Camilla Yakupova, Hooi-Ying Ash Zhang, Janey Roanna, Kari Robertson, Leo Rij, Ni(e)k van der Meulen, Pavlos Theodorou, Santiago Pinyol, Sol Muñoz-Baroja Acaso, Sophia Wirth, Urvee Kulkarni, Doe Het Zelf Werkplaats (MB McGregor, Tomi Hilsee, Florian Henschel, Deniz Gülyurt, and Christian Lesmes Mendoza), Garden of Queerdom (Latoyah Burlace and Mandy van Pelt), Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Lilah V, Raffia Li, Dr. Rita Issa, Selçuk Balamir, Snackbar Frieda, Sophie Allerding, Varia (Luke Murphy and Sofia Boschat-Thorez), Yunfan Tian, and Yanfei Li
Publisher
Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam
Printing & Binding
Balto, Vilnius, Lithuania
Institutional Support
Kunstinstituut Melly is supported by the City of Rotterdam and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science in the Netherlands.
Project Support
CLiP #7: The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise has been supported in part by Fonds 21, Fonds voor Cultuurparticipatie, and Stichting Verzameling van Wijngaarden-Boot.
This project grew out of research by Kari Robertson supported by CBK Rotterdam.
Copyright
The materials in this book are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, with exemptions noted where applicable.
All rights reserved. © the artists, authors, and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam 2026.
Publication
The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise: Collective Learning in Practice was published on the occasion of CLiP #7: The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise (October 2025–March 2026), a Collective Learning in Practice programme at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
ISBN
978-94-91435-64-5
Printed in Lithuania
Distribution
This book is available at the MELLY Bookshop at Kunstinstituut Melly