The School of Each Other
2026 - ongoing
The School of Each Other is a collaboration between myself and Rose Lewis. Built on the belief that everyone is a teacher, we use the pomp & ceremony of institutions (think robes, parades, stoles, pledges) to honor knowledge no institution would credential. Skills passed between neighbors, across kitchen tables- through necessity, generosity, and care.
PARADE 1: ASSEMBLY
Gathering & March
Portland, Oregon June 2026
Park Blocks, Downtown
We brought the School of Each Other into Assembly, PSU's graduate confluence, which meant folding a project that pokes fun at institutional learning back into the institution itself. We're still not sure what to make of that.
We chose the parade as our form. A march through the Park Blocks, loud and public, carrying handmade cardboard emblems of knowledge earned outside any classroom: from lived experience, from necessity, from just having been alive. Each person shared what they knew. Each person made something to show for it.
The weather was moody. The park was mostly empty. We marched anyway. There was something fitting about that or maybe just something that had to be accepted. If anyone heard us from inside the university buildings, we'll never know.
What stayed with me was displaying my emblem alongside everyone else's: “how to plan a great road trip”, held up next to “how to start over,” “how to think things through,” etc... Not a credential, not a discipline. Chanting "we know, we know, we know what we know" in unison, meaning i,t and also feeling the dissonance of it: all these different knowledges trying to land at the same time. Whether that adds up to something or just sounds like noise, it’s hard to say from inside the chant.
Photos by Nina Vichayapai
SESSION 1: JOSEPHINE LACOSTA
Portland, Oregon April 2026
Rose’s House
The EndingFor the first event of The School of Each Other, Rose and I invited Josephine LaCosta to Rose's house in Portland. Jo is a chef, gardener, writer, and someone who has dedicated her life to setting the table. We dressed in doctoral robes. We placed a stole on her shoulders. We asked her everything.
The room contributed. The conversation moved between food and farming, between learning and being in service of someone else's learning. It ended somewhere none of us planned: Jo leading everyone in a three-part round of Scarborough Fair, voices overlapping in a living room. Before people left, we gathered the notes, what we'd learned that evening, collectively, from one person who never needed a classroom to know what she knows.
This was the second event of The School of Each Other and the first time we understood what it could be.
In collaboration with Rose Lewis
Guest teacher: Josephine LaCosta
RADIO 1: COLLECTIVE SKILLS
Radio Broadcast
The Grange, Big Sur, California March 2026
Alongside the
Liars' Village Exhibition
For this first activation, Rose and I collected audio recordings from people in our lives about skills they learned outside a classroom. Things passed down, figured out, stumbled into. The kind of knowledge that doesn't have a certificate but absolutely has significance.
I broadcasted the recordings from the kitchen of the Grange during Liars' Village, a radio station running alongside the exhibition.
This was the first time the School of Each Other took a public form. It was modest. We weren't trying to build an institution. We were trying to name something that was already happening everywhere and put it on the air.
In collaboration with Rose Lewis
Audio recordings from:
Ayla Gizlice, Belle Baker, Betty Belle Peery Nicks, Carolina Cuevas, Cooper, Danielle Yorko, Dominic Toliver, Gek Lim + Adele, Gwen Hoeffgen, Haruka Ostley, Josephine La Costa, Kevin, Lauren Wood, Lou Blumberg, Nube Hawk Cruz, Peery Sloan, Ruhee Maknojia, Ryne Leuzinger, Tania Shcheglova
Photos by Sarah Blesener