IF YOU COULD BAN THREE "RULES" OF ACADEMIC ART EDUCATION FOREVER, WHAT WOULD THEY BE?

I wouldn’t ban. I don’t believe in bans. I come from a context, geographically, historically, emotionally, where punishment was the default pedagogical language. Where alterity was absent. Where your own desire, curiosity, will, were the last ones to be heard. Where you had to erase yourself to be accepted. Where to exist, you had to disappear.
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And it never worked. Or rather, it worked too well: it created submission, fear, silence, and deep fractures in confidence and self-worth.

So instead of banning, I challenge. I encourage internal disobedience. I invite unlearning: unlearning intimidation, unlearning the limiting thoughts you’ve inherited about yourself and your capabilities. Unlearning being the last one you listen to. Unlearning academic automatisms, institutionalized patterns, lessons we picked up during our studies without realizing how harmful they are. So, I can’t say what would I ban, but here are three things I intentionally challenge in my educational model:

1. Competition as structure.
I challenge the idea that artists must prove themselves against one another. That creativity is a race, and success is reserved for the few. I’ve seen too many voices silenced before they ever spoke, convinced they weren’t good enough, or worse, that someone else was better. My learning spaces are designed for collaboration, not comparison. Here, no one wins at the expense of another. We grow side by side. Each person brings something irreplaceable, incomparable. Difference is not a threat, it’s the foundation of community.

2. Overload as virtue.
I challenge the worship of exhaustion, the belief that being overworked is a sign of commitment, that intensity equals depth, that rest is weakness. In academic art schools, the norm is long days, no time to pause, multiple projects to juggle at once, and always a final product to present. 

In contrast, I value digestion. I believe in giving time and space: time to rest, to reflect, to step back. Not every process needs to be visible. Not every journey ends with a polished outcome. Slowness is not failure; it is often the only way to access nuance, to notice details, to allow real depth to emerge. Because depth doesn’t grow in haste. It requires focus. And focus takes time.

3. Scale as success.
I challenge the equation of size with success. I’ve been running the School of Disobedience for years, and I’ve made a deliberate choice: to stay small. I don’t want to grow bigger. I don’t want more visibility, more recognition, more followers. That’s not my path.

Traditional art education often encourages the opposite, it teaches you to desire expansion. To seek fame, to network endlessly, to scale up at any cost. Visibility becomes the metric of value. But I resist that narrative.

I believe in smallness. In details. In focus. My groups are tiny (no more than four participants at a time) and that is entirely intentional. Smallness is not a limitation, it’s a radical choice. A form of resistance that protects the essence of what we do. It allows us to go deep, to stay present, to truly see and support one another.

In a world obsessed with more, I choose enough.