about: Manoa Free University
(->deutsch)

This is the "official" about. As the MFU is first of all a process, this is outdated by definition...
If you want to see what's going on in the machine, go to our Wiki.
Or, have a look into an ongoing self-survey.Tak.

...and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a
place, that (...) goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures
they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for
our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of
economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been
simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia
par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the
place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
         Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967)

The Manoa Free University has been founded in 2003. Inspired by talks with Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise at the Copenhagen Free University we hoped such a self-institution would enable us to progress with our collaborative practices in the field of political art. Amongst other collective associations especially the group wr had come to an end... whereas in wr we had focussed on radical collective authorship, the MFU should be designed as an open platform of knowledge production, archiving and exchange.

We understand the notion of a Free University today as an antagonism to the ongoing total subordination of education and science by neoliberalist imperatives (GATS etc). On the other hand it also refers to historic examples of self-organized anti-institutions of the 1960s and 70s.
We do not translate "university" with "professors", "students" or traditional "empirical objectivity", because we take it serious as an open place for the construction of subjects and collective knowledge production in postfordist times. We are what the average german speaking conservative contempts as "Ewige Studenten".

So where's Manoa?
That we don't know... but it's the natives' name for (El)Dorado, the mystic Golden City. This name reflects our insecurities and hopes and our restless wanderings to find a better place. Manoa beras in itself the horror of the ambivalence of paradise and colonization. By naming this everday contradiction we want to re-accomplish the capacity to act, a permanent reflection of our own endocolonized bodies. As Foucault says, the ship carries both economization and the quest for New Worlds. The Manoa Free University is such a heterotopia, it exists at the same time here and now and in our imaginations, it materializes both in exuberating discussions and in the dry economy of funding applications.
We don't know yet what we are looking for – or if such a place exists in the end - but then we like travelling anyway. So the MFU is a ship with eights sails and fifty canons, sometimes a fleet, divided about the course, a swarm of subjects on a nautic exploration. And our quirks as diverse as ever: emancipative forms of organization, anarchitectures, feminist theory, soundings, tomorrow something new.

some projects:

Freie Uni Mahagoni - a small space for us in the Anatomy-building of the former Veterinary Universoty in Vienna; constructed as part of:

(Heterotopologie, ehem.) - Building a space, reseraching heterotopias. Awarded contribution to "Utopie : Freiheit".

W...WirWissen - self-organized international exhibition and conference on collaborative artistic knowledge production, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, March / April 2005

Gothenburg N.B. - neverending cartographic excursions into info-visualizations, starting from the EU-Summit GBG2001 and Constant's New Babylon

Soundings of Social Reality - Compendium of texts and an Audio-CD; a subjective overview of field recordings and soundscapes to map social space

oh_know! - ongoing wiki, now also an encyclopaedic book, the Ship's Log

and: radio, visuals, futebol, cooking, etc