The Halle School of Common Property will take place prior to the 6th Werkleitz Biennale from August, 27 to 31, 2004. The 5-day workshop series is conceived as a central discursive and practice-oriented part of the festival. It addresses a national and international audience.

The individual workshops will be held by international cultural producers and artists' groups working within the frame of informal, self-organised, and/or non-institutional knowledge production. Initial results of the working groups will be presented and discussed at the biennial.

The Halle School of Common Property is a temporary venue for critical debates on forms of producing and distributing knowledge. Alternative models of knowledge production linked to specific cultural and political practices will be presented. The various workshops will address aspects of current knowledge regimes which are being transformed under the conditions of neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, and critically examine them.

If the privatisation of intellectual property in the interests of the new (biotechnology) industries and the functionalisation of participation in new governmental strategies belong to the problematic developments of what is called the ‹information› or ‹knowledge-based society›, then the big opportunities lie in structures of appropriating the knowledge that is available everywhere and in forms of cultural and collective practice as knowledge production. Halle School of Common Property also understands itself as a further opportunity to intensify the exchange among the individual groups and participants and to further expand partially already existing networks of alternative cultural production.

The workshops will take place in the rooms of the Werkleitz Gesellschaft. Results of the workshops are displayed and presentations of the participating groups shown on the ground floor of the Volkspark (Insert 2). M.C., C.S.