Kaospilot students coming to Berlin for their Outpost 2021
Starting on September 20th and until the end of November, around 70 students from the Kaospilots in Aarhus will come to Berlin for a double Outpost, to collaborate with local partners and organizations. In this short article, we share with you what an Outpost is, why it takes place in Berlin & why immersing yourself in the beautiful messy Kaospilot universe this fall will be an unforgettable experience!
What is the Outpost?
Pretty much since the Kaospilots started in the early 1990s, the Outpost has been established as a central part of the educational experience. Each year a team, made up of around 37 students, leaves the school in Denmark to go abroad together for a couple of months. Previous Outpost destinations were San Francisco, Durban, Habana, Vancouver, Shanghai, Bogota, Cape Town, and Barcelona. This fall the destination is Berlin.
As Aarhus team leader Anna Forrest phrases it: “The Outpost is essentially about placing yourself in a new and unfamiliar context.” The Kaospilot pedagogy believes that there are certain skills and kinds of knowledge you can only acquire by experiences in the real world, students will collaborate with local organizations and stakeholders in Berlin around local projects and challenges. In the past and hopefully, now again, these collaborations & encounters will allow the students not only to learn a lot of thanks to this new and unfamiliar context, but it’s also through those encounters they get to create meaningful impact for their collaborators & the city that hosts them for a period of time. An Outpost is always a special phase in the process of the Kaospilot Enterprising Leadership Program, as the students are not only individuals in an unfamiliar context but as a collective of learners. To be abroad together often brings out many new, beautiful, and challenging experiences for them as a team and community.
Why Berlin?
Because Berlin is a city that Kaospilot students can learn a lot from. And vice versa, Berlin and its transformative ecosystem can receive and learn a lot from the Kaospilots and their way of learning, creating & challenging. Berlin is a city with multiple challenges and, as we’d argue, in constant need of creative, critical systemic change-makers and their diverse perspectives and desire to transform to create a better future.
Berlin has been and still is one of Europe’s most intriguing cities, with a unique historical past, and a present important strategic location within the EU. Its vibrant and queer cultural scene, where the art, music, and dance scene keeps reinventing itself, inspires beyond Berlin’s borders. With a rebellious spirit, the city attracts especially impact-driven startups and initiatives. Berlin stays an important ecosystem for norm critical, bold, and visionary transformation agents. With its international, diverse, and multicultural inhabitants, Berlin is a never-ending container for intercultural connections and learning. That is why this year, also the Kaospilot students & community want to be inspired by, learn from and co-create with Berlin.
How to become a part of the Outpost?
During the Outpost, connection with the students happens of course through their project collaboration with various local stakeholders, but there will be many other opportunities for connection too. A series of events will be taking place in our location, on the BUFA Campus, and emerge from the students landing in the city. Follow us and Kaospilot on social media to keep up to date or sign up for our newsletter!
Furthermore, Kaospilot+ Berlin is running a Berlin Residency, where participants work on their own projects while being supported and surrounded by a community of creatives, practitioners, students, and visionaries. They get to explore their leadership skills, challenge themselves and be part of the first residency cohort at our Kaospilot+ Berlin campus.
