Dream Academy: Social Discipline in conversation with Jakob Jakobsen

Dream Academy in collaboration with Sasusu Radio and Social Discipline podcast presents Jakob Jacobsen in conversation with Mattin

Sunday, 1st March 2026, 3pm-7pm
3-5pm conversation and Q&A
5-7pm food
Tromsø Kunstforening, Mellomvegen 82
Everything for free and open to all

This will be a live recording of a podcast conversation between Jakob Jakobsen and Mattin about Jakobsen’s extensive life and his relationship to art, politics, education, and mental health. You can think of it as a cultural and political biography. From an early age, Jakobsen has been involved in self-organised spaces and collectives, as well as in zines, radio, and television projects such as Free Copenhagen University and the Hospital for Self-Medication. We will also hear what led him to create his final artwork, Letter of Resignation, a goodbye letter to the art world.

After the conversation and Q&A, we will serve a free, vegan meal and hang out together, hopefully also to further digest together the topics raised in the podcast conversation.

You can listen to the podcast at Social Discipline, and it will also be aired on SASUSU Radio

About Dream Academy:
The Dream Academy is a self-organized, experimental art academy for everyone. The Dream Academy builds on the premise that art education is a form of lifelong learning where artistic practice, theoretical reflection and everyday life meet. We have been organising both sporadic and more-or-less regular study groups, seminars and workshops since the publication of the Dream Academy book in 2023.

Jakob Jakobsen Bio:
I grew up in suburban Copenhagen in a middle class family, my mum was a nurse, my dad a desk top farmer. I was dyslexic and didn’t like school. When I was 15 or 16 years old I got absorbed into the punk and poetry scene in Copenhagen and that changed everything. After some years of temp work and drifting I got accepted at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen when I was 24 years old. It was a very privileged and competitive environment. Together with some comrades we opened several independent art spaces and published several journals with poetry, art, and experiments outside the school. The Art Academy was not a liberating place, so in 1994 in my final year I moved to London to get away from Copenhagen. London changed everything again. I got involved in the activist and rave scene that was thriving at the time. I didn’t really engage with Brit Art, that was an elite upper class champagne fueled no-mans-land for me. Together with my then partner Henriette Heise I opened the Info Centre in Hackney in 1998. It was a meeting and exhibition space that slowly also turned into an archive. We mainly displayed printed matter relating to social urban practices across London. And we were brewing beer and when the beer was ready to consume, we had a reception party with free beer. In 1999 I had my first child Solvej, and in 2001 we moved back to Copenhagen, even though I kept a room in a flat in London for many years. When arriving back in our empty flat in Copenhagen it didn’t take long before we established the Copenhagen Free University with a lot of rebellious optimism. Before the year was over the Twin Towers came down - and the war on terror became a reality. We knew that that war was going to hit us sooner or later as well. The Free University brought a lot of different people together in sharing and producing critical knowledge in an everyday setting beyond the education industry that was expanding as a new area of investment at the time. We traveled and told the story of the CFU and many parallel self-organised universities emerged in many places, all very different from ours as they related to whatever needs people had. In 2007 we closed the Free University because we had reached its limits and didn’t want to become a stupid object within the art scene. In 2006 I became a lecturer/professor in a small provincial art academy in Odense, Denmark. It was formative for me to work inside an official educational institution. It was independent, so we could decide the structure ourselves. My focus was on the community of students, I was not there to teach them anything, but organise an environment where everyone could speak and feel safe. My contract ended in 2012. In these years I also engaged in the activist scene in my neighborhood in Copenhagen, Nørrebro, and was very involved in the period of conflict and collective creativity around the eviction of the Youth House in 2007. I had got involved in taking over a local television station in 2004 and organised a decentralised network of people producing video material for the final period of terrestrial television. I made some solo exhibitions in Denmark and abroad in those years until 2014 where I got my second child Teo. 2014 was also the first time my lifelong depressive impulse spilled over and I got hospitalised in a psychiatric ward in Copenhagen. That changed everything once more. In 2017 I established the Hospital Prison University Archive in a room in the coop where I lived, it was a combined reading room, exhibition space and radio station. The idea was to make an archive that did not own a collection, but made exhibitions and talked about the objects on show as a means to challenge the exclusive and untouchable art object and expand the understanding of what defines art. The archive lasted two years until my lease was terminated. In 2019 I was hospitalised a third time, this time I wrote a diary of the three months inside the hospital called Ophør oprør, that was later published as a book in Denmark in 2020 (and Norway in 2025). During that stay I somehow developed the idea of a self-organised hospital I wanted to open when discharged. This became the Hospital for Self Medication that I opened in the attic above my apartment. In 2021 I decided that I have had enough of the art-scene and I decided to quit as a professional artist, so my final art work was my letter of resignation that was part of a biennale in public space in Copenhagen. This final art work was in a way an experiment to go beyond the art scene to live a life that was inspired by the initial promise of liberation, which was the reason I engaged in art in the first place. It has not been easy but it has been interesting. I am living in Barcelona now working with amazing people from all strands of life. Check out Jakob's website