This document will be shared alongside a collective learning workshop. Pictures to follow!
“It is only the oppressed who, by
freeing themselves, can free their oppressors”
-Pedagogy
of the oppressed. Paulo Freire
In considering what
art, education, and furthermore art education, might be for or how ‘arte util’
(a Spanish phrase meaning ‘useful art’ perhaps first coined as long ago as 1969
by Eduardo Costa and more recently by Tania Bruguera, amongst others) might be
made it seemed necessary to explore and account for our own discreet
professional lives. Importantly, we sought to preface any decision-making about
outcome with an investigation into the wealth of activity, including the
sometimes routine or humdrum, of our day-to-day lives and the research we were
carrying out as part of the Critical Pedagogy module. Therefore, the material
that we’ve collected ranges from the mundane to the revelatory, from email
trails, overheard conversations and planning input to notes from seminars,
lectures and recommended reading.
It seemed appropriate
to retain and bind it all, unedited, as an honest document to unpick, discuss
and arrive at an almost inferential understanding of what we do in order to
draw some conclusions about what we might do as (socially engaged)
practitioners in the future.
It was through open discussion between
three different practitioners that we drew the conclusion that it was in the
space between nothing and something that the practice of critical pedagogy
could take place. This flexible space allows for risk taking and
misunderstanding to take place and an honesty about intentions to exist. It was through this honesty that democratised power
relationships and opportunities for genuine collective learning experiences
could be explored. Through
this collection of information and everyday actions we see the space between
nothing and something as an attempt to act against the mechinic thinking of the
institution and the pre-established orders where it could be argued that ones
experience has already been decided. This is especially prevalent in an
educational institution where the dialogue between the institution and the
people with in it has become an irrelevant nuisance, as suggested by Freire in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968. Instead it is an attempt to engage in a
meaningful conversation.
During the
conversation entitled ‘What Does Community Mean?’ in Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics, page 39,
Frances Williams, Head of Education at The South London Gallery, explains:
“The Gallery has given
me an amazing privilege to de able to have the kind of relationships that I wouldn’t
have been able to have had on my own, or if I was an individual artist rocking
up to the estate. And also, the gallery has been able to provide something for
the estate that they wouldn’t have had if we weren’t there.
There have been points
where I think I can sit in quite a critical position in relation to the rest of
the gallery. The estate itself has its own internal differences about what
people think we’re there to do, which I try to respect.
But all of that has
been a conversation the wouldn’t have taken place without being part of an
institution.”
From this we start to
see forming a complex, co-dependant, conflicting relationship between the
established and accepted institution and a space within it that acts as the
point of public engagement. This public space, where an honest and democratised
approach is taken towards the power relationships present, begins to act as a
wedge, a point of conflict, a space where Ranciere’s idea of dissensus can take
place within an institutional context, a space to offer alternative ways to
interacting.
In this instance we
suggest not a physical space as such but the creation of a metaphysical space
through the action of a collective learning experience.
"Really, all you need to become a
good knitter are wool, needles and hands…”
Elizabeth
Zimmermann.
British-born
knitter known for revolutionising the modern practice of knitting.
