Jovan Ćirilov
, artistic director of the 41st edition of the Bitef festival, together with Francisco, showing the catalog of the 40th edition (not the 41st edition)
Likewise, the title of this post will scandalize someone, although that is not our intention; someone may exclaim, how can you trivialize such a ‘serious’ issue as education!. I think the ability of art to successively devour other areas of human activity, assimilating its methodologies and objects of study like an epistemological vampire, is well known. One of the most serious negative consequences that usually derives from this eating habit is the aestheticization and deactivation of the critical, resistant or transformative potential of whatever field art extends its networks over. The fact is that it would seem that education’s turn has come. We could point out two key events in this rise of education in the artistic field – quite randomly, as is almost always the case when doing this type of ‘historicization’ -: one would be the ‘
Summit of non-aligned educational initiatives
‘ held at the end of last May in Berlin, and the other the attention paid by
Documenta 12
to education through its editorial project
Documenta 12 Magazines
of which we have already spoken quite extensively. The symposium
Goat Tracks of Self-education
, organized within the framework of the theatrical festival
Bitef 07
by the collective
TkH
on September 21 and 22 in Belgrade, can be understood as a continuation of that work of making education visible and recognizing it that is taking place in ‘the art world’; this political work in essence, has other layers, perhaps more useful, in which new roles for education in contemporary societies are problematized and proposed.
Some months ago I was working on a text that I would have liked to title ‘
Why isn’t education
cool
?
‘ in which I reflected on the total absence of educators in the list of characters that occupy the pages of trend magazines, in which artists (pop or not), curators, designers, dj’s abound… To all this, if anyone doubts that education is not ”
cool
I propose, as an exercise, that you compare the avatars of the members of
myspace
and
eduspaces
… The question is directly related to the one that gives title to this post, and in both cases the person who asks does so without a moral prejudice about what the answer should be. What is interesting is to see how some practices and discourses are integrated into certain spheres of valuation and social, economic and/or cultural recognition and others are not, to think about what consequences their inclusion or exclusion has and to draw lines of action against these processes. And this was one of the explicit objectives of the symposium in which, as we announced a few days ago, we participated presenting projecte3*.
In truth, the symposium organization launched a hypothesis: given the preeminence of knowledge in the current post-Fordist production model, it is not surprising that eyes are turning towards education; on the one hand, artists, as producers of knowledge, would seek new forms of legitimation within the mercantile logic, the mass media and the internet, but on the other hand, they would have, from the avant-garde, a long experience in managing their own training outside of educational institutions. However, if we understand, following the ideas of Paolo Virno – an author who was quite cited, not always in an ‘accurate’ way – that the cultural industries constitute for cognitive capitalism a testing ground in which to test new ways of organizing production, work, desire and, in general, life, it does not seem unreasonable to think that even now artists are the most suitable to offer capital new educational models that replace those of outdated institutions (school, academy…) that are practically useless to their interests. In this sense, the presentation of
Milena Dragićević-Šešić
, head of European cultural cooperation policies of the Serbian government, who in a very detailed statistical study broke down the unconventional learning methods used by university students who transit the ‘European educational space’, that is, that power is on our track… more or less.
Vladimir Jerić Vlidi
from
slobodnakultura.org
– who came to talk about the project
One Laptop Per Child
(OLPC), of which he only said that it seemed “very good” (!?)- drew in a rather dramatic way, while adjusted to reality, the way in which, by diluting the limits between work time and leisure time, the capitalist system had put to produce full time until the last human capacity. Faced with this situation, Vladimir Jerić Vlidi advocated for ‘contemplation’ as a possible solution, an exit that seems too… aristocratic to us.
Bojana Cvejić
, also a member, among others, of the TkH collective, together with
Ana Vujanović
and
Mišco Šuvaković
(these last two editors of the symposium) also did not see the contemplative alternative very clearly and opted for the exercise of some type of ‘speculative pragmatism’. Without a doubt, the relationship of the different projects and theoretical conceptions with ‘the institutions’ was one of the themes that appeared repeatedly during the symposium and there seems to be a generalized opinion in certain sectors in this regard: we cannot abandon the institution because, said in Foucaultian terms, we are crossed by the institution that, in turn, constitutes us. Now, how each one negotiates this is a topic that gives a lot of itself… In this sense, Mišco Šuvaković, professor of aesthetics and art theory at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, proposed establishing channels and mechanisms of collaboration between ‘independent’ collectives and entities, and the University itself, as a possible strategy to overcome the ‘imitative models’ and hierarchical relationships that still prevail in this institution, at least in the Faculty of Visual Arts (which here is still called Fine Arts).
From the organization of the symposium, they appealed to the critical capacity of art to subvert the co-optation processes related to education. In this sense, with the exception of our own presentation, all the practical projects presented – the sessions were divided into theoretical exhibitions in the morning and presentations of practical experiences in the afternoon (!)- started from the express will of the participants in the respective projects to learn, creating for this purpose horizontal structures that allow them to produce knowledge and circulate it without the restrictions and customs that academic bureaucracy imposes: PAF (PerformingArtsForum), Nomad Dance Academy (educational program still in its infancy of the Balkan Dance Network“, -the adjective ‘Balkan’ raised blisters among the locals regarding national identities-) <illegal_cinema> or the s-o-s project of which we have already spoken with a little detail in this post previous.
But, as I was saying, if something differentiated
projecte3*
from the rest of the proposals is that it starts from a collective (specifically
La
Fundició
, a Cooperative Society) that proposes to a public institution (the
Joanot Martorell
“) to undertake a work process that, in some way, to a greater or lesser extent, will modify the modes of production of said institution, in this case the modes in which education is ‘produced’. This transformation of the institution passes, in line with what was said above, through enabling spaces for the emancipation of the individuals who ’embody’ the institution itself (and this in the case of projecte3* occurs in a perhaps too literal way…). There is, of course, a problem with the term ’emancipation’ because it sustains the illusion of an ‘outside’, of an autonomous space; in addition, this ’emancipatory’ will would place us as “educators” in an unsustainable position, too close to the enlightened teacher, the true educator, who removes the student from his ignorance to bring him closer to the domains of wisdom. However, we think that it is necessary to resignify the word or find one that satisfactorily replaces it, to designate those initiatives that try to change certain power relations that translate into countless social, cultural and economic phenomena.
The symposium took place in Magazine MKM“, a new center dedicated to cultural production and research in Belgrade, enabled by the city council, in which several independent collectives will be located. The audience was rather scarce, although this did not seem to matter to the organization of the symposium. You can see some photos on
our flickr page
.
