Credits photo: Adelita Husni-Bey, Postcards from the Desert Island, 2010-11, SD video transferred to DVD, 23 mins.
Courtesy the artist and Galleria Laveronica

Dates: January 31, February 28, March 28 2014: 19.30 – 21.00 h 

Locations:
Piet Zwart Institute: Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
Witte De With, Center for Contemporary Art: Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam

Admission: Free

The lectures are open for public

What is a school? How does it influence and construct politics and social relations in our present day society? Society seems to be ready for implementing change in schools. On the one hand this is based on the premise that we have to rethink education in relation to the future and challenges of the 21st Century. On the other hand there is a critical evaluation of conventional institutions and formats, fuelled by a clear interest from artists and theoreticians alike in alternative educational models.

The film Postcards from the Desert Island from the artist Adelita Husni-Bey documents a 3-week workshop with students from an experimental, self-run elementary school in Paris. The artist asked the pupils to turn the school hall into a desert island, and to relate themselves to this new territory. The video documents the children’s approaches to self-governance and the possibility of imagining institutions and social relations from scratch. What if we break down the concept of school to its bare essence? What is a school? This question is the starting point for the lecture series Critical Pedagogies of the 21st Century, which deals with the phenomenon ‘school’ on a philosophical, theoretical and fictional level.

Critical Pedagogies of the 21st Century
Lecture # 1
Friday January 31 2014
Jan Masschelein: Making Art School: A Story about (Cave) Walls and Tables
Location: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam
19.30 – 21.00 h

The first lecture entitled Making Art School: A Story about (Cave) Walls and Tables is organized in close cooperation with the educational department of Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, and marks the starting point of a structural cooperation.

In his presentation Jan Masschelein proposes to discuss the (art) school in terms of ‘forms of gathering and actions’, rather than in terms of functions and institutions. The school is neither an institution (obtaining legitimacy from a transcendent idea or ideal), nor an organization (obtaining legitimacy from performance of functions). It refers to a particular ‘scholastic form’ of gathering: a time-space-matter arrangement - including architectures, technologies, practices and figures - that allows for a particular relation to the world and for an experience of commonality of making things public. Masschelein relates this scholastic form to the first cave paintings and to the time-space experiences, gestures and the kind of attention that this emerging (art) practice implied. His lecture is not an attempt to describe an ‘ideal school’: by identifying what makes a school a school, Masschelein wants to pinpoint why the school as form has value in and of itself and why it deserves to be reinvented today.

Biography

Jan Masschelein is Professor of Philosophy of Education and director of the Laboratory for Education and Society at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. His primary areas of scholarship are educational theory, critical theory and social philosophy. Currently his research concentrates on the public character of education and on ‘mapping’ and ‘walking’ as critical research practices. He is engaged with architects/artists in the development of experimental educational practices.

Together with Maarten Simons he is the author of In Defense of the School. A Public Issue. (2013, Leuven, free downloadable: http://ppw.kuleuven.be/ecs/les) and: Jenseits der Exzellenz. Eine kleine Morphologie der Welt-Universität. (2010, Berlin/Zürich: Diaphanes). Masschelein and Simons also co-edited the books The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality (2007, Oxford: Blackwell) and Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy (2011, Oxford: Blackwell).

Critical Pedagogies of the 21st Century
Lecture # 2
Friday February 28 2014
Dennis Atkinson: Events of Learning and the Poietic Materialism of Art
Location: Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
19.30 – 21.00 h

In his keynote lecture Dennis Atkinson will explore processes of learning through the themes of event, truth, pedagogies against the state and becoming in order to consider learning and how it might be supported in a world of becoming. He will focus on art in education at a time, particularly in schools in England and elsewhere, when it is under some threat. It will argue for the importance of art in education in terms of the force of art by taking the line that the transformational and ‘vital’ force of art is deeply significant for processes of learning and pedagogic action. Here the emphasis is not upon the art object in its more traditional or contemporary guises but upon art’s process of becoming or its event: an event that will be considered in terms of a poietic materiality. The presentation will consider educational practices through two lenses: education viewed in terms of the power of production, commodification and calculation and education viewed in terms of an aphetic space of mutuality, enabling and poiesis. A space whose force, put in the words of Deleuze, is to restore a belief in this world when today for many the distance between involvement in the world and a belief in it is increasing.

Biography

Dennis Atkinson is Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Educational Studies and the Centre for the Arts and Learning. He taught in secondary schools in England from 1971-1988 when he was appointed lecturer in art and design education at Goldsmiths University of London. Atkinson directed a number of programmes including, PGCE Secondary Art and Design Teacher Education, MA Education: Culture, Language and Identity and the Post Graduate Research Programme in Educational Studies. He was appointed Professor of Art in Education in 2005 and was Head of Department of Educational Studies from 2006-2009. He established the Research Centre for The Arts and Learning in the Department of Educational Studies in 2005 and was Director from 2005-2013. Atkinson was the Principal Editor of The International Journal of Art and Design Education from 2002-2009 and was a member of the National Society for Education in Art and Design’s Publications Board until 2013. He was made a Fellow of the Society in 2009.

He has published regularly in a number of international academic journals since 1991 including The International Journal of Inclusive Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, British Educational Research Journal, and has contributed chapters to a number of edited collections. He has published five books, Art in Education: Identity and Practice; Social and Critical Practice in Art Education, (with Paul Dash); Regulatory Practices in Education: A Lacanian Perspective, (with Tony Brown & Janice England,); Teaching Through Contemporary Art: A report on innovative practices in the classroom, (with Jeff Adams, Kelly Worwood, Paul Dash, Steve Herne, & Tara Page) and Art, Equality and Learning: Pedagogies Against the State.

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Critical Pedagogies of the 21st Century
Lecture # 3
Friday March 28 2014
Jonas Staal: Art in Defense of Democracy. An Introduction to the New World Summit and New World Academy.
Location: Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
19.30 – 21.00 h

In the third lecture Jonas Staal will introduce his artistic and political organization New World Summit which develops what he calls 'alternative parliaments' for organizations excluded from democracy, for example by means of so-called designated lists of terrorist organizations. After the first three summits in Berlin DE, Leiden NL and Kochi IN, he is currently preparing the fourth edition in the Royal Flemish Theater in Brussels. He will further speak of the New World Academy, developed in collaboration with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht: a new school that invites organizations invested in the progressive political project to explore with artists and students the role of art at the center of political struggle. 

Biography

Jonas Staal (1981) has studied monumental art in Enschede NL and Boston USA. He currently works on his PhD research entitled Art and Propaganda in the 21st Century at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (NWS) that contributes to building alternative political spheres for organizations banned from democratic discourse and of the New World Academy that connects progressive political organizations to artists. His work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, lectures, and publications, focusing on the relationship between art, politics and ideology. His essay Post-propaganda (Fonds BKVB, 2009) and publication Power?... To Which People?! (Jap Sam Books, 2010) provides the theoretical basis for this line of work. His most recent book is Art, Property of Politics III: Closed Architecture (Onomatopee, 2011), a research into a prison model developed by Dutch far-right Freedom Party (PVV) politician Fleur Agema.                     

His projects were exhibited in among other the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven NL (Trickster’s Trickers,2010; Freethinkers’ Space Continued, 2012); the David Roberts Art Foundation in London UK (History of Art, the, 2010); Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen BE (1:1, 2011); Kadist Art Foundation in Paris FR (Enacting Populism, 2011); BAK, Utrecht NL (How Much Fascism?, 2012; New World Academy, 2013); de Appel, Amsterdam NL (Vote Back!, 2012); the 4th and 5th Moscow Biennial, Moscow RU; the 7th Berlin Biennale in Berlin DE and the 1st Kochi-Muziris Biennial in Kochi IN 2012. He regularly publishes in books, newspapers and magazines – his written work appeared in NRC Handelsblad, de Groene Amsterdammer, Metropolis M, nY, Open, Artleaks, Frakcija magazine and Manifesta Journal, among others.

Staal lives and works in Rotterdam NL

http://www.jonasstaal.nl

http://www.newworldsummit.eu

> via pzwart.nl