Rethinking the Art School (open source)

A school of art is a zone of convergence studded with a multiplicity of individuals, things and flows, stories, fictions and stagings, with social, cultural, material, singular and interacting asperities. And it is also a common territory by default: if we choose to come there to work or to study, we do not choose those with whom we will share this ephemeral biotope.

Taking her current position as head of the Brussels-based art school e.r.g (École de rechereche graphique) as a starting point, Laurence Rassel reflects in her talk about how the art school as an institution can be conceived as an environment for developing a sense of collectivity. Assuming the double definition of the word "institution" as a potential to be developed as well as an established form, Rassel identifies alienation where the "instituted" takes precedence over the "instituting."
In her work, the common is thought, and will be contructed as the result of an action composed of the differences in presence. The common will not erase these differences, and it will not only be composed by them. The common is always the result of a "common doing" rather than a fixed group and or an "institution." The paradoxical task then is to sustain the collective, the common, while preserving heterogeneity and the singularities in place. (Video based on a lecture at HeK | House of Electronic Arts Basel as part of creating commence)

The spoils of art education

Content: The loot of art education in the studio, in history, in pop, in the lexicon, in competences and diagnoses, in sounds and in speech and silence. (Pierangelo Maset)

Contemporary art between enigma, explanation and participatory corner

The relationship between contemporary art and its audience is not an easy one. While artists see themselves as part of the so-called discourse, refer to it and are also evaluated according to it, this discourse is completely unknown to the majority of the public. A direct encounter with a contemporary work of art is sometimes as puzzling as a direct encounter with an equation from contemporary theoretical mathematics. The obvious thing to do here is to intervene as a mediator, to explain the discourse, to dock the initially unfamiliar work to the audience's world of experience. But this is a process with many pitfalls: according to Watzlawick's "One cannot not communicate", every mediation is always also an interpretation of the work. The enigmatic character of the artwork, which according to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is its essential core, is immediately led back into the world of the logical-deductive and dissolved. The whole thing is not made any easier when the artists are still alive and on site and use all means at their disposal to defend themselves against any explanation of their work that is not on the same level and thus also the complexity of the discourse. Edit Molnár & Marcel Schwierin have been running the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art since 2015 and will report on these contradictions from their practice. (Edit Molnár & Marcel Schwierin)

Farewell to projectitis - thoughts on the meaning of sustainable collaboration

Constanze Eckert and Anna Zosik founded eck_ik büro für arbeit mit kunst in 2008. Since then, they have described themselves as art workers who work with and on art in different roles and functions. As an artist, art mediator, accompanying researcher, project leader, consultant or person responsible for qualification - their work is always integrated into the respective institutional structure. In her article, Constanze Eckert reflects on the possibilities and impossibilities of sustainable art mediation work based on some of her activities at various institutions. (Constanze Eckert)

About the scenic - mediation work in schools and the theatre

We assume that institutions - and thus their social orders and power structures - are not based on natural laws, but are the product of elaborate staging. Where institutions exist, roles are rehearsed, monologues practised, poses internalised, props procured, stages built and lighting set. This is just as true for the theatre stage as it is for the classroom. Based on this consideration, we develop waysof analysing institutional structures and ways of rearranging them.(Wiebke Trunk & Alexander Henschel)

Unlearning the museum? Coloniality and mediation in ethnological museums

"What are all these things?" asks a seven-year-old in an ethnological museum as she makes her way through the exhibition. "Did you make them all yourselves?" What does the guide say to this, apart from "no"? The many conceivable possible answers, what they emphasise, what they leave out, signify positions on central questions of postcolonial critique: on the question of ownership, on the power of disposal over objects that came to Europe during the colonial era, on the question of representation and the power of definition in narratives about culture and difference. How do mediators deal with the coloniality inscribed in their work? The lecture will use examples from the positioning and reflections of mediators to work out contradictions that characterise the field of work and to ask in perspective: if ethnological museums have historically represented Europe's production of knowledge about its "others", can they then become places of unlearning? (Nora Landkammer)

Projection space art. RAUM for art in primary school?

As part of the introduction of all-day schooling in Lower Saxony, schools are being equipped according to a so-called model room programme, which specifies exactly which rooms a school must have and in what size and equipment. The model room programme for all-day primary schools includes a "creative room". How do (primary) schools deal with this space and where and how is art displayed there? What institutionalised basic assumptions can be derived from this? Based on this, I will present an idea for rethinking and opening up this space. Can teacher training students get involved there, try things out, play with failure? (Sandra Langenhahn)

Which school would be responsible. Explorations critical of racism

In the German-speaking social and educational sciences of recent decades, "racism" was not considered a serious category of analysis for a long time and the examination of current racial thinking and feelings was at best only marginally relevant. Even today, despite the normality of racist violence that has prevailed for decades, the boom in hate speech, despite the widespread approval of racist figures who justify border policies that cause people to die every day, despite the NSU complex, etc., large sections of social and educational science, but also of political education and school pedagogy, still find it difficult to use "racial construction" as a category of analysis. This refusal to take "racism" seriously as a contemporary category of analysis has preserved an empty space that has been and continues to be conducive to the effectiveness of thinking and feeling about race. Criticism of racism does not explain violence against natio-ethno-culturally coded others with experiences of decline and fears in "the population", but rather points to the fact that the fact that experiences of decline or disintegration lead to racist actions and affects in this degree of prevalence is itself worthy of explanation. Patterns connected to racial thinking and feeling, in which people recognise themselves and others, legitimise their actions and their consequences, are ramified via media discourses, economic structures, school books, political statements, family narratives ("Grandpa wasn't a Nazi", grandma wasn't either) and dominance-cultural background assumptions as social normality in the so-called centre of society. For this reason, it is possible to give a certain meaning to one's own experiences by resorting to racial constructions. In a first step, this connection will be explained in the lecture by analysing the significance of racial constructions in the (micro-)political debate about social order in order to reflect on pedagogical implications and consequences. The idea guiding the lecture and the discussion is that school as a place of responsible educational processes should be orientated in a critical way towards racism. (Paul Mecheril)