Education from Below is a two-year collaborative programme organised between the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, MACBA, Barcelona and WHW, Zagreb.
Education from Below explores art as a place for dialogue, collective learning and imagination. Education doesn't belong only in institutions, but it can be horizontal and come from below, from communities.
The project recognises that art practices can dislocate the usual hierarchies of what should or should not be learned and traditional divisions between theory and practice, and that knowledge does not have to be based on accumulation, but rather on sharing and mutual learning.
The partners will explore new models of art practice based on collective learning and will generate a network of institutions and professionals for sharing methodologies.
Education from Below links three independent programmes for artists, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, PEI at MACBA, and WHW Akademija that each provide important opportunities for artistic development outside of formal education systems. The project will be realised over the course of autumn 2019 – autumn 2021 through seminars, study groups, artist residencies, exhibitions, series of lectures, an international conference, a collective reader and a common web platform, involving many artists, thinkers and educators.
This encounter is intended to cross the dynamics of collective learning and the thinking-by-doing of the Radio Web MACBA Working Group with the polyhedral work of the poet, curator, sound artist and activist Antye Greie, who was born and educated in East Germany and has resided on the island of Hailuoto, Finland since 2008.
With Antye Greie, we will analyse the contradictions and inequalities that the new world order imposed after the fall of the wall in 1989 and the abrupt transfer of the Eastern Bloc from one paradigm to another, in its accelerated and unreserved assimilation of the values of the Western capitalist system. We will see how the globalisation process revealed economic and social disparities, and found in post-Soviet communities the cheap and delocalised labour power that enabled the cannibal logic of old Europe. Tensions that now feed and complicate the war in Ukraine, and the role and responsibilities of the different actors involved in it, actively and passively. At the same time, Antye’s experiences of networking, collective creation and community creation suggest strategies for a sensitive, militant and proactive listening and organisation that allow us to continue to imagine new forms of governance and living together.
Performing as AGF, German poetess, vocalist and digital artist, utilises language and electronics, exploring speech and the spoken word within the depths of electronic music, sculpting glowing post-internet tapestry as @poemproducer.