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.
The online programme 'Artistic Ecologies, New Compasses and Tools' is part of a discursive series 'Evenings with WHW Akademija'. The programme explore tools that are being developed and experimented with by artists, thinkers and institutions in order to navigate a period of immense disruption and social change, and what kinds of artistic ecologies can be formed with these.
Tuesday March 16, at 7pm CET: 'Decolonise, Democratise, Deeliticise' by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz.
Due to the great interest and fully booked capacity at Zoom platform, the conversation with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz will be live-streamed via the Facebook page of WHW Akademija
Between March 2019 and June 2020 the Museo Nacional de Arte (MNA) in La Paz found itself in a process of renewal of its basic institutional guidelines. This process was based on three basic actions: "decolonise, democratise, deeliticise". But what does it mean to decolonise a museum? Does it mean burning the museum, destroying its colonial architecture, destroying its colonial works? The experience in the Plurinational State of Bolivia is a particular one. Wanting to decolonise the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, for example, implies starting from completely different premises from those that would be used to decolonise the Museo Nacional de Arte de La Paz. The process of decolonisation cannot make the same mistake as colonisation, which is to overthrow local habits and structures in order to impose a universal principle disregarding given preconditions. However, there are certain epistemological approaches, and certain ethical and political principles that we can propose as indispensable principles in an effort to intervene in the coloniality of the museum, an institution entirely based on a logic of 19th century Eurocentrism.
Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz will talk about his experience of directing the museum.
Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz is a Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher based in La Paz, Bolivia. From March 2019 to June 2020, he was Director of the National Museum of Art (MNA) in La Paz, where he founded the museum's Program for Decolonial Studies in Art (PED) and was responsible for generating a historical change of the institutional profile. His work at the museum has been recognised by the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM), being considered a reference in the international museum community for its developments in the fields of social inclusion and education. Hinderer Cruz regularly publishes essays in the Bolivian newspaper 'La Razón'.