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.
What happens when we discuss what is called ‘social practice’? And how does it happen? Artist, and educator Annette Krauss and Elke Uitentuis from the Social Practice Workshop have come together with a group of artists from the Rijksakademie for a series of sessions to share and discuss ones’ artistic practices with a specific attention to the role of educational, and social aspects.
The social and educational aspects have been understood in the widest sense ranging from experiences of socially engaged art, teaching at art academies, activism, workshop-driven practices, or collective work. Bringing in personal experiences, the group has discussed what educational and social practices might – and might not - mean and do in our different work while questions of inclusion, equality, labor, authorship, economy, responsibility were brought to the table.
In the forthcoming sessions we will continue studying together artistic^educational*social practices. Moreover, we attempt to think about a framework (including its difficulties and potentials) of how to gather the shared experiences and conversations in relation to a possible archive/collection/pot of experiences at the Social Practice Workshop.
Participants of the Feb-April 2022 sessions included: Winnie Herbstein, Cihad Caner, Ola Hassanain, Penelope Koliopoulou, Rajyashri Goody, Ratu Saraswati, Werker Collective, Tom K Kemp, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba.
Annette Krauss is an artist, educator, and writer. Her work is dedicated to practices of ‘unlearning’ and ‘commoning’, addressing questions of institutional responsibilities, feminism, and privilege in long-term collaborative practices such as Sites for Unlearning, Hidden Curriculum, Spaces of Commoning, Read-in; Read the Masks. Tradition is Not Given; and School of Temporalities. These practices reflect and build upon the potential of collaboration while aiming at disrupting taken for granted truths in imagining and living forms of collectivity.