Education from Below

Education from Below is a two-year collaborative programme organised between the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, MACBA, Barcelona and WHW, Zagreb.

Art as a site for learning

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.

Network

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.

Support

  • collective research
  • Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam

Site for Unlearning

Annette Kraus

    Annette Kraus introduces her collaborative research project Site for Unlearning to Rijksakademie residents. Its point of focus is how to question social norms and structures that we internalise, and thereby sustain.

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    Krauss deploys “unlearning” as a tool to collectively reflect on our (unconsciously developed) habits, so that we can adapt our ways of behaving and thinking towards a more common practice. A key question for her is how to “unlearn one’s privileges” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). This is not meant to be taken as turning our backs on these privileges in the first place; rather, the aim is to think how these might help us in individual and communal ways of envisioning non-capitalist futures that embrace social values like care relations, reproductive labour and collective responsibility to fight racism, sexism and classism.

    Anette Krauss

    Anette Krauss is an artist whose conceptual-based practice addresses the intersection of art, politics and everyday life. Her work revolves around informal knowledge and normalisation processes that shape our bodies, the way we use objects, engage in social practices and how these influence the way we know and act in the world. Her artistic work emerges through the intersection of different media, such as performance, video, historical and everyday research, pedagogy and texts.