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 Open PEI Seminar by Jaime Vindel seeks to respond to the wave of mobilizations against the climate crisis taking place in different parts of the world, with the intention of discussing the numerous variations in contemporary political imagination in connection with the eco-social transition.
From proponents of the Green New Deal to eco-socialist approaches to the logic of community disconnection to eco-feminist critiques of extractivist policies, these theoretical positions overlap with the practical work that multiple groups of activists, political representatives, social stakeholders and cultural producers have been undertaking.
This plurality of voices converges at the seminar with the aim of providing a partial (and not univocal) response to two specific questions. Firstly, to the need to constitute and consolidate a new material culture of life that mitigates the damage to the ecosystem caused by late-stage capitalist civilization. Secondly, and with the purpose of conferring perspectives on reality on this aim, the desire to reactivate a strategic imagination which, in critical contrast to the course of the emancipatory projects of the 20th century, facilitates bringing about the eco-social transition to a future of rational regulation of the socio-environmental metabolism.
Speakers include Cara New Daggett, Joan Martínez Alier, Daniel Tanuro, Aura Lolita Chávez Ixcaquic, Yayo Herrero, Miriam García Torres, Emilio Santiago Muiño, Marian Simón Rojo, Laura Laguna and Luis González Reyes.
Jaime Vindel is a member of PEI management. He is an European Doctor of Art History and a Master in Philosophy and Social Sciences. He is researcher with the Ramón y Cajal Programme of the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council, where he is working on a study on the relationship between the metaphors of thermodynamics and the cultural metaphors of fossil modernity.