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 9, at 8pm CET: 'Sensing Salon' by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri.
For the Zoom link please sign up in advance to register via e-mail.
Healing, as much as art, is a transformative praxis. It is something to do and it does something: it restores. In their collaborative work, Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva explore healing as an art form, a praxis of sensing and making sense that includes studying, thinking, reading and restoring experiments that reach for the deepest level of our entangled existence. Ferreira da Silva and Desideri will host a Sensing Salon—a studio for the practice of healing arts—where different reading and healing tools will be shared and available for use, such as Tarots, medicinal plants, Fake Therapy cards, books, Astrology, Reiki, etc.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. Her work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of 'Toward a Global Idea of Race' (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 'A Dívida Impagavel' (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), 'Unpayable Debt' (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of 'Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as '4Waters-Deep Implicancy' (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York).
Valentina Desideri is an artist whose practice consists in plotting study with others. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006), later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13) and is currently a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organisers of Performing Arts Forum in France, she speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is part of the Oficina de Imaginação Política, she reads and writes.