In The Vortex of Institutional Lives

Abstract

Following from a series of conversations that have been taking place sporadically between us in the past years, the current contribution serves as another opportunity to address ways of living multiple institutional lives. In our respective contexts, these pertain to different types of institutions, ranging from art school/academy, to university, to art or cultural organization/collective. Here we explore ways of traversing the boundaries and frictions between radical classroom practices and the institutional processes and frameworks that we speak and act within and against in the context of European higher arts education; all these environments are deeply entrenched in coloniality. We are drawn to radical classroom practices that experiment with forms of sociality that go beyond the dominant, modern-colonial model of meritocracy that dictates our lives in the academy and the labor market. We are interested in un/learning from accounts of educational practices in the lineage of pedagogues including Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Ivan Illich, Sandy Grande, Eve Tuck, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Gayatri Spivak, and Fred Moten/Stefano Harney. All these thinkers and practitioners share a perspective on education not as the solution to a problem but as a part of the problem (while still they engage in educational-institutional practices themselves). This