SELF-MANAGED EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN ART: s-o-s-project
SELF-MANAGED EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN ART: s-o-s-project
An attempt at cracking the codes of knowledge production
Bojan Djordjev, Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović
Short Introduction
Self-managed Educational System in Art is a research project on educational systems in the fields of arts and humanities, initiated in 2006 by TkH – Centre for Performing Arts Theory and Practice in Belgrade. According to the Serbian title: Samoupravni Obrazovni Sistem u umetnosti, we are using the acronym as a short title of the project in Serbian and English: s-o-s-project.
The key topics/concepts of the project are: artistic education, production and management of knowledge, research, self-organization, self-education/learning, self-management, application of open source procedures in education, contemporary contexts of knowledge production, and commodification of knowledge.
This project is conceived as an open system of scientific-research as well as theoretical and practical workshops that develop the practice of post-pedagogy in the fields of art theory, culture studies, cultural activism, and educational methods. Its goal is to find and/or shape alternatives to official educational institutions in the direction of self-education. The project is to be realized through five different segments. The basic segment of the project is research, which is currently running. It is carried out by a working group of eight people with different educational backgrounds. The aim of the group is to, through selected texts and books, reflect, modify, and re-appropriate (crack) existing concepts and develop new concepts which could build new methodologies of (self-)education and knowledge production. As a part of this segment, the group is making a research on other initiatives and projects of a similar kind worldwide. At one point of research the working group will open the project to other participants and form an “experimental class” to test the developed concepts and methodologies in the form of workshops during the TkH Summer Re: public.
The project is organized through the following segments:
1) Self-organization
2) Research (Belgrade, PAF (France))
3) Presentations (PAF (France), spiel:platz dietheater Konzerthaus (Vienna), Kontekst Gallery (Belgrade))
4) TkH Summer Re: public (summer school (Belgrade, Užice (Serbia))
5) Publishing (on-line publishing; a TkH Journal issue; an international collection of essays (also: compendium, anthology; srp: zbornik tekstova)
The working group consists of undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as young professionals in the fields of arts and humanities:
Siniša Ilić (MA, visual artist), Marta Popivoda (video artist, student of film directing), Ana Vujanović (PhD, theorist of performing arts and culture), Iva Nenić (theorist of culture, ethnomusicologist), Bojan Đorđev (theatre director), Jelena Knežević (arts and culture manager), Vida Knežević (curator, postgraduate student of theory of art), Ivana Marjanović (curator), Ana Vilenica (art historian, performer).
Close readings: Between workers’ self-management, an ignorant schoolmaster, and post-pedagogy
Through s-o-s-project we are trying to establish new procedures by introducing and investigating the “self-managed system” in the field of education. Here this means first of all that the participants of TkH Summer Re: public (“experimental class”) and researchers from the working group do not attend/study a pre-determined syllabus taught by pre-determined lecturers, but quite the opposite, they are the ones who take over an active role in articulating specific topics and then look for and decide about appropriate lecturers.
Our usage of the term self-managed system actually refers to workers’ self-management ((radničko) samoupravljanje) which was developed as a state system during the 1950s in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Workers’ self-management is now recognized as a practice of direct democracy on the lower levels of the Socialist regime of that particular period in Yugoslavia. This means “the working class and the poor people had a type of sovereign right, which they do not have today”. The work councils in which the common workers were present were sovereign to decide about social issues, such as distribution of income, distribution of state-owned apartments, work strategies, etc. Even though this concept proved highly controversial in practice (especially as there was tight control by the Communist Party on higher levels of the decision making process), we are interested in exploring its possible re-appropriation in the current field of education in art.”
According to this approach, one of the most important aspects of the project is practicing self-organization. The project is organized from below (but not from bottom-up): gathering collaborators who have a need and interest to take part in creating an alternative education model for themselves, and also keeping a non-hierarchical, rhizomatic structure of collaboration. This structure does not imply a sector division of labour, rather, all participants take part in all segments and aspects of the project – organization, decision-making process, research, etc.
In a theoretical sense, the project started on the basis of two books we decided to use as a departing point in the research: Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation and Gregory Ulmer’s Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys.
According to them, we develop and apply post-pedagogical educational-research strategies, whose goals are:
1. To make a transfer from the logocentric and humanistic science about art to critical, analytical and culture-studies oriented theories of art;
2. To take a risk to put an open critical research at the place of accumulation of positive knowledge and their explanations, as the basic principle of (self-)education;
3. To apply artistic and theoretical knowledge and experiences of historical avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, post-avant-gardes, and post-modernism to theoretical (at the level of theses) and practical (at the level of testing the theses) self-education;
4. To position artistic and theoretical work as a critical approach to the key topics of the project, that are also used as tools for self-reflection of one’s own artistic, theoretical, activist, and scientific-research activity;
5. To replace the authoritative figure of ‘one who knows’ (schoolmaster) with a multitude of new ‘subjects of art and education’ as intelligent, active/willing, research-oriented, and critical actors within a contemporary society; and
6. To set the relationship among the researchers in the fields of theory, history, and production of arts and humanities as collaboration on an equal basis.
Post-pedagogic work in the project is based on the following needs that address our local context (transitional Serbia) as well as the post-Fordistic global socio-economical context:
a) The necessity to establish productive and transversal relations of art and theory as critical approaches to contemporary culture (especially in a local context);
b) The necessity of studying models and possibilities of self-organization and self-education, which can help us to make alternatives to official educational institutions and crack codes of such an education;
c) The necessity to form a critical tool through which we can constantly produce temporary autonomous territories for permanent education out of the official educational institutions; and
d) The necessity to make a distinction between learning through one’s own work, research and artistic practice and learning for later paid labour-time (in educational institutions), which is just one more demand of the neo-liberal capitalistic machine.
Define: What is to be done? Hacking the information on the border of territories …
The project is planned for realization in five segments in collaboration with different partners.
1) Self-organization
This aspect was most intensive at the beginning of the project, but it stayed the main concept of development and further articulation of the project. At the beginning it took two months of self-organization to provide relatively stable infrastructure (space, technical equipment, grants) for the working group to start the research. It originated from the experience of the TkH group that started as a similar, self-organized study group in 2000, as well as in Performing Arts Theory School organized by TkH for new collaborators – undergraduate and post-graduate students of arts and humanities, in 2001/2002 within the Centre for New Theatre and Dance in Belgrade. s-o-s as a project emerged in between our needs to do further systematical theoretical and artistic research, based on the previous TkH experiences, and also provoked by the invitation to participate in the Documenta 12 publishing project. The research group was formed after the conference on self-organization which was edited by Ana Vujanović, within the frame of the 40th BITEF (Belgrade International Theatre Festival), and where Marta Popivoda and Jelena Knežević presented the basic concept of the project.
2) Research
The basic procedure of the working group is reading and analysing different texts and books on the topic of art education and related subjects. Analysed theses are then modified through discussions and adopted as our own tools, engaged in modeling new educational procedures which will be tested through the TkH Summer Re: public.
The research group meets twice a week, and works through three simultaneous vectors of action:
1. working on new strategies of self-education, in the form of reading, analysing, and discussing texts and books, and making platforms/diagrams of re-articulation and re-appropriation of chosen concepts (see diagrams platform1, platform2);
2. concrete artistic, theoretic, and aRtivistic solutions/results of the researchers as well as testing of the developed concepts and strategies in the form of reports, texts, consultations, etc; and
3. semi-public events: discussions, lectures, and introduction of outside observers and experts from various fields in the process of work, as well as presentations of new phases of the project to a wider audience. These events will serve as a kind of constant evaluation of the research.
3) Presentations
The first presentation of the research was realized in PerformingArtsForum (PAF, France) in December 2006. The second presentation and public discussion was in January 2007 in spiel:platz dietheater Konzerthaus (Vienna), in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts – Post Conceptual Art Practices Class: Nomanden reading group, Vienna. The third presentation is planned for May 2007 in Kontekst Gallery in Belgrade, where the research group will present the new phase of research to the Belgrade scene and open the project for a wider audience to take part.
We view presentations as a tool for self-reflection and recruiting new collaborators of the project. Also, through the realized presentations s-o-s-project entered the discussion with two very different institutions: PerformingArtsForum, self-organized and privately owned, now working on developing self-learning practices, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a formal educational institution and part of the state apparatuses within which a self-organized reading group emerged. These collaborations helped us in more precise articulation of our interests, and attitudes about different/other territories of knowledge production, and reflection of a wider map of institutions that deal with education in the field of art.
4) TkH Summer Re: public
“Summer School” is planned for August 2007 in Belgrade in Kontekst gallery (Cultural center Stari grad). It is going to be a result of the first three segments, particularly of the last phase of the research during which the strategies of work and workshops will be formed, and then lecturers selected according to the formed topics. After the establishment of the “experimental class” which will work in TkH Summer Re: public, all participants will take part in the decision-making process about content and organization of the summer school. We plan to use an algorithm designed by the s-o-s working group which will offer a set of theoretical and artistic problematics/issues and define a decision-making procedure (voting, etc.). We think that through the algorithm we will avoid participants staying fixed in their existing conceptual frames.
The starting proposal is that the summer school consists of three workshops. The first will be dedicated to new skills (e.g., using free software). The second will be theoretical, and organized through studying theoretical key concepts and texts for the chosen subject and stimulate discussions among the participants. The third workshop will be dedicated to the problematics of artistic practices such as performance, dance, visual arts, photography, music, etc., and it will have a concrete final product. It is planned for all the participants to collaborate with each other on the level of discussion, as well as in concrete projects.
5) Publishing
Within this segment, complete documentation of the work on forming the summer school, as well as all the research materials and work results of the school itself, will be published. This segment involves online publishing of the entire documentation (research reports, transcripts of the discussions, readers, diagrams…) of the research and organization. Online publishing will be realized through the wiki tool/page at the HYPERLINK "http://www.tkh-generator.net" www.tkh-generator.net online platform, as well as through publishing selected texts in TkH – journal for performing arts theory, which will be probably realized within the frame of Documenta 12 publishing platform in September 2007.
During all five segments of the project, one of the basic questions will be about the need for self-organization around the topic of education and knowledge production, their procedures, territories, and contexts. A possible formulation of new models and methodologies of (self-)education, which will use open source procedures and reinvestigate post-Fordistic concepts concerning knowledge and their resistance to, or support of contemporary capitalistic society from which they emerged. And also, a reflection of the question: why are educational issues so rapidly and fervently entering the art world?
The aim of the project is to develop an alternative model of (self-)education as a permanent critical tool for producing temporary autonomous territories that will always stay out of the formal university system as a safe zone in which information can be realized/actualized as knowledge. But also, to develop possible strategies of cracking codes of such an education, that is, freely taking over the methodologies of work and their implementation in our own procedures – against information as a market unit. We will propose a model for investigation and engagement of knowledge beyond actual proprietary relations, knowledge that will not stand in the position of the commodity and close its code.
This text is realized in collaboration with Siniša Ilić (diagrams), Vida Knežević, Ivana Marjanović, Iva Nenić, Ana Vilenica.
Bojan Djordjev deals with contemporary performing arts and theatre direction. He graduated Theatre and radio direction from the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade; currently, he is MA candidate in Theory of art and media at the University of Arts in Belgrade. He is co-founder and permanent collaborator of TkH platform.
Marta Popivoda works in the fields of cultural organization, video art, and Internet. Currently, she is senior of Film and TV Directing at the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. She is permanent collaborator of TkH platform.
Ana Vujanovic is a freelance worker (theoretician, lecturer, organizer, writer, dramaturge...) in the fields of contemporary performing arts and culture. She got her PhD in Theatre studies at the FDA in Belgrade. She is co-founder and permanent collaborator of TkH platform.
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'" see HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia ; http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/yugoslavia/yugo001.htm
(i went with the name from 1946-1963)
Todor Kuljić, “Yugoslavia's Workers Self-Management”, transcript of an interview from video by O. Ressler, recorded in Belgrade, Serbia, 23 min., 2003, http://www.republicart.net.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985/1992).