How to Work with Archives that are "Not There"? Engaging Medu Art Ensemble in the Now

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 14:46:20 +0000

WORKING GROUP: JOHANNESBURG
AUTHORS: PULENG PLESSIE AND RANGOATO HLASANE

ABSTRACT

This Learning Unit is concerned with the politics of archival access or how to work with archives that are ‘not there’.

The central story of the Johannesburg Working Group (JWG) is the Medu Art Ensemble (Medu), a collective of informal members; most of them exiled artists from South Africa, working in Botswana circa 1979-1985. Due to the precarity and risk attached to their political work, much of the Medu archive is scattered. Crucially, Medu archive has not been easy to institutionalize. As a result, much of Medu work is unknown and untaught in formal institutions.

The JWG attempts to use the Medu story as a point of departure in decolonizing problematic epistemologies, language, terminologies and pedagogies in modest ways within formal education spaces in South Africa (largely Johannesburg). The JWG has considered notions of collectivity, a being togetherness as a powerful strategy for meaning-making and knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing.

The following document should be seen as a constellation of experiences, processes and activities of the Another Roadmap School Johannesburg Working Group in conversation with the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster, Intertwining hi/stories, students, learners, artists, collectives, Medu Art Ensemble and more. It has been showcased as a zine at the Another Roadmap Exhibition in Huye, Rwanda. Members and visitors had the chance to comment the print outs. These comments can be seen in the attached version and ask for an engagement into this work in progress.

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We would very much appreciate your feedback. Please share with us in the comments below your experiences of working with this Learning Unit, as well as your thoughts, concerns and questions. The authors will do their best to get back to you and continue the conversation. Thank you!

FOLLOW THE PATH THIS LEARNING UNIT IS CONNECTED TO:

→ Letterwriting

→ Working with Images

→ Critical Pedagogy and its Critiques

→ Archival Activism

Reengaging Freire: Paulo and Elza in Geneva

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 16:00:05 +0000

WORKING GROUP: GENEVA/ZURICH
AUTHORS: MICROSILLONS - MARIANNE GUARINO-HUET, OLIVIER DESVOIGNES

ABSTRACT

This Learning Unit offers historical information about the ten years the pedagogue Paulo Freire (1921, Recife – 1997 São Paulo), his wife Elza and their children spent in Geneva in the 1970s. It also presents four experiments, realized by autonomous gallery educators, to reinvent and reengage Freire’s thinking in
present-day Switzerland. Finally, it opens some ideas to translate those experimentations in other contexts. The Reenagaging Freire Learning Unit is a first step to reinstate Paulo and Elza Freire in Geneva’s history of pedagogy, from which they are strikingly absent. It is also an attempt to imagine experimentations that
interrogate the topicality of Freire today in Switzerland (as the gallery educators did in developing a feminist choir, a community garden, a construction workshop in a popular neighborhood or a long-term experiment around the future of asylum-seeker youth), imagining how concepts such as untested feasibilities, conscientização, codification or generativity could serve as tools to question the contemporary dominant models of arts education.

→ DOWNLOAD THE LEARNING UNIT IN PDF (ENGLISH)

- DESCARGAR LA UNIDAD DE APRENDIZAJE PDF (EN CASTELLANO)

The download is free of charge. Please note you need to be logged in to access the PDF.

FOLLOW THE PATHS THIS LEARNING UNIT IS CONNECTED TO:

→ Critical Pedagogy and its Critiques

→ Letterwriting

→ Missionary Dimensions in Arts Education

→ Archival Activism

Intertwining Histories's contents tagged with "archive"

How to Work with Archives that are "Not There"? Engaging Medu Art Ensemble in the Now

Reengaging Freire: Paulo and Elza in Geneva