(Un)learning: Decoloniality within Creative Practices and the Destabilization of Hierarchical Dimensions and Dialogue

Description

Unlearning is as a part of the decolonial process that questions many realms of life fundamentally. It gives a voice to the invisible and unheard. It reveals a great diversity of knowledge. In particular it touches the discourse of education and arts. Why arts? There is an obvious trend to reorient arts and creative practices towards societies and social transformation. The amount of case studies reveals bottom-up orientation of knowledge production and creative processes that relate to decolonization and unlearning the given canons of values, esthetics and ethics. Unlearning is as difficult for the institutions as it is for individuals. Our session addresses the process of unlearning as a part of the decolonization process on various levels:

• Learning from practice: Collecting and discussing selected case studies

• Creative collectives/art collectives as role models

• Experiencing/applying participatory settings in "work-shopping", research, teaching and learning, in social transformation processes.

Timetable

The session will be a multi-voice workshop that brings together a group of artists and researchers on a common platform and shares their ways and thoughts on “un-learning”. The basic structure will be divided into 3 parts. The first part will be a series of Pecha Kucha style rapid presentations from the presenters to prompt questions and open particular aspects of "un-learning" and decolonising methods of working within creative practices. Using Pecha Kucha's format of 20 seconds x 20 slides will allow for subtopics and questions to be succinctly communicated with the most impactful visual aids and imagery. After this, the second part will consist of an open dialogue between the presenters and participants, prompted by the subtopics and aspects that have emerged from the presentations. After the open dialogue, the third part of the session will ask participants to come up with ways of presenting back to the presenters their own ideas around "un-learning" and decolonising their own or others' creative practices to prompt an ongoing discussion after the workshop. We aim to continue this dialogue through social media or interactive and participatory online platforms such as Miro.

Interaction

The suggested format aims to be as inclusive as possible. Attendees are encouraged to introduce their topics and showcase their research interests in a Pecha Kucha form (see Timetable). The presenting group will include two moderators who monitor the chat channel (depending on communication platform used, this would include the “raise hand” function or similar), where all attendees are encouraged to participate. The aim is to make sure that all attendees can share their thoughts, questions and insights on the previous presentations. The third part will consist of inputs from the attendees, collected on a Miro board (or any similar tool which functions as a whiteboard), which the attendees can edit themselves. In the final part of the workshop, attendees have the opportunity to react to the main question of the workshop (What is to be (un)learnt within the existing hierarchical, patriarchal and neoliberal system to allow a pluriversal praxis to thrive?), and to propose methods, questions and insights of their own. The board will be made available to everyone during and after the conference, ideally acting as a stepping stone towards further engagement with the topics of un-learning and decolonization. In accordance with the theme of decoloniality, we aim to be as inclusive as possible in our communication methods during the workshop.

Takeaway

Unlearning is as a part of the decolonial process that questions many realms of life fundamentally. It gives a voice to the invisible and unheard. It reveals a great diversity of knowledge. In particular, it touches the discourse of education and arts. Why arts? There is an obvious trend to reorient arts and creative practices towards societies and social transformation. The amount of case studies reveals bottom-up orientation of knowledge production and creative processes that relate to decolonization and unlearning the given canons of values, aesthetics and ethics. The proposed workshop wants to encourage all attendees to engage with these processes. Unlearning is as difficult for the institutions as it is for individuals, however, it is a highly necessary process in contemporary society. Our session addresses the process of unlearning as a part of the decolonization process on various levels: by collecting and discussing selected case studies, the workshop aims to encourage learning from each other’s practice; by looking at creative collectives/art collectives as role models, participants should be animated to look into such collectives’ methods of collaboration. We suggest that experiencing and applying participatory settings in workshopping, research, teaching and learning is crucial to the outcome of projects in social transformation processes. We strongly hope that attendees will have the opportunity to reflect on their own approaches, but also to refine and supplement them with insights gained over the course of the workshop.

Outcomes

This session is part of a comprehensive project on arts and social transformation. It is a module that enables and promotes our shared research, learning and teaching process, that shares (instead of hoards) information to create solid knowledge. The outcomes provide a testing ground and a basis of thoughts and a network for the outline/organization of a workshop on how to teach socially engaged arts in December 2020. The findings are also incorporated into new teaching formats and research projects conducted by shared campus. The session furthermore discusses the role of unlearning in today’s learning environments. It is oriented towards the decolonial process (as an overall change) and focuses on new perspectives of learning. It experiments with the fact that we all have skills and knowledge to unlearn and to co-created knowledge. We hope that this experience can also provide individual reorientations for the participants and therefore create an offer for low-threshold networking.

Abstract

‘Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.’ Audre Lorde, 1984

Decoloniality fits into the broader goal of sustainable development and social reconciliation. This process of undoing colonizing practices affects in particular education, science and the arts. This session shares decoloniality creative practices in the context of the emerging transcultural and global cooperation platform Shared Campus. Embracing nuances, complicity and the limits of such a “borderless” platform, the (artist-)researchers acknowledge their own decolonial frameworks/positionalities, with the goal of ‘un-learning’ hierarchical ways of thinking and working to create anew. The artists and researchers pursue how destabilising hierarchical structures can produce a ‘decolonised Shared Campus,’ expanded and emancipated with less-visible knowledge systems ‘produced by subalternized and inferiorized subjects’ (Jaramillo, McLaren and Lazaro, 2011).

The (artist-)researchers posit that collaborating with marginalised and dispossessed communities in non-dominant ways, and building resilient solidarity networks, contribute to a radical pedagogy urgent for the inequitable colonial present. The returning question is, What is to be (un)learnt within the existing hierarchical, patriarchal and neoliberal system to allow a pluriversal praxis to thrive?

The session will be a multi-voice workshop that brings together a group of artists and researchers on a common platform and shares their ways and thoughts on “un-learning” decolonial practices in preparation for a two-day transnational workshop that will take place in December 2020—both in-person (pandemic-permitting) and online so as to bring kin-like communities together who have yet to meet. The overall objective is the solid development/foundation of a decolonial creative practice.

We share experiences, reflections, tensions and intentions provided by decolonial thought. Our working mode includes collaborative settings, “polylogic” exchange, and substantial commitment to bottom up development.