WORKOUT (BRUSSELS & ONLINE)

<expect the unexpected>

Ingrid Grunwald, Maarten Cornel, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, The Netherlands
Why is communication/conversation of the utmost essence in these challenging polarising times where nothing is certain? Why do we need especially now time to reflect, time to ask questions without looking for the answers/results straight away? Why is identity and authenticity at this moment so important for our students, for the world they are living in. We all want to be part of a community, we want to belong in this changing world of constantly evolving identities. Do we give our students sufficient research tools to keep learning and looking beyond borders. Are they able to stay critical with an open mind? This is a short presentation of experiences concerning racism, diversity and inclusion, identity issues, cultural sensitivities at the KABK, where 65% of the students are international. This workshop will be an interactive place to exchange and look for answers. The way being more important than the destination.

<extended art school>

Volkmar Mühleis, Nancy Vansieleghem, LUCA School of Arts, Belgium
Like other educational institutions, the art school faces new and profound challenges. We want to make current questions in art education tangible with the intention of opening up what Donna Haraway has called ‘practices of worlding’. Therefore, we create a platform capable of considering key concepts that have been constitutive for the formation of the art school. A re-reading of key-concepts aims at a mapping of controversies and of disclosing challenges to transgress existing categories and divisions. Moving beyond centralising ways of art education, the book project aims at an approach that evokes patterns for becoming sensitive for what art education is made of and for shaping entangled response-ability (cf. Waldenfels, Haraway). This session will be structured as a performance, brought together with participants.

<extended art school>

Anna Maria Ranczakowska, Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Estonia
This workshop will provoke a discussion towards fostering a mindset that enables artists to become agents of change in society around them. It can be observed, that with emphasis on “career readiness” and on employment as ultimate market and students demand, the language of today’s education appears to be driven by the ideal of the human as a competitive economic creature (homo economicus) leaving out other important functions of the human like homo biologicus — understood in terms of its neurology and biological and behavioral evolution, or homo rationalis—the human as a rational being—as well as homo socialis –one societally oriented. This neo-liberal systematisation of curriculum feeds the constant repetition of the tragedy of the commons, where individuals neglect the well-being of society in the pursuit of personal gain, which leads to over-consumption and ultimately depletion of the common resource, to everybody's detriment. Using design thinking as a tool and principles of transformative thinking participants will collectively explore and map concrete ideas on how to nourish the mindset in artistic students.

<extended art school>

Stéphane Sauzedde, ANdEA, France
Art and design schools are fast transitioning in a changing world. Social changes, economic fluctuations, political upheavals, ecological crises, and public health concerns are now omnipresent; redefining our common interests and raising new questions around our well-being. They are making us question the way we produce common goods, the establishment of real equality, our culture of hospitality, the circular economy, and much more -pushing us towards a new era of sobriety and slowdown. Bridging the separation between nature and culture is one of the main challenges faced by the current movements of transition in pedagogy. In this context, and with the need to think differently about the place of humans amidst this biodiversity, several French art and design schools are opening garden initiatives for art and design as one of the teaching strategies. These gestures of creation in local ecosystems, collective and individual are today finding their place in higher education, where they traditionally don’t belong. They help us raise key issues and gradually evolve the academic curriculum for the benefit of the "extended art student".

<extended art school>

Chris Torch, Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden
Exploring the original impulse to become a cultural worker, what and why we choose this profession. Based on serious self-evaluation, we can create a survival strategy in a radically shifting cultural landscape .

<changing power dynamics>

Pascal Vandelanoitte, Flo Flamme, Sirine Jendoubi, LUCA School of Arts, Belgium
The attention paid to topics as diversity and equality is growing steadily in arts education. For the Audiovisual Arts department, this is not only stimulated by the global world we live in, but also by the multi-diverse city of Brussels that the campus is situated in. Furthermore, we LUCA is one of the three partners of the European Joint MasterDocNomads and every year it welcomes a mixed student group with origins from all over the world. As such, diversity and equality are not only fashion words. This session aims to facilitate an exchange of practices and ideas with other partners from ELIA. Presenters want to illustrate multiple practices of our audiovisual department & campus, both in the curriculum and extra-curricular, by teachers as well as students. The main goal is to evolve into arts education where these topics are inclusive, and not only points of attention. Open dialogue will be encouraged.

<extended art school>

ginger coons, Robert van Raffe, Suzanne Rademaker, Willem de Kooning Academy, Netherlands
Joint his chat-show Since early 2020 a pilot programme has been running in selected theory courses at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Students are asked to understand theory through the development of hands-on projects. In Illustration, this involved asking students to imagine ideological drawing tools as a response to the term's theme of technopolitics. This session takes its title from one of the capitalist drawing tools proposed during the course, creativity pills, for creators who want to be always-on, never un-creative. The aim of this session is to open a discussion about hands-on ways of doing theory education.

<changing power dynamics>

Gudrun Beckmann, Martijn Boven, Nathalie Beekman, NHL University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands
A Pedagogy of imaginative dialogues (PIMDI) Or how to explore seemingly incompatible cultural and existential values in a playful way. Six universities with master programmes in arts education have come together in the Erasmus Plus project ‘A pedagogy of Imaginative Dialogues’. During a period of three years, they will develop a new pedagogy based on Education in Arts. By drawing on the imaginative potential of arts, this pedagogy takes the tension between seemingly incompatible cultural and existential values as a productive and engaging starting point. The pedagogy is imaginative in the sense that it employs artistic forms and strategies, already available in different fields of the arts, to play out these tensions in a fruitful and non-violent manner. By taking the (radical) differences between cultural values seriously we try to tackle the waning of a collective, shared system of values, which is, among other things, due to democratisation. The simultaneous presence, in the public sphere, of widely divergent perspectives, has led to what could be coined as the paradox of democratisation: stimulating diversity, democracy runs the risk of losing the common ground that allows for an interaction between perspectives. Join this experiment with interventions following the so-called PIMDI-cycle: Disruption –Suspension –Confrontation –Exploring –Translation.

<changing power dynamics>

Benjamin Wild, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
Around the world, on the catwalk and the sidewalk, people, groups and organisations are dressing up in funny, angry, challenging costumes as never before to make their voices heard. Understanding the criticality of costume, and its function as a dynamic and attention-seeking form of communication in arts-focused teaching and learning, is important in developing a creative intelligence and empathy at a time when many feel disenfranchised and are using dress up to champion social causes that affect us all (e.g. BLM, the Extinction Rebellion and the international women’s marches). Fancy dress is a dynamic and democratic form of communication. Helping arts students to understand this form of dress in an interdisciplinary perspective, from history to psychology, design to politics, can give them a more purposeful sense of how the arts, have long been used to articulate social agendas, to generate mass interest and spark action. Despite surface appearances, fancy dress costume is no laughing matter: it demands our attention.

<changing power dynamics>

Christine Goutrié, Weissensee Art Academy Berlin, Germany
Through this lecture performance, Goutrié explains how factography, growing up in the German Democratic Republic, East Germany and her experience of a huge system change have influenced her teaching. The focus from decolonising the curriculum shifts to decolonising yourself -the teacher. Factography can help to deconstruct our privileges as teachers, our beliefs, our systems of thinking, our sources of knowledge, our tools and make all facts visible, bringing them into the open. And then, coming back to bell hooks: “allow us to be whole in the classroom, and as a consequence wholehearted.”

<changing power dynamics>

Tundé Adefioye, Sint Lucas School of Arts Antwerpen, Karel de Grote University College, Belgium
Adefioye offers the course, US Popular (Black) Visual Culture. Many students consider themselves as interested in the idea of US, and a lesser number, Black culture. What becomes apparent, is 90% of those excited by the focus on Black culture have a fetishized view. Fred Moten has asked “Can Black People Be Loved?” Without asking the question directly, but using quotes, intersectional theory, anti-racist and anti-colonial perspectives, along with many pop culture videos from YouTube among other platforms, Adefioye challenges perceptions of what students know of US and Black popular culture.

<expect the unexpected>

Alice Marshall, University of Derby, United Kingdom
This lecture demonstration explores how to keep your creative ideas alive whilst living through a pandemic. Pulling on knowledge of working with under-grad, post-grad students and professionals in this current climate, this lecture dem will provide pathways and tools for artists and lecturers to use to keep their, and others, practices active. Key themes: Creating in unusual spaces, Documenting ideas digitally - using social media as an effective platform, Pen to paper (A look at moving away from the digital), How to use COVID restrictions to your advantage –creative advice for any rule book, Time to play (live tasks).

<the extended art school>

Fernanda Branco, Oslo National Academy of Arts, Norway
This workshop intends to give to the participants tools to experience with their bodies, relationships with the environment we are in. By exploring different sites, focusing on the agency of the place and our abilities to respond to it. Working with awareness, attentiveness, intuition, perception modes and ways of inquiring, create a written narrative and a score of movements/actions.

<the extended art school>

Eva den Heijer, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Netherlands
“all art derives from play” (Huizinga), and “play can come closer to reality than reality itself” (Fink). Inner Play in a Study Narrative that addresses a form of reflection on, and organisation of the study career that: provides room for the student's polyphony; can be arranged by students themselves; is fun and activating; establishes a link with relevant subject matter; promotes flexibility in the thinking of the student. Using a philosophical framework combined with game design principles, students design inner play in their study to face this rapidly changing world we live in, confident with agility and skills. In this workshop, participants will discover their own pluriformity as a human being and how they can discover and use their own peculiarities and playfulness in life in order to hack daily systems. The workshop will contain a short introduction about the method and its philosophical approaches. The rest of the workshop will consist of working with the method.