Pursuing Education and Artistic Practice, Differently

Ali Eisa: PILOT was developed in response to the upheavals of the pandemic and its detrimental effects on formal education, such as university-based art schools. We both work in universities and have seen these impacts first-hand over the past few months, with students and lecturers increasingly isolated and under significant pressure.

Alberto Duman: Yes, I think there has been a great deal of trauma and pain travelling through our educational spaces in between institutional and human frames of memory, experience and understanding. The sticky matter of discomfort and dissociation worked through an accumulated narrative of fees and monetization, of lost purposes of pedagogy and care in art schools, of micro-aggression at management level, of hours and days of pastoral care spent shoring up the shortcomings of what we mean and do and say about an art education in times of change, as if the world mattered.

Mike Davis reminded us in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic: ‘Corona walks through the front door as a familiar monster’[1]. The simultaneous surge of Black Lives Matter activity, which burst into planetary action in the midst of the summer, compounded the antigenic monstrosity of Covid-19 with a bigger human consciousness shake-up, and deepened the discourse around the pandemic as it was still in progress. It was as if all the intimated horror of things to come for those who felt them and experienced them, either consciously or unconsciously for some time, folded into the upheavals of the present.

AE: Yes, and this led us to thinking: ‘if not now, when?’ for opening up an alternative space for arts education – and PILOT was our answer. How do you think the course opened up new ways of thinking about and doing arts education differently?

AD: In some ways there is nothing really that new about PILOT and that is why it worked. We simply enabled the manifestation of desires that we have treasured intimately for a long time to act up as principles for a wished-for reality. Through Autograph, we were able to put in practice what we were taught as ‘radical pedagogies’ and make-believe them into existence.

Fuelled and charged by all those signs of a conjuncture shaping up in the present, we set aside accreditation, assignments and assessments in favour of a pedagogy of shared knowledge and shared learning, adopted from the many voices that we came to understand as messengers to an art school that wishes to exist.

In other words, we took out all the key components of the structure of art degrees in university settings whilst embracing its repressed inner calling, as an act of hope. Not as higher-level aspirations quashed by the pragmatism of the educational sector, nor as gestures towards radical / critical knowledge in academic and curatorial forums, but as actual blueprints for a kind of teaching and learning and care that we simply could not wait anymore to be a part of in our lives, in the here and now.

AE: The course was structured around three themes: Rights, Care and Future, each with two invited guest speakers who brought radical (and often contrasting) perspectives to the table. What kind of discussions and creative responses did these themes and speakers open up for the participants?

AD: We never expected our participants to be ‘theme-ready’ in any academic sense. There was no reading list or name checking of bell hooks and Paulo Freire to be confronted with at the beginning (although those inspirations did eventually come in). When we proposed the themes to our participants, they came at them with their own richness, depth and singular tone of voice. Their subjectivities were the real curriculum, and the themes acted as the channels for their own ways of inhabiting the learning space. A space to witness a remarkable body of experiences - we had births, losses, major surgeries, tears, some powerful silences, schedule spills and oversights, as well as many moments of wonder, joy and love for each other.

AE: This was really important wasn’t it? The honesty and candid nature of each participant bringing their own life stories and knowledge to expand and enrich the provocations of the speakers. The point of PILOT was not to be a kind of ‘finishing school’ for radical pedagogists, to then be re-inserted back into the educational structures they emerged from, but to be a breathing space away from those structures, with room for respite and freedom to reflect on and pursue practice differently.

AD: I think because of that way of bringing them together, the participants’ discussions and responses have been astonishing and immediately grounded in the particularity of their experiences. They were already the experts of their own learning as they entered the sessions, and the invited speakers recognised and honoured the gathering’s soulful disposition with their generosity, attentiveness and care.

I’m thinking for example of the productive gap opened up in our first session on Rights, between the call for an abolitionist stance by Lola Olufemi and the confessional language of Phoebe Boswell. And, how one of the participants’ experiences of a protracted medical condition grounded the whole conversation, introducing a dilemma of positioning: where are the embodied histories of real subjects in relation to the demands of activist campaign targets and the symbolic power of representation in art?

During PILOT sessions, the spontaneous interactions between speakers and participants produced unexpected and precious moments for learning and sharing.

For example, Cassie Thornton’s presentation on care was abruptly uprooted by unexpected events surrounding a court case for the murder of an indigenous woman in her city of Thunder Bay, Canada. This altered the script of the whole session into an affective atmosphere, through which Kate Adams’ own stories about her life and work with people with complex needs, and a number of the participants’ personal experiences resonated in hugely amplified ways. Or when, in the midst of the Future session with Gregory Sholette and Jemma Desai, everyone in the room experienced that sharp pang of the moment of deadlock, which afflicts all those contending with irreconcilable positions between being and living, caught up between the path of truth-telling and liberation and the administrative complex of professional conduct which summons all forces against those who dare to follow those paths.

AE: I really think the speakers opened up the themes in provocative ways and this led to all manner of creative works produced by participants in response. In some instances, taking the time to reconsider and think deeply about their creative practices, or in other cases experimenting with entirely new approaches. It seemed liked PILOT gave people the confidence and permission to call themselves ‘artists’ or ‘writers’ having not done that before. This felt all the more important given how much pressure people are under in the current circumstances, facing multiple barriers including health issues and home-schooling for instance. Are you surprised at how much creative work was produced during the course and the care people took to make it?

AD: Yes, it has been an unexpected shower of beautiful gifts! We had some reasonable expectations of what might be possible to achieve in terms of production due to the duration of the programme, its intensity and the multiple barriers you highlighted. But our expectations could not possibly take into account the investment that each one of our participants would end up making and the quality of the outcomes as a whole.

In hindsight, we can see that the sense of mutual excitement and genuine interest in each other's presence (yes, online ‘presence’ does exist!) multiplied the energy levels within each session exponentially and amplified one’s sense of being in the group.

The high degree of rapport amongst them spun the caring for each other into the making for each other, materialising in words and deeds the axis of mutual attention and mindfulness of each other that characterised the time spent in sessions and the time spent between sessions, thinking of each other and opening up criss-cross paths of attention and regard.

AE: Yes, I would say more than seeking tangible outcomes, PILOT worked towards creating that space for participants to flourish. It was much more about the process than the product - although I’m very excited to present the wonderful videos, music, writings and the other riches participants produced on Autograph’s blog in the coming weeks.

This leads me to another reflection, about how, in many ways, PILOT was all about the people in the (virtual) room. The course attracted an incredibly diverse range of creative people: different ages and backgrounds, different levels of practice, with different interests and ways of working. It was this rich variety – across identities, experiences of health and disability, race and class, living in different countries and drawing on a broad range of artistic practices, cultural heritages and political commitments – coming together which really shaped the kinds of conversation and creative work that emerged.

AD: We stated as a principle in the welcome pack for the course: ‘PILOT will be its participants’.

It was the sound of our voices that first carried our mutual recognition of who was in the room, broaching the affinities that were to develop throughout the course in such remarkable ways and forging bonds built on trust and on the knowledge of each other’s yet unspoken promises and commitment.

If I can allow myself some name-checking (!) it brings to mind this quote from bell hooks: "My intent is to bear witness so as to challenge the prevailing notion that it is simply too difficult to make connections—this is not so. Those of us who want to make connections, who want to cross boundaries, do.” [2]

AE: Connection is really the fundamental basis for any true learning space and is exactly what we have been challenged with in these unprecedented times. Many of the course attendees reflected that PILOT was unique because of the intimate connections they made with others and they felt safe enough to open up and explore their personal experiences during the sessions. It was humbling to see people talk about their lives in such brave and honest terms, week in week out. Why do you think this intimacy and trust between participants emerged?

AD: I would say the participants were “invited to bring their whole selves...invited to come with their pains and their traumas…” [3]

The affective atmospheres of the present (with reference to Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter especially) have cut deep into our consciousness as artistic and cultural practitioners. Imagination and anxiety got entangled into new formations, simultaneously awakening previous ones, all in the space of isolation and hardship, producing moments of dread and flashes of epiphany in equal measures.

Within such circumstances, to look out for the other, to reimagine our relationship with others in different ways, to test our own moral structures and to raise new scaffolding to prop up things we want to assert, in regards to the horrors of the present, can be a reflex rather than a fully conscious decision. Maybe it was this reflex that initially brought our PILOTs together?

But as we moved into the actual space of the programme, I sensed that the bonds we were all looking for were those of intimacy and trust above all. Perhaps we all dared our hopes for that space to exist, to come into being, and tell us that another world is not just possible, but that it already exists.

Perhaps the undeclared fourth theme of PILOT was ‘love’: the nurturing of each other’s presence and respect for each other’s pain and trauma, the wilful acts of giving up fear and learned helplessness, the rejection of dissociation as defence mechanism and the embrace of emotional intelligence and academic sensibility as mutually nourishing life learning vessels.

AE: Our call out for PILOT used a beautiful quote you introduced to us from Raymond Williams: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”. I think this rang true throughout the process, where often sensitive and difficult conversations felt energising and productive – I think someone described it as "exhausting, but in the right way".

AD: No matter on what terms we opened the doors of PILOT’s learning space, or what we hoped to gain from it or give to it, the actual experiences of being together throughout the 12 weeks of its programme were a collection of truly overwhelming memorable gifts, heart-warming gems, and yes, emotionally and intellectually humbling.

Maybe the success of PILOT comes from the distributed agency of this act of shaping: we all simply aspired, in our different ways, to make that level of recognition the very first checkpoint of our gathering. An acknowledgement that what bell hooks calls the ‘world as classroom’ [4] can overlap with the ‘classroom as world’: I See You, You See Me. We Are Here.

AE: We wanted PILOT to be a catalyst for these artists to better understand their work and be stimulated by leading practice and research material to take it further. We wanted them to leave with a sense of purpose to guide them in their futures. Do you think the course has achieved this ambition?

AD: One way of describing what we wanted to achieve with PILOT is: To enthuse, empower and help develop their becoming as creative practitioners, capable of seeing through “barriers and walls…things that prevent people from coming together”. [5]

It would be overreaching the power and scope of any short-term educational project to claim to be able to transform one’s approach to practice and worldview. But the nurturing of learning operates also on multiple timelines: knowing our limits and making decisions to invest our time together rather than on delivery of pre-packaged course material was a given from the start. The material eventually did accumulate - a PILOT library now exists, and all our sessions are recorded and captioned for future returns - but it was not the condition for them to be in that space.

Freed of obligations, but committed to care, the boundaries of our being together stretched to accommodate everyone as a ‘pilot’ of other spaces to be with and be a part of in the future. Indeed, to go ahead and initiate other PILOT-like learning spaces: figuring out and passing on.

AE: It’s also brilliant how in quite a short time PILOT created a close network of peers and potential future colleagues that can continue to inspire, challenge and support each other now that the course is finished.

AD: Yes, the proximity is less tight now, and the world slips in and conspires to close in the gaps between us, but the bonds made in the connections of PILOT are still amongst us and will emerge again in many shapes and forms.

AE: As well as sharing the work made by participants over the coming weeks on Autograph’s blog, we are currently developing an online event to bring the conversations, ideas and energy of PILOT to a wider audience. And, of course, we’re planning to run PILOT again later this year. So an exciting opportunity to meet more artists, create this learning space anew and go through the rich process of exchange again.

If you are interested in taking part in PILOT 2021, you can register your interest and read more about the course here.