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The following text is proceedings from Dejana's talk during the presentation on the conference "The (future) of artisctic education" hosted by UNESCO Chair for Cultural Policies and Management, about the work of the collective People Coming from NowHere, their project PhD in One Night and film "Poems from which we Learned".
The conference took place online, on May 11th 2021.

dejana.sekulic [at] hud.ac.uk

 

The video excerpt we just watched was just one from many moments in a long and continuous journey of this collective, sometimes perhaps, from the outside, seemingly messy but always with a clear path of searching for ways to enrich learning - collecting and sharing of knowledge.
And through it - growth.

The excerpt comes from our film "Poems from Which we Learned", which some of you saw in full.
It is a document of one of the sessions during (what we somewhat reluctantly call) "a course" with students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels.

A session on which students of performance art are listening to experiences of a musician; and through practice, exploring what would these experiences be and mean for them; and if and how they can be applied, according to their needs.

What is put in motion through this, and all the sessions that took place, emphasises thinking indisciplinarity.

Indisciplinarity, a term coming and inspired by Jaques Ranciere, rather than inTerdisciplinary is a term the collective prefers to turn to as unification, an eraser of borders between disciplines.

Thinking indisciplinarity in practice means creating an environment in which exchange and practice-based sharing of approaches for ways of seeing, ways of listening, ways of moving can take place. Unhindered, each young individual (a university student) can focus on finding and creating a multifaceted rich set of tools for expressing and articulating firstly what is their own self (and whether it will be one interested in one specialised field while still having all the indiscilinary insights or as multifaceted human), but then also finding a place within both smaller and larger community.

A dancer can learn from a musician. A musician can learn from a painter. A painter can learn from an electrician. An electrician from a poet. A poet from a sculptor. A sculptor from a lawyer. A lawyer from an architect. An architect from … and so on. This isn't to say that a musician should not still learn from a musician, a dancer from a dancer… But rather, it is a reminder that there is such vast knowledge out there, ungraspable by just one discipline yet valuable to every and any, that if mindset can be adjusted to thinking about all the knowledge as one indiscipline shared by all - it all may become a little bit more accessible to any individual, anywhere, at all times.

In artistic work and the development of personal ideas, we all often ask the same, or very similar, questions. But we approach them from very different perspectives, often influenced by the collection of very different previous experiences.
Exchanging possible ways of how to question the same things can open up unexpected paths that, slightly altered to suit a specific discipline better, can result in a wider spectre of tools for arriving to an articulation of an answer for the question we were seeking.

In this way, placing oneself and observing through perspectives of others, one does not just become more versatile and skilful in their own field and for their own merit. This act enhances growth as a wholesome, compassionate human, open to understand and see from different perspectives to their own. We can all learn from each other, and we can all teach each other. Through this process, we can maybe slowly reach a society that as a whole can function in a more compassionate, empathic and equitable way, willing to share and aid any situation - education one or life one.

The process of studying and education will always have a set of specific goals, but one can reimagine what those goals are. What People Coming from NowHere with project PhD in One Night, and now also Guerilla University, is aiming is the kind of education that as a goal is setting the process of learning. Education that aims for learning on how to learn, and not just execute and produce.

Our focus today is on university-level studies, but if we are being honest, education is a continuous process that starts from birth and lasts till the end of one's life. With this in mind, when speaking of any "future" of education, we might as well think about all the levels of education as a whole. The earlier a mind learns that it can seek knowledge everywhere, the longer it will remain curious and hungry to expand, lasting throughout the highest academic cycle of one's education and beyond.

 

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links

⊶ People Coming from NowHere, and their projects PhD in One Night and Guerilla University
⊶ Watch the recording of the conference

 

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