New Models is a lecture series that invites practitioners from different disciplines to discuss how their work can change the models around which society is organised. These conversations will address how we can shift power structures, socio-economic forces and structural inequalities present in society today to give us new tools to rethink the world around us.
We see learning as active, constantly shifting and evolving, exhausting and yet very much alive. The practices brought together from very different geographies share the struggle against ‘banking’ knowledge-based forms of exchange, and strive for biophilic rather than a necrophilic education – unlearning transactional forms of knowledge as though the student is an empty vessel collecting wisdom from the ‘master’ and instead attempt to identify the tools needed to pursue self-education, to decolonise, to embody, to experience, to make and do. Coming from the etymology of ‘education’ – ‘to draw out and lead forth’ – how can the congregational, the coming together, the being with, produce new forms of learning which replenish and do not just simply extract?
Sepake Angiama is the artistic director of the institute for international visual art in London- a curator and educator, whose praxis lies in the discursive and social framework, in order to collectively rewrite our understanding of the world. This has inspired her to work with artists who disrupt or provoke aspects of the social sphere through action, radical forms of pedagogy and architecture. While in her position as Head of Education, Documenta 14 she initiated the project Under the Mango Tree – a self-organised gathering of unlearning practices. The second edition (Visva Bharati, Santineketan) brought together artist-led spaces, libraries and schools interested in unfolding discourses around decolonizing education practices that destabilise the European canon, through examining alternative epistemologies, notions of unlearning and indigenous knowledge. The next edition will take place in Puerto Rico in 2022 with a focus on indigenous epistemologies, land based learning and craft. Previously she was the Head of Education for Manifesta 10 hosted by the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Her research, Her Imaginary, addresses how science fiction, feminism and social forms of architecture harness the perfect tools for a pedagogy to awaken a political and social imagination.
source
