Son[i]a #269
Mônica Hoff
Brazilian artist and researcher Mônica Hoff operates on the edges that connect and separate the inside and outside of artistic practice, theory, and education. In her own words, she explores “the way artistic methodology becomes pedagogy.” And from this slippery Bermuda Triangle she warily saw the so-called educational turn start to be conceived as a model from the moment Kristina Lee Podesva put it down in black and white in her article “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art”, published in 2007.
In all her work, from her role as coordinator of the educational programme at the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre to projects such as the Extraordinary School of Desterro and Surf School, as well as others too small to mention on a CV, Mônica Hoff approaches and practices education as process. She advocates institutional imagination and shifting the place from which things are done, because “in practice, theory is different.”
We talk to Mônica Hoff about epistemological Dadaism and education in public, about institutions that learn, dissent as a strategy to generate movement and thought, scales, micropoltics, and the cracks in which everything happens, and about slowing down, or even stopping.
Deleted scenes
We dig up an unreleased fragment of our conversation with artist, educator and researcher Mônica Hoff, questioning the notion of creativity, that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the collective Laagencia, embodied here by the voices of Mariana Murcia, Diego García and Santiago Pinyol, that we were unable to include the first time around.
Raw Material Company
Based in Dakar, Senegal, Raw Material Company is an independent, collaborative centre that aims to foster critical thinking through artistic practice. In this conversation, Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—discuss a situated feminist and decolonial practice that focuses on doing rather than enunciating and categorizing. They share some of their experiences and talk about the strategies they use to create rich forms of dialogue and to negotiate the tensions and the ideological and economic constraints imposed through the still-colonial structures of the so-called global North.
Marina Garcés
We talk with philosopher, writer, and teacher Marina Garcés about education and knowledge, about the future, and about time as raw material. We consider the question of how to appear and think with others in this present moment, which demands our active involvement. We discuss the meeting of unequals, and the possibility of strangeness becoming a link. We also explore the logic of the sinking ship or “every man for himself” and the evolution of the words “disobedience” and “freedom”, which leads Marina to emphasise the importance of forming alliances rather than thinking from the reductionist position of unity. At the same time, she invites us to imagine how to weave together worlds that are falling apart.
In this document we share Jordi Ferreiro's preparatory notes on his personal research about ducational situations outside the norm.
Nicolás Paris
Nicolás Paris talks about his years as a teacher in La Macarena and his particular teaching method based on association. He also reflects on the importance of drawing in his work as a tool for projecting ideas, on architecture as a working method, on words as artistic material, and on thought as form.
Judy Dunaway
Judy Dunaway talks about tenor balloons, improvisation, greyhound buses, Western music, the AIDS crisis, studying with Alvin Lucier, working day-jobs and learning to play a well-tuned piano.
Jordi Ferreiro
Jordi Ferreiro talks about educational situations outside the norm, affects and meaningful learning, and experimental systems of evaluation.