Son[i]a #315
Laagencia
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For the Columbian collective Laagencia, mediation and education are indistinguishable from artistic practice. Laagencia first opened its doors in 2010 in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, as an office for art projects with an exhibition space, run by Mariana Murcia, Diego García, Santiago Pinyol, Mónica Zamudio and Sebastián Cruz. Five years later it was rebooted as a collective thinking and study group open to methodological experimentation and informality, always looking for ways to organise new forms of “doing with others”.
One of their common ventures is the “Garage School” open programme: an informal, ensemble research and education project that implements alternative forms of production and circulation of knowledge. A Garage School can take many forms: talks, curatorships, artistic residencies, shared reading, collective writing, self-publishing exercises, outdoor assemblies, banquets… with all the frictions, affects, and unlearning that they entail.
In this ensemble podcast, we talk with Mariana Murcia, Diego García and Santiago Pinyol about these ten years of “extitution”. We explore Gerald Raunig’s notion of “instituent practices” by way of Irit Rogoff, read out here by the agents. We talk about art that is decentralised from financial centres, about participation versus representation, about mediation and public programmes in collaboration. We also talk about collective writing in the cloud and the performative coefficient, about decolonial gestures and a new Cubeo museum by the Cubeo people in the Vaupés River basin, and about other fragilities and strengths of possible art worlds.
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.
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.
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.
Irit Rogoff
Irit Rogoff talks about ways of creating participatory, creative, and cognitive alliances that allow us to critically inhabit contemporaneity. She also calls for the need to devise processes of unlearning, inside and outside the academy, that will pave the way to new and unexpected kinds of knowledge.
Jordi Ferreiro
Jordi Ferreiro talks about educational situations outside the norm, affects and meaningful learning, and experimental systems of evaluation.