27 NOVEMBER: Approaching Pedagogy Through and with Contemporary Art Practices

The CoVA Graduate Academy would like to invite you to their final event of the year. Hosted by Louisa Bufardeci (CoVA Graduate Academy, PhD Candidate, VCA Art) it will feature presentations from artist and researcher Nuraini Juliastuti and Associate Professor Stephanie Springgay (University of Toronto). Light refreshments will be provided, further details of presentations can be found below.

2 - 3.30PM Presentations
3.30-4.30PM Refreshments

@ Buxton Contemporary Education Space

NURAINI JULIASTUTI
The Studying-turn: Artist collectives, Free school, and long-term cultural strategy

My presentation is about artist collectives, independent cultural spaces and free schools. I use the development of free school and classes organised by Tiny Toones (Phnom Penh, Cambodia) and Arte Moris Art Centre (Dili, Timor Leste) as study cases. Tiny Toones and Arte Moris do not only serve as a model of alternative schooling for youths in Cambodia and Timor Leste. They emerge as a space for nurturing strategies for everyday sustainability. I conceptualise the ‘studying-turn’ as a method for reimagining the usefulness of an alternative space for a wider social ecosystem. I focus on various layers of teaching and learning practices to understand vernacular vocabularies on the making of the teachers, students, classes, and peer-based learning methods. The establishment of Tiny Toones and Arte Moris provides an avenue for exploring the link between art and pedagogy. Their long-standing practices show the creation of collective sustainability mechanism which intersects with the organisation of the spaces. An examination of the free school practices in Tiny Toones and Arte Moris poses direct questions about youth culture, lack of cultural infrastructure, a sense of crisis, and the development of agency shaping collective vision. I speculate on studying, or learning together, as an inter-relational thinking and a mechanism to develop a long-term cultural strategy from below.

Nuraini Juliastuti is a co-founder of Yogyakarta-based Kunci Cultural Studies Center. Her research and professional practice is situated within alternative cultural production, art history in Southeast Asia, music/sound studies, digital culture, commons-making, and politics of translation. She holds a PhD from Leiden University (The Netherlands) with a thesis titled “Commons People: Managing Music and Culture in Contemporary Yogyakarta”. Departing from her involvement in Kunci’s School of Improper Education, she is developing a research project about artist collectives and free school in Cambodia and Timor Leste. Her new projects includes running Reading Sideways Press and publishing a woman zine called Domestic Notes. She lives and works in Melbourne.

STEPHANIE SPRINGGAY
Socially-engaged art, experimental pedagogies: The ethics and politics of research-creation with diverse publics.

Feminist scholars argue that we need research practices that break with ableist, racist, extractive, and settler colonial logics, and instead focus on ones that are situated, relational, and ethical. This means troubling our relationship with institutions and transforming the kinds of value we allow for particular forms of knowledge. We need to alter our practices from ones based on extraction of data or as a means to correct a wrong. As such researchers are urgently turning to new ways of doing research that create conditions for other ways of living and learning, and which materialize new kinds of research relations and questions. It is fundamentally about practicing an ethics based on response-ability, stewardship, care, and reciprocity that centre relationships to land, territory, human and more-than-human bodies. This paper/presentation will take up these important ethical dimensions of doing research and share some exemplifications from my research-creation practice.

Stephanie Springgay is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. As a site for artistic-research in art and education it has initiated a number of experimental, critical, and collaborative projects including: a series of artist-residencies in K-12 classrooms; the creation of curriculum materials and resources on social practice art; and a series of curatorial projects including Instant Class Kit – a mobile exhibition and curriculum guide. With Dr. Sarah Truman she co-directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Additionally, she is a stream lead on a SSHRC partnership grant Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. Other curatorial projects include The Artist’s Soup Kitchen – a 6 week performance project that explore food sovereignty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies www.stephaniespringgay.com.

Image: "An open studio in Arte Moris, July 2019" Photo: Nuraini Juliastuti