The contribution of the Another Roadmap School Africa Cluster (ARAC) to documenta fifteen was a sequence of three week-long editorial meetings held in June, July and August 2022 in Kassel. These meetings comprised open and closed sessions and contributions to the documenta fifteen public programme.The editorial meetings were a continuation of ARAC’s Schoolbook Project, a series of five “exercises books”, namely: Provocations Book, Exercises Book, Glossaries Book, Images Book, and a Playlist Book. The five books aimed to make accessible the work that ARAC has done and the knowledge that ARAC has produced since 2015. ARAC’s Schoolbooks are an evolution of the Another Roadmap School’s existing practice of creating “learning units”.
The three editorial meetings were held in a modular setting that tended to ARAC’s chronologies; its genealogies; and its Typologies. The setting was developed through Another Roadmap’s method of “an exhibition kit”: an open-ended method of art making and learning through creating company and fellowship.
The setting played host to works developed through ARAC’s collective methods including the Un/Chrono/Logical Timeline; the Traveling Printing Suitcase that extends the artistic methods of the Medu Art Ensemble, a South African collective that used jazz and poster making in their fight against apartheid; wooden sculptures developed by the staff and students of École d’art de Nyundo as part of the art school pedagogical programme, in an exchange of the context of the study of the school’s history not only through recorded media and books, but also through material practice. The setting also featured further symbolic creative works in various formats and media emerging from ARAC Members’s own practices; rotating entries of works that included dyed fabrics, posters, vinyl records, books, zines; and a stream of film projections across the space.
In keeping with tradition, our series of workshops held throughout the three meetings culminated into a presentation by one of our critical friends, Saki Mafundikwa as the closing event of the Glossaries programme, film screenings and discussions in the spirit of Ecole du soir, cooking, eating, thinking and dancing together, on and off the clock.
