This is the day by day documentation of our meeting. Please post the minutes you have written as text articles here.
Tuesday 25 - lunch around a history
Minutes by Nora
Karin: most things in the archive are letters. Amazed how patient he did the letters to explain his concepts.
Marianne: Circulation of theory through letters. Publication “Letters to Guinea Bissau” – form of letter.
O: most letters are by the secretaries, answering he is abroad. Find secretaries and interview them.
Carmen: I chose the letter because it had handwriting (connected to fetishizing handwriting). And because of images (Images missing here). Answer to Graham, 1978. You should invite invitation by UNESCO. He was an educationalist seemingly. The letter by Graham connected to Yuk Lins presentation. Become educational advisor in Ramallah, by UNESCO, other to China. Interesting: how decisions are taken.
Andrea: that he replies “Unesco”, not Palestine is interesting.
O: connections between UNESCO and WCC are many, has to be researched.
George: the time, 1979, my own history. Zimbabwe. I was involved in Britain in My father was in Britain, and sent me this kind of airmail letters. We also started to look for Freire, to see whether his experience in Guineau Bissau could tell us something. I came to Nicaragua (?), and then Freire was a reference there again.
Yuk Lin: 1960ies, then China was in cultural revolution. it was chaotic, no schools. Students didn’t gpo to university. Since Mao died, then the situation changed.
Carmen: And then this guy was invited.
George: Tanzania: ASK for REFERENCES
Nana: Circle, eyes and love by a fan. Absolutely struck by his lectures, did not read his books but his eyes. This speaks to his charisma. This charisma is also very gendered, interesting to take into account. I picked other fan/friendship letters. He must have been informed by their questions.
M: he decided to grow the beard while in Harvard. In previous research: this made him so charismatic
Nana: This is also something reoccurring: this “love” ….is part of liberatory movements. In has a performative dimension.
Carmen: Shoshana Felman, “when eros swallows chalk”, german publication
Nana: charismatic teachers. Many times teachers of color; attract many students. Statistics: 80% prefer a teacher of color.
Carmen: but also statistic: teachers get lower ratings.
Emma: Another Fan letter. Jim Firrows, Konstanz, 1975. Professional/existential crisis, desire to work with ideas of Freire, but compromised by his bourgious position, and maybe a pseudo do-gooder. I identify strongly with the man at this point in the research project.
another document: draft for international peace research institute. “We should never mythologize education…” Statement on the political of education
Kitto: Australia seminar videos, 1974. William Kennedy. Why I chose: commission of Christian education. Because of interest for this religious influence also in Uganda. 4 points I get out of it: Titles of the books: Education for the critical consciousness. 2) the language used: “Affluent societies such as theirs”. “pharrexies (?)”. If you follow the pattern it shows hidden parts of the knowledges of what they give to us who receive gladly. Amusing: Our problem about being at the assembly havce to do with the limitation. Only 7 advisors from the whole world. Some must be women. As much as we would like to have you, we cannot. Some one like me, and you, white, male, middle class. Black young women have all the advantages. (William Kennedy)
O: he was the director. We selected this because of tapes of videos, supposedly should have been sent.
George: there is a Quarrel between Freire and Cabral about women. Reference?
Hussein: “Freire of free space”, New Zealand. 1974. “No teachers have nothing to learn, and no students have nothing to teach. Talks about defects of his book: lack of method. Freire: is not important. Important is political clarity. Political clarity is here leftist. “In starting to work with the people you discover the instrument”. But which instrument? I do not mean that Freire leaves a backdoor for authoritarian teachers, but it is not clear to me. When he says: as long as it coheres with your political vision, it will be the right ones. But which political vision.
Lerato: Curious that in 1974 they say that black women have advantages. Same as now in south Africa. White man go on and on.
Sao Tomé: you should not say illiterate, but on the way to literacy. And education is not technical, but political exercise. Think of class as cultural group. Two way exercise.
Tuesday 25 - maseru working group
Minutes by Nora
ATTENTION: SESOTHO WORDS AND PROPER NAMES ARE MOST PROBABLY MISSPELLED
Study the language education in church schools in Northern Lesotho, because influence oft he colonial administration is still huge, not so much in public schools. English and Sesotho education
Soofia - Muslim community founded
Leribe –
and English medium school
In Soofia, access was easy, the other was complicated, not allowed to talk to students.
Findings:
Soofia: more unconventional, committed. Others: follow prescribed curriculum, do not read for pleasure.
Bala: Sesotho word both for reading and study. This led to language issue in interpretation of question: Do you read for pleasure for the students
Why is this research done: colonial influence. Schools were foundation of missionary system. Reforms have not been as aggressively implemented. Important moment 1978, but not fully implemented. 2011 came integrated curriculum in primary schools. And creativity and entrepreneurship: they want to counter the division between school contents and lives of people. Traditional ways of lifes, like ritual in most Basotho families, are not discussed in school, because it is not Christian.
2nd phase: go to rural Lesotho, give schools the same questionnaire. To compare with the schools which are not at all influenced by the church.
Questions:
Patrick: is there a difference between the literature produced between church schools and public schools?
Lerato: Now only primary schools, this will be relevant in studying secondary schools.
Emma: you have not focused on historical dimension. But do you have some references on: who and how were the colonial approaches in curriculum introduced?
Lerato: we have some archival material. We want to know through the schools study what is persisting.
Ra: Word BALA, which is reading and studying. Relevance for bare ene re, whicb is a story, that is told. Speak to that?
George: In region movement of people. Shona ? in Zimbabwe, their words were moved through movement of people. Shiri … But the missionaries changed that.
Zulu influence in the north. Ra: “Bala” in Zulu is to write. Has this implications?
Lerato: All not Basotho are supressed. One category for all, also Zulu in them. They speak their language only at home. We are not interested in their language. Even when we say we want to include Sesotho culture in the curriculum, we still exclude the others in the country and languages.
Storytelling: we are doing this with Bar e ne re, focused on production of stories by people. here also colonial influence: the stories we got for an anthology, some sounded as if they were located in England. People feel that in order to write, they have to locate themselves in England. The own place and language is not deemed important.
English medium schools: Sesotho is taught in English, spelling is done used english rules. Ba re e ne re did spelling bee to address that. If you don’t have vocabulary, you can not properly write in Sesotho. Sesotho stories also produced inconsistencies between formalized writing and contemporary Sesotho.
I would be interested in how our oral traditions can be used for learning help intellectual capabilities. Now the focus is only on reading, reading.
George: in my school, I had to forget what was at home. I learned to love in Shona; but then it was English. Word WARA is associated to Work, and coloniality
Emma: just to share: Margaret Trowell publication 1936 ('?) Pictures for Africans.
Luganda: SOMA means read and study.
Nana: Asante also one word for read and study. Christian: ???means taste.
Your project is so practice based. Love the idea of oral tradition in the curriculum. Example: folk tales told, and then assessment: did you get it? I was always bad at it. Is it a colonial framework, the assessment. Do you have an idea about assessment of the capabilities you want to teach in alternative art education?
Lerato: We have to go back in history. Traditional: school, from puberty, Taganing for females, other for males. You would get life skills there. There is a traditional framework for this. Let’s see how this was done before.
Because now the life skills are there in the curriculum theoretically, but there is no emphasis on that.
Nana: A Christian school would be open for this?
Lerato: the spiritual content would be taken out.
Ra: Interesting at the festival poertry session in Ba re e ne re: women on stage poetry, many said: they promised to audience they would not be witched (NL: didn’t get the Sesotho term). How are young Lesotho poets using the term (witchcraft)?
Lerato: Holoa (?) young poets are drwawing power from it. If you are young women and have an opinion….it was a defiance, a deliberate use for getting power. Witchcraft is associated with negative. Now the story we were told doesn’t make sense for us any more. The spiritual element is everywhere when you find out who you are, ther eis a movement going on of taking this back.
Poet: had Christian upbringing. Something happened in her poetry reading, she is in the middle: should I go for it? Or listen to parents who say it is an evil spirit?
Nana: How do you go back to old traditions without re-installing the notion of authenticity? There is danger. Essentialism was there in negritude; and is there in the black art movement…
Lerato: we cannot look at identy as a silo, this is it who you are. In my case: I could back to my ancestors and say this is me, but that is not true, there is influence now.
Ra: Want to go Back to poet who has been called to another power that is not Christian. It is there, but people (?...)
George: traditions are fictions. But it is important to understand how this fiction comes into place. Identities are contested and in flux. We have been produced by this peculiar histories: the mark of the conjuncture is interesting: we are both planetary subjects, and the local. I am interested in the GENERATIVE aspect of the question: Who am I? (not the generational). Because The story of who I am has never been told by my.
Christian: respoind to the essentialist aspect Nana mentioned, and the impossibilities of the queer ion that. Sometimes the struggles demand an identification, whith the erasures this carries with it. Only calling negritude essentiualist is equally essentialist. Queer: could be in the life practices. Lerato used life skills. I would prefer practices (not emphasize the “learning”).
Carmen: Listening to Christian: coming back to unchronological timeline, the idea of it also refers to this group. We have different parts of knowledges in different ways in the room. For example: queerness as an epistemology, not referring only to sexual orientation. Important to take this into account.
Questionnaires: the methodology of the questionnaire, producing knowledge about people, also has a colonial history. Did you develop the questionnaires with teachers and students? Did you test if the questions actually produce only the knowledge that you want? The questions mirror a lot of assumptions-.
Lerato: The first application now was a test, if the questions produce the knowledge we want. The issue with “BALA” made us do the questionnaire in future in Sesotho as well. That we did not have dialogue with teachers is another weakness.
carmen: did not mean weakness, only that research methodologies in themselves have a content….let’s have a talk about questionnaire.
São Paulo Meeting, 24.10.2016 (AM) (Johannesburg and Kampala)
Intertwining HiStories. São Paulo Meeting, 24.10.2016 (AM). Minutes : microsillons
Johannesburg Working Group (Puleng | Ra | David)
History : Medu Art Ensemble
Medu Art Ensemble (group of artists, cultural workers, activists, based in Botswana in the late 70’s, 80’s) as main story, nod around which smaller stories are connected
Looking to establishe a lineage from the 60’s to today (including projects the groups members are involved in).
Central elements in the group :
- Intergenerationality of research team.
- Dialogues, talks, conversations and re-enactements
- Decentralisation of learning sites
- Potential of a festival
Medu Art Ensemble
Many of thoses artists, activists were coming from other countries. Exile after uprisings especially.
Interracial and intergenerational.
Referred to themselves as ‘cultural workers’
Interesting case study because of the variety of tools that they used (poetry, publications, performances…). Tools imported from different countries but universal dimension as well. Question of the skills in exile. Question of how the different units wanted to be rooted, embeded, in Botswana. Issue of language. Question of how those practices got localized, used local techniques.
Key moment/realisation -> Exhibition and symposium “Culture in resistance”, 1982. Need to localize and find what was important in the socio-political context of the time. Keep in mind that Medu Art Ensemble is a larger project than visual art (therefore : “culture in resistance”).
Another intersting thing is to look at how knowledge is exchanged. Use of suitcases in particular (“silkscreen workshop in a suitcase” for example).
1985 : brutal raid by the South African Defence Force. 12 dead including 4 members of the Medu Art Ensemble. The group is disbanded.
Project in Johannesburg (presented by Puleng)
Inkulumo (conversation)
Localising context through terminology
Use of the local terms :
Ulando (“plant stem” or “story”)
Inganekwane (indigenous folk tale)
Story telling technique.
Collaboration with the Keleketla! Library. After school programm to try to understand the past to better imagine the future and to relook at the present.
Interview of people involved in treason trial.
Use also of the term Solanka (we are in the mean time). Idea that post-apartheid structures are needed (and were not thought during the transition) and that the country is still in an in-between situation.
Terms also of : Inkulumo (conversation) and Mpen.
Q&A
CARMEN : Would like to know more on the last part.
PULENG : Elderly men talk about the transformative system put in place during apartheid. But no system was together in the post-apartheid area. Slang idea of solanka or “in the mean time” (cf song : “Sister Bethina” by Mgarimbe).
GEORGE : Importance of thinking about the oral histories within national liberation movements (including, music, rock and roll, etc…).
NANA : I see solanka as an alternative temporality and as a potential.
PULENG : “in the mean time” is also linked to educational aspects (time to learn…) even if Medu artists were defining themselves as “cultural workers”, not “teachers”.
RA : Banality and importance of songs. Current protests against the police forbidding the use of songs in the students demonstrations in WITS. Songs are crossing time (“historical” songs sung by young people today who were not there in in the 80’s). Songs as a way to be together during that moment of disruption that the protest is. Language becomes a huge issue.
NORA : Was there an idea of training to new techniques/new uses, in the Medu Art Ensemble ?
RA : The techniques and tools used have to be looked at in the context : suitcase for example were a way to get rid of the limitations…
PATRICK : How do you position yourself in the actuality of resistance today in Africa ?
RA : Many sources were destroyed so the process of collaborative image making for example is something important in that resistance, as a way to overcome fear.
GEORGE : What happened to women groups outside the country during Apartheid was not really documented. South Africa exported violence against independent groups in frontline states (Mozambique, Angola, Namibia…), not only against art groups but also to all independent movements. Very little documentation about what happened to those groups.
DAVID : Yes, it happened espeacially during the late 70’s – 80’s.
RA : (coming back on Patrick’s question) Importance of developing spaces of artistic production and education (rethink what is a gallery, a school, a club, a publishing house). Refuse to be locked in discipline is also a way to work in that resistance. As is the way I teach art (using for example the case study of Medu as a way to challenge the myth of a lack of existing material on decolonization). It is not because it not a book that it does not exist. Important to recognize that some people are still alive, still there… that the story can be written. Choose the example of Medu is a way to take an example close to use (some members are still alive and around) and to make it visible. This is how I see culture as a tool of resitance today.
OLIVIER : Could you tell us more about the idea of “art education against arts education” that you mention in your paper ?
DAVID : Idea is coming from the Documenta 12 “Education” magazine, mentioning “An aesthetic education against aesthetic education”. I have been involved in what has been named “art education” for a long time in South Africa, with a bad experience. The research on the Medu Art Ensemble but also of the connexions with other researchs in the Cluster (Biko’s reading of Freire for example) is a way to challenge that kind of art education, to revisit history and possibilities. Hopefully, through the Keleketla! Library and Puleng’s project, the curriculum can change very quickly, leanding to an “art education against arts education”.
NORA : I propose to add keyworks and dates for the construction of the timeline, collectively.
NANA : Beware of hyper-commercialisation of “music”, of “blackness” in the festival format. Why is festival the accurate exchange platform ? What I hear is more about inflitration, in schools, etc… Think skills and practices as sites of resistance… How to translate what Medu did in the contemporary and in an intersectional approach of the hegemonical framework ?
RA : The festival raises challenging questions : how to use festival as a place to really listen, hear, and also as aplace to act.
DAVID : What RA achieved in the Notrthern Province, as a form of festival was very different to commercialized festivals. Skill to be used.
Kampala working group (Emma | Kitto | George)
History : Margaret Trowell’s School of Art.
Many things influenced the work of the groupe lately : health issues, impossibility to travel to Uganda….
Start from Trowell and her legacy as a focus for specific reason… starting to plot convergences and simultaneity, thinking about possible connexions between this material and other timelines and interconnexions with other research groups… For example, Marion Richardson, who taught Margret Trowell to be a teacher could be a link with the Vienna group. Cult of childhood and child art as a possible other convergence.
Role of Christianity in the expansion of arts education : through art, through image, it become easier to convert illiterate people.
Discussion to be developped with Joburg and Lumumbashi on the role of visual art education outside and inside the colonial administration.
Margaret Trowell, takes part to the colonization process but in arguing that African people were “artistic”, which is a difference regarding the general discourse.
1949 : film to present East African College (Makerere Art School).
1968 : publication of Contemporary art in African by a german recruited teacher in Nigeria involved in anti-colonization struggle. First book for the west presenting artists from Africa who then became the only artists successful on western contemporary art scene…
Q&A
CARMEN : Link to Roger Fry (exhibition on child art where is compares children drawings in German and South Africa, discussing primitivism), link also to collectivism (idea of forming future voters), to Walter Crain (close to libertarian movement, writing on primitivism, but for liberation) .
EMMA : For anybody interest in arts education in colonies or foreign countries, a very interesting book is Draw they must: a history of the teaching and examining of art (Richard Carline, 1968).
MARIANNE : Christianity seems to be a point of convergence between many of our researches. Freire for example was somehow used by the World Council of Churches as a way to renew its Christian action.
GEORGE : In Central St Martin’s, 200 images were left by a former missioner. They can be useuful to look at the way people were infantilized.
EMMA : The Slade school of art has many pictures from the 50’s online. We can see a very diverse students body (more than today probably). Alfred Liyolo for example, who studied in Vienna, shows the kind of students’ journeys at the time. Those stories could be picked up too.
JANNA : Keep in mind, in the colonial process, the cultivation in individualisation as a way to enter the capitalist discourse. In Canadian artic in the 1950’s for example, art was introduced on purpose to introduce capitalism, through a system of coupons to purchase food, through cooperative to sell products… See the art collective : Art and Cold Cash.
Look also into the links between primitivism, the child and also the mad.
Convergence of anticolonial and anticapitalist discourses around the idea of madness. It would be great to look for anticolonial art education / radical psychiatry projets around that.
ANDREA : In Cairo, we are trying to be aware around those questions of individualization. Current movement from a big body of national education that is very accessible, to the privatization of (art) education, in very expensive structures… How the informal part (we are part of) can resist to that movement of education for the few ? Herbert Read is a main influence on art education in Cairo.
CARMEN : After writing Education through art, Read was appointed at UNESCO and brought the issue of art education there. So thanks to him taht we are there together today !
GEORGE : Parallel between Read and Hall for cultural studies (open space to work in an occupied context).
CHRISTIAN : The role of Christianity in the subject formation is very interesting area of research… Monasteries and Seminaries in Rwanda are places of the formation… Intrigued and solidary with the will to investigate further what the formation of the indvidual means, today as well, including in connexion to visual production.
EMMA : Churches are still the biggest group of patrons in many countries, but they should not be seen in a too simplistic manner. We need to remember the Liberation Theology and recognize its role in the liberation process. It’s a multi-facetted thing.
GEORGE : Church did/is producing things in the public realm. It sometimes occupy the place of the state. Therefore, it’s impossible not to look at that aspect.
NANA : I’m intrigued by that complicated relationship. What are the repercusions in the interested decisions of producing a specific type of artists (market oriented/religious) ?.We need to think about the role of capitalism within education.
EMMA : Margaret Trowell is the funding myth of art education in Uganda. Why did she wants to start teaching art, what was a personal investment ? Why everyone still oves her ?
Minutes of the final session of the closed meeting, Wednesday 26 October 2016
Andrea Thal (AT). The roles and responsibilities of the final project were left poorly defined yesterday, and require further discussion.
Nora Landkammer (NL). We need to identify the contact person for each of the IH subgroups, also what the next steps are.
Christian Nyampeta (CN) is the contact person for the exhibition kit group Olivier Desvoignes (OD) and Marianne Guarino-Huet (MG) are the contact persons for the timeline, they will take responsibility for collecting the material AT is the contact person for the learning units group
Carmen Moersch (CM). Each of us needs to make responsibility for the project as a whole, i.e. answering to emails and questions when they are put to you in a timely fashion. Lineo Segoete (LS) told CM that getting responses to enquiries in the preparation phase for this meeting was very frustrating, it was only when NL “doubled up” that anyone bothered to respond. In this project, there is “the magic of the encounter” during which we do a lot of work, make a lot of plans, and then after we part, we struggle to follow through. We tend to be over-laden with work.
AT. There is an open question about where we meet in 2018. NL. There was a proposal not yet discussed about not meeting in Johannesburg as a result of another possible coincidence of a History Cluster meeting and an Africa Cluster (AC) meeting. It would save on travel costs and stuff. AT. It is not yet 100% decided that the next meeting of AC is in Johannesburg. If it is, then it would make for 2 consecutive meetings in Johannesburg. (AC will meet in April 2017, for very stupid funding reasons we probably have to meet in Johannesburg. This is something we should decide very soon, and we need to think about what it means if it happens in Johannesburg twice in less than a year. Patrick Mudekereza (PM). If may be more relevant for Johannesburg to have the biggest meeting in 2018, and then we (Africa Cluster) look at having a meeting elsewhere in southern Africa in April 2017.
OD. Sophie Paglai (SP) (The Intertwining Histories project administrator based in Geneva) will be contacting us about payment for the next phase of the research in the next week. Geneva will continue to pay people in advance.
NL. Contracting and invoice will be done by SP (Geneva WG). I will be contact person for the web platform together with my colleague Maja Renn (MR).
CM. Please introduce the project co-ordinators.
OD. Sophie Paglai studied in at HEAD in Geneva, did many projects about the Roma in Switzerland, and is part of a group/cluster formed by teachers and assistants and students from University of Geneva who are interested in thinking about decolonising Switzerland, gender, race, intersectionality, etc. We decided to work with her because of the thematic connections. It was not an option for us just to take someone just for administrative tasks, we wanted someone who was theoretically involved. She will be producing the newsletter together with all of you (and will also contribute), but will take charge of lots of administrative tasks, everything related to salaries, honoraria and travel arrangements (partly) of the next events.
NL. The histories cluster funding “flows together’ in Geneva. I continue to work on the general level of the AR School as a whole in co-ordinator with help from Maja Renn who is quite young and has studied a the ZHdK in the teacher training but also previously studied curating with arts practice and runs an artist’s space with residencies in Porto, Portugal. She is incredible at connecting things online, for example runs the space in Porto while mostly being abroad and is very interested in collaboration in different places and is interested in how such a collaboration could have a politics of its own. The web platform as not just structural but directly related with the content. She will be in touch with you directly about the web platform.
AT. This is the last hour we have basically. We should use it to collect the comments and remaining questions from the last 3 days. So I would like to open the microphone and start collecting.
Nana Adusei-Poku (NA). On behalf of the “advisory board” (I am not comfortable with that name). My impression is much much better than it was before, I have a much better understanding of the project in general. I have really enjoyed the format of sharing the projects, having the input and then the conversations over the past days, and this is a format that should remain. However there should be a few more breaks. I am thrilled to see how the project will further develop. I sincerely hope that some of the issues raised around the philosophical backdrop of the entire project – history, people, locations, not to forget the basis upon which we care operating – continue to be considered carefully. Double check – what am I reproducing here? Who am I allowing to speak? Who is silent? – in order not to reproduce paradigms that this project is trying to tackle and make visible and also underline. Also an urge in terms of practices: one of the things that I missed was a discussion of assumptions about subject positions in the room. A practice of naming one’s preferred gender pronoun, naming things that are sharply shared in the room. We talk about queering issues but what does that mean practically in the room? One thing I wonder about it is what kind of disciplinary backgrounds we have and not do to this “name dropping” (I am guilty of this). Because we are coming from different schools, what are we actually talking about? To what extent to we share a terminology? Not everyone may be intrinsically familiar with Stuart Hall. This is something we reproduce is our speech acts that needs to be addressed.
Claudia Hummel (CH). I have a question. Is the number of learning units reduced to the number of case studies? NL. No. We do as many has we have the energy and time to do. CH. So if i can find make one about [could not hear this]
CM. It’s such a miracle, we are such a heterogeneous group and openness and maybe compensates for the frictions in the different epistemological positions and backgrounds. And there is very little mobilisation of jargon in comparison to other contexts, and a readiness to explain ourselves to one another. Positively surprised at how productive these encounters are. What I will take out of this, rather than thinking about conditions, I would not accept such an invitation like this one again. I don’t like the hard chairs, the 3 days, and then the 2 days of reciprocity. We would have been much more productive if we could have had a rest day and then could have read together on a less tight schedule. Next time, we need to think about the material conditions – sound, seating, etc.. SP Biennial team have made a big effort to work with us within the structure of the biennial, it’s structurally important for us to be here – kudos, visibility – but what does it lead to? This is the question I take away from this experience. I congratulate us form being energetic and strong to cope with these conditions.
OD. I am glad for everything we did in these 3 days. Even though there are some frictions, it’s not that bad given the challenge that we have. Regarding the structure of what we discussed. It think it’s very nice that we split some tasks between the timeline, the exhibition kit and the landing units, but it’s very important that these 3 elements are fed by everybody and not just by the people who are announced to be more involved in that. For the challenge is to find strategies so that everyone can be involved in that. So that we can all contribute to those things.
PM. We are individuals but I know that within the Lubumbashi WG there are people more interested in the learning units. We need to open these tasks to the people back home who are not attending, put them in touch with the others so that they can take part.
AT. I am very happy that Hussein and I were able to come. It feels like an achievement. I am actually becoming aware that we have made a transformation in these 3 days. We have not been officially members of this cluster until now, now we wanted to announce that we are. We were kind of homeless without cluster, ours kind of disappeared. The economy cluster disappeared. So this is really what I feel happy about and it was important to be here, I was not in Madrid, I feel very much inside it once more and I want to keep that feeling.
Lerato Molisana (LM). This has been very informative, I am her on behalf of LS. Being here I get the relevance of the research and the potential that it has. It has brought the content to life for me.
Luiza Proença (LP). It was very interesting to be with you on these days. I am very interested in the group dynamics, and am very proud of what this group has been doing. I remember that I could not come to the meeting in Madrid because I had to attend a meeting with museum curators, and I saw pictures of the Madrid meeting and it looked much more interesting than what we were doing in Brazil at the time. I understand that you needed this time in a closed situation too discuss the projects of the cluster, it would have been better if we had more time to prepare a dialogue with the context.
Carla Bobadilla (CB). Thanks to Sofia and the SP Biennial team and AR people who organised this encounter here. It was so interesting to hear all those histories and gave us energy to stay and to keep working. Thank you.
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (EW). It has been great to see everyone again and to spend time. I just hope that we can do a good job of dividing the labour equitably so that running the project does not become a responsibility that rests solely on one or two pairs of shoulders.
George Shire (GS). Thank you.
Catrin Seefranz (CS). I would like to thank the project for having invited me as a guest. It means a lot for many reasons. I took part in AR in the very beginning, then I had to stop but now 2 years later to see how the project has grown and changed is really amazing and touching also. I really have the impression that AR is in many senses and on many levels really departing from the south or trying to do so. This is something rare and exceptional. It’s great to see that it has got this direction. I didn’t say so much, this has to do that I am not used to this discursive spaces any more. But I am happy to contribute with my research and findings related to popular education in Brazil, in relation to the museum in the 1960s. I could also offer help on an organisational level to realise the festival in Vienna (where I am based). Thank you. I learned a lot.
MG. There are a lot of nice people here an many inserting things that are going on. I’m just not ready to unpack this.
Rangoato Hlasane (RH). It has been yet another enriching space, I’m very happy to have met new people, we are still going to be together, and maybe some people don’t know that there is a planned movement to move our bodies. People who think together dance together. So let’s go. Maybe some things will be resolved on the dance floor. We are still trying to find a venue and a sound system. We will see. If we come to you and ask for a contribution to the cost of the sound system, please be generous.
David Andrew (DA). Thank you to an extraordinary group of people. I have learned a lot over the past few days. That is down to the rich generosity that is in this group. One of the interesting things about this project is how it is starting to infiltrate the work at the Wits School of Art and beyond Wits. It’s becoming completely enmeshed in what Ra is doing what I am doing, what Puleng is doing. When research starts to work in that way, it’s very significant, it is important with the broader group and with with Africa cluster particularly. There are many further extraordinary things that will take place. Thank you to Nora and Carmen for the organisation that ha taken place.
Puleng Plessie (PP). Keleketla has a project called Inkazata (???) a concept where people bring stuff together, they bring something in order to prepare something to eat – something big together. I know I’m just a typical language and translator person but it’s how I connect to certain things. We all brought so much and ate so much. I feel completely full. I really appreciate being here, what I have learned, from exchanging, sometimes you feel like you are on an island. thank you to all, and especially to the Johannesburg WG for being so great.
Yuk Lin Cheng (YC). My feeling is quite complex. I am very impressed by everybody here, they are very committed and serious about what they are doing. And that is what I want to share with my friends when I go back to Hong Kong. I feel a bit guilty because life in HK is very hectic and I am very burned out, and am considering retiring. Before I came I did not sleep well for a few days, and I wondered if I could manage with just a few hours of sleep. Actually I would like to have more commitment, but I have to consider my own condition, because I have serious time constraints. If I work further with the university it will be very tough for me. I am now thinking about strategies and solutions that will enable me to continue.
Kitto Derrick Wintergreen (KD). I sent a mail to Nora informing that I had got a visa. She replied with “Yeah!”. You can know good people and it touched me so much that someone was very happy that I am attending. I have worked with good people – Emma, George, Carmen – and communicating with them via the internet/social media, I am very happy to be here. I see good people, people with information, I have learned a lot from this, and I expect to continue learning and to take some of the information back to NIAAD, especially the way of working together around the table, My task was to come, observe and make an assessment, I am still observing and assessing.
CN. Thank you everyone – different everyones who have made this possible over the time and years. I am grateful that such a space can produce such a wealth of directions of hopes of futures (despite its limitations). Keeping in mind the people with whom I am speaking or speaking for, I will quote Issayi Nzemana says on the subject of education – he is rector of a school in Butare – he finds education is not only to inform the mind but also to attend to the heart because “Not all rationalities are good for humankind and for society and therefore the heart just go up to see the thoughts that the mind is conceiving. But the mind must also visit the heart, because not all feelings are good.” There maybe a separation between heart and the mind, but they are in the same body. We must pay attention to what is going on in our daily lives, and try to focus on the actual message and filter out the noise. This is what I will take back to Nyanza, and also use this to think about what I will do differently.
CH. It was a pleasure to get to know you and the contents you are dealing with. I am carrying away a lot of new thoughts, and I would love to contribute if there is a possibility of something to do.
Janna Graham (JG). I want to echo a lot of what I have heard. I came into this having been away from AR for several years, an I was 20 minutes into the discussion was completely blown away by how much has happen in this time and how rich this space is. This thing about the heart and the mind I felt it so many times in these past days, and felt very refuelled by the seriousness, commitment focus, but also the generosity and the care that people take for one another It’s fare and I don’t experience it very often. The people in my group are only just getting together would have loved to be here, and I do hope that I can transmit to them the richness of this experience. We all contributed in terms of an intellectual knowledge, but we also reproduced this in terms of coffee, cleaning, etc. I wanted to say thank you for caring. Practically today I loved it when we changed formats, not just sitting around the table all the time, so it’s something that we need to think about going forward. We could dance a bit in the middle of our discussion too.
NL. I don’t have much to add. My whole feeling of the meting was very strongly linked between total excitement – when I look at this wall I imagine this as a 10-year full-time research project for each of it – I love it and want to work on all of that but this is also linked with a sense of desperation: how are we going to deal with this? This is also part of my emotion of being here, learning and thinking at high speed in an intense way and I am very grateful for that.
Lesotho Presentation Minutes - Day 2
Lesotho Working Group
The research is preliminary research on Church schools and how language works in those schools because of the colonial model of educaiton is very relevant today
First Phase
research is being done, trying to discern the colonial influence
wanting to re-look at that
missionary - school to be the foundation of missionary work in this country
church created the colonial curriculum - ‘darkness to the light’
top down
there was a consultation but not taken up
integrated curriculum for primary
new idea of ‘creativity and entrepeneurship’
creativity extracted from the everyday lives of students
traditional belief ritual would not be discussed in a church school but is a lived experience…certain elements of cultural life cannot come into the curriculum but that’s changing
two schools…
Soofia was started by Muslim community (top performing)
unconventional
more freedom to share data collection
less conventional in the way they teach
teaching methods that are prescribed
teachers themselves do not read for leisure and therefore do not translate this with students
no appreciation of reading for leisure or creative writing
everyone thought that ‘reading for leisure’ meant academic reading
English is a second language
language is instrumental and not storytelling
the reason the research is
government school - Leribe School
bureaucracy in terms of disseminating research to the students
Findings:
teachers were passionate about language education
less creative language education
most
northern region of lesotho (zulu influence)
influence on students and how they learn
sesotho in south
Questions
What do students say in their writing?
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Do you have a list of reference texts about the colonial education process, that you can use to point to the continuity or discontinuities about how this process is implemented today?
We have archival research material but not for what exists in the schools today.
How does the reading and writing relate to each other and to publishing?
What you have in the region is the movement of people
Lara is the word for read and the names of families they will speak the same thing
The church disrupts the movement of people and the different languages they carry
Shires in different places, speaking different language
‘to read is to write’
Zulu influence of ballad writing and reading
own language is the denegrated
strong culture of oral and poetic work
mix of crazed poetry with a kind of rap, done mostly by men
this is not in school
someone will come with a story and beat and tell the story and three minutes they will remember years later
that art is not appreciated in how the languages taught
storytelling and producing their own literature, something they are doing, making an anthology of stories
colonial influence : some of the stories sound as though in England, so would use the ‘authentic’ idea of an English story. People frown upon an artists’ work that is not replicating shakespeare
English medium schools - learn in English from pre-school but do sesotho as a subject
they try to transport english into sesotho
use english rules to try to explain sesotho
went into schools and worked with students on writing
this is very important
if you don’t have a wide vocabulary you can’t write
with the sesotho stories they were very hard to edit because people were moving between ‘shakesearean’ sesotho and contemporary sesotho. people in the urban areas think they would have to write about living in the rural areas in past times because in the colonial imaginer does not include contemporary or urban sesotho
how could our oral traditions could be taught like reading
how can our oral traditions work in the school
grandparents would not reprimand but instead tell a folk tale which would be about what you did wrong and how
there would be something very amazing
doing standard I in 1956 which was what it was like when he was in school
when i had to forget i was at home
when shona was not taught at all
i know how to love in shona, but not in english
sublime, artistic etc remained in a place that was not touched
church meant looking at the image was a simple
experience that a generation
you had to be able to speak in english to be a garden boy
if you can be shoe cleaner, why learn English
Bala - relation to work and colonial
Margaret Trowell - prodigal son, pictures for Africans
anachronistic rural idyll
the bible and th
soma - twi
read and study
read and write is the same
oral curriculum
the ability to put a story together from scratch
the question afterwards from the parent telling the story, that’s the assessment
intervention in a system that is about assessment
how do you put something like oral learning into a system based on colonial models of assessment
dissonance with schemes that we are infiltrating
school - girls and boys separated, life skills taught, both sexes together to see if they learned what from what they saw, see how they learn to interact etc
look at traditional learning and how things were done
life skills: there in curriculum, not there in teaching the kids
should be there reflected on the report
we will have to convince the school
we would ask the schools to look at the method itself
Ra: something very interesting in lesotho
many of the poets, especially the women, the first thing they said was
time
women say: ‘to be bewitched’ (loya)
Lerato: growing up witchcraft is something that is evil and women’s
interested in how women / young women are using the term ‘bewitched’ in oral recital space
what is the claim around this term?
Lerato: opening this power with my voice (against the history of repression of women’s power)
it’s historically associated with evil but things like root medicines (Christians say ‘devil’s work’)
Awakening of witchcraft
When you back to who you are, you run into spritual elements
There is a war going on between who I am and who I am taught to be
Poetry sessions
female poet performed with a christian band, the effect that it had, everyone was getting chills, but there was something in the air,
she was christian by upbringing but has ‘the calling’.
should she follow this. people will say they bring ‘havoc’
poetry sessions/own that…
call to caution around questions of authenticity
‘this is not me’
how do you make use of traditions without making a claim to authenticity
going to traditions, there is an idea of an intrinsic entity or truth but actually traditions and identies are framed in a multiplicity
in black diaspora and on the continent and there is an essentialism in the black arts movement…queerness becomes not applicable
how do you deal with complications of the translations that are taking place
identity is not a silo
how my ancestors used to live is important to research but it is not possible to be purist in terms of how to view identity
borrow and draw from many aspects of practices
being a local in many places
‘the calling’ to work with something that is not Christian, doing something with something else
there is a negotiation with what happens
there is something about this project and its applicability more widely
George: traditions are myths
they are fictions produced by all kinds of things
but it’s important to think about how those things come into play
right now we might choose to call ourselves something, another moment something else
identities are made up
the mark of the conjuncture, the moment that we are currently in
now as planetary subjects, we speak with the material we’ve got
it is the generative effect/generative
what brings me back to the question of ‘who am i’ is that it was never told by me
Response to Nana’s question about the essentialist question and the impossibility of the queer
In the struggles for justice one of the responses is to insist on a specific way of pronouncing a tomato
to call negritude essentialist is also essentialism
queerness resides in the life practices
use the term life practices instead of life skills
historical element and contextual one but also the
Carmen: un-chronological timeline
very important that we come from different places with different knowledge practices
‘queer’ is epistemological in some places
as I’m involved in empirical research
very aware of the empirical data that is collected (what teachers do, what students think) comes with a colonial burden
did these questionnaires get developed by students and teachers (to undo this power relations)
was there a pre-test to see if the questions are leading?
how was the process developed itself?
this first phase was about testing our research practice
out of this we now know that there should be two languages for questionnaires
written english does not make sense
we also would like to bring into effect more collaboration with students and teachers in the framing of the research, its questions and its use
some of the questions come with pre-assumptions
Emma: Africa Cluster to meet by the wall and then join the lunch.
Second Phase
others are Christian schools
