Another Roadmap’s Manila Research group proposal is a collaborative attempt to address transnational questions involving the implicit privileging of individuation in art practice and art education vis-à-vis the need to anchor art education in grassroots/locally nuanced communal learning contexts. In shifting from undertaking case studies of art education histories, Back to Square 1 is exploring modes of intervention posed as action research that might possibly address questions like:
- How does the artist-educator, as locus of individuating, thus emancipatory impulse, fail or succeed in opening up modest as well as radical breaks from a mainstream neoliberal education paradigm which requires the production of docile if not complacent minds and bodies given to unproblematized notions of ersatz harmony and social hierarchies?
- What insights might be gained from community-based initiatives that assert the place of art in education across intersections of notions such as agency, performativity, criticality, and reflexivity?
The Manila research team is presently made up by members of the independent art platform, Back to Square 1: Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez (critic-historian-researcher from the University of the Philippines Department of Art Studies, Mary Ann Josette Pernia (Education specialist, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design and Lecturer, University of the Philippines Manila), and Iris Angela Ferrer, independent researcher and cultural worker.
