Scratching the Surface Series

A critical exploration of independent educational organizations and the hurdles in the way of remaining “alternative” with the passing of time.

Grounded in empirical research, Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization is a critical inquiry into the establishment, development, and transformation of alternative pedagogical and social spaces. Written by Anna Colin, the former director and co-founder of Open School East, an independent art school and community space founded in London in 2013, this essay-length book explores the instituting factors, organizational life cycles, and alignments and misalignments between values and practices that permeate such a project.

The essay delves into the qualities and prerequisites for what Colin calls “multi-public educational organizations.” It also scrutinizes the hurdles associated with the effort to remain “alternative,” including processes of habituation, temptation or pressure to scale up, ethos-bending fundraising exercises, long tenure, as well as the plain desire for stability and sustainability. 

Alternative Pedagogical Spaces proposes where look for a reconceptualization of waiting, slowness, and longevity and asks how these ideas may benefit cultural practice and the design of future institutions (or the redesign of existing ones). Overriding the common assumption that success equals longevity, the author searches for institutional models that resist chrononormativity, drawing from social movements, psychotherapy, biology, and permaculture.

Copublished by Villa Arson

Two lectures that address feminist questions and art education in the 1980s and today.

Feminism, Pedagogy and the Studio: Reflections Across Four Decades brings together two lectures delivered by feminist art historian and curator Griselda Pollock in 1985 and 2022.

In 1985, Griselda Pollock critically examined the gender politics of twentieth-century art education that, she argued, reinforced masculinist and individualist ideologies within capitalist conditions of artistic production. She linked the cult of authorship to the nonrecognition of women as artists, even in the face of the evidence of women’s considerable participation in modern art. She explored the impact of a critical post-modern and feminist artistic engagement with theories of meaning, subjectivity, and the image drawn from outside the “studio” model. She ultimately proposed “feminist interventions in art’s histories,” where expanded histories—including race, class, gender, and sexuality—challenge both the monographic-all-male model of the hero artist and the hegemony of formalist art theory.

Almost forty years later, in 2022, she revisited the impact of “1968” and its theoretical revolution, historically situating the major geopolitical and ideological shifts after 1989 or 2001, but notably 2007 (the iphone, linking to the internet and social media). She identifies a troubling cultural tendency post-2010 (with thanks to Derrida) she names “insta-grammatology” and calls for critical analysis of how the “grammar” of social media reduce the spectrum of nuanced thinking and perform political surveillance of ideas. She documents her feminist pedagogical project: a Master’s and PhD programme in “Feminist Studies in the Visual Arts” drawing on the emancipatory politics of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Jacques Rancière. She also turns to Hannah Arendt’s model for intergenerational communication (in a shared, radically changing world) that values both historical self-understanding and the critical necessity for an expanded, conceptually-richer language. 

Copublished by Villa Arson