Education from Below is a two-year collaborative programme organised between the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, MACBA, Barcelona and WHW, Zagreb.
Education from Below explores art as a place for dialogue, collective learning and imagination. Education doesn't belong only in institutions, but it can be horizontal and come from below, from communities.
The project recognises that art practices can dislocate the usual hierarchies of what should or should not be learned and traditional divisions between theory and practice, and that knowledge does not have to be based on accumulation, but rather on sharing and mutual learning.
The partners will explore new models of art practice based on collective learning and will generate a network of institutions and professionals for sharing methodologies.
Education from Below links three independent programmes for artists, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, PEI at MACBA, and WHW Akademija that each provide important opportunities for artistic development outside of formal education systems. The project will be realised over the course of autumn 2019 – autumn 2021 through seminars, study groups, artist residencies, exhibitions, series of lectures, an international conference, a collective reader and a common web platform, involving many artists, thinkers and educators.
In 'Walking Distance', Vlatka Horvat reflects on a series of projects she undertook during COVID-19 lockdowns from the spring of 2020 to the summer of 2021. Diverse in form and ranging from drawings, collages, and other works on paper to video, photography, and writing, each project begins with an encounter with the local landscape, which for Horvat becomes a space for exploration of ideas around presence and absence, proximity and distance, mobility and stuckness, memory and projection.
This programme is hosted via Zoom and will be livestreamed on the Facebook page of WHW Akademija.
The presentation 'Walking Distance' adopts a collage-like form, interweaving elements of the artist talk, fiction, speculative writing, and communal viewing to construct a compelling essay on the artistic process, the role of place in the organisation of experience, and the interaction between landscape, perception, and imagination. At the heart of Horvat’s works produced over the last fifteen months is a daily practice that stages a negotiation between the “infraordinary” of everyday life and its counterparts in the realm of the fictional, the speculative, and the impossible. The projects featured in Horvat’s presentation all stem from related processes through which local geography, quotidian urban spaces, and experiences of the pandemic are seen, re-seen, and ultimately transformed.
This conversation is realised in cooperation with the project Curating in Context, organised by the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, within the Erasmus+ Programme.
Vlatka Horvat is a London-based artist working across a wide range of forms and contexts. Her studio-based practice includes work in sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, and photography, and her other outputs span performance, publication, participatory events, and public space interventions. Often involving gestures of reconfiguring space and spatial-social relations at play in it, Horvat’s projects probe the precarious relationship between bodies, objects, materials, the built environment, and landscape. Central to her investigations across different forms and media is the question of presence, an exploration of the dynamics between the subject and the context, and an interest in the possibilities and problematics of inhabiting and negotiating space—social space, physical space, psychological space.
Horvat’s work enacts certain reversals and inversions of established spatial and social orders, involving objects, materials, bodies, images, and elements of architecture to explore how the organisation of space and of structures that contain us affect movement and action, how they impact encounters and social relations, and how they shape our sense of both limitation and possibility.