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.
Pulp is an ongoing project initiated by Aimée Zito Lema and Elisa van Joolen in 2019. Through this collaborative work they look into processes of transformation, imagining and proposing new forms of collective production, in which the re-use of textile (garments) play a central role to question our relation to daily life and the world we live in.
Pulp believes the idea of transforming the material world around us is relevant for both its symbolic meaning and its practical/concrete outcome. To actively be engaged in a cycle of transformation, a cycle where deconstruction and reconstruction comes to life, a cycle of presence and non-presence, of making the everyday object into an abstraction and then concrete again. For this new iteration of the project Pulp invited kids and teenagers (aged 9–12) to participate in a workshop where they imagined new ways of creating garments and new ways of dressing.
The workshop revolved around dissecting discarded pieces of clothing brought in by the participating children. Subsequently, all garments were cut into small pieces and recycled into a new material: paper. A Dutch windmill in Loenen (Netherlands) which still masters the age-old technique of transforming old rags in cotton-based paper transformed the shredded garments into coarse and tactile paper sheets that form the material base of Our Rags Magazine, a magazine that pushes the possibilities of recycled material. By manufacturing a fashion publication that is printed on this very material—creating a magazine of which the pages don’t merely show the garments, but are the garments—this project shows the creative potential recycling garments and textile can offer.
The project and resulting Our Rags Magazine question consumer behaviour and its relationship to the world in which we live. Further expanding the potential of recycled material, Our Rags Magazine is a magazine where the pages not only show clothing, but actually are clothing.
Designed by Elisabeth Klement, the magazine contains contributions by photographer Janneke van der Hagen and writers Maria Barnas and Persis Bekkering. Limited edition of 68 copies. Each copy is unique, handmade, signed and sealed. Available at the launch and via the Warehouse webshop.
Rijksakademie Alum Aimée Zito Lema (RA 15/16) is a visual artist engaging in her practice with questions around social memory and the body as an agent of resistance, making uses of photography, sculptural installations, performance and moving image.
Elisa van Joolen is a designer based in Amsterdam. Her approach to clothing design is characterised by strategies of intervention and reconfiguration. Elisa’s projects often reflect specific social contexts and emphasise collaboration and participation. They expose relational aspects of clothing and subvert processes of value production.
This residency is a collaboration with Framer Framed, platform for contemporary art, visual culture and critical theory & practice.