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.
Artist Yael Davids conducts regular Feldenkrais workshops and studio visits with resident artists from the Rijksakademie.
Yael Davids is developing a practice inspired by the work of Dr Moshé Feldenkrais, whose methodology seeks to cultivate acute bodily and mental awareness, Davids deploys weekly Feldenkrais sessions as a meditation on the potential for an institution to exert a refined, heightened sense of listening towards its inner-workings, its collection, and its transactions with artists and the public. With each session taking place on the floor and with all members of the institution invited to participate, these sessions operate as an exercise in horizontality, unity and democracy. Extending the research to the institutional framework of pedagogy, the forthcoming phase in the trajectory places emphasis on locating a connection between established systems of pedagogy and hermeneutic methods of knowledge production
Yael Davids examines the capacities in which the body operates as a documentary vessel. She studies how collective heritage and socially charged narratives become intertwined with the individual’s biography and sensibilities, surmounting to an experiencing of the concrete world that is defined by a unique finitude.