[REC]
From Project to Collective: A Brief History
In 2006, a project known as Radical Education was developed at the Moderna galerija. The basic idea was to find ways of “translating” radical pedagogy into the sphere of cultural, cognitive, and non-material production, with education being conceived not merely as a model but also as a field of political participation. The aim of Radical Education, then, was to create a unique “progressive” micro-political space within the gallery itself, a kind of critical antipodes to both the conservative and neoliberal tendencies that predominate in the art system as well as in cultural production. Right from the start, Radical Education was understood in the sense of “heterogeneous spaces”, in which art would be but one field of activity among others. For this reason, the project was all the more critical toward art’s extended domains, e.g. socially engaged art, relational art and participatory art – forms of art-making that often include in their projects, in an uncritical way, transversal practices, practices of self-organization and practices in which it is not clear where art ends and politics begins; as a result, such practices become normalized. Radical Education, then, aimed not only at interpretations of various forms of art activism, but in fact at “the production a space”, basing itself on the principles of transversality, which is not some predetermined form but is rather constituted through events, different kinds of alliances, crossings and collective organizing.
Radical Education was constantly concerned with a number of questions about institutional critique and its expansion into a critique of social relations linked, consequently, to the systemic crisis of capitalism: Has critique become merely a form of artistic practice and, as such, already been thoroughly instrumentalized? Is such critique merely the post-modern apology – and camouflage – of art institutions, and therefore incapable of any more profound theoretical or practical understanding of the crisis? Or alternatively, does such critique also contain a certain emancipatory potential based on values and, ultimately, also institutional forms that differ from those founded on neoliberal capitalism?
If we interpret the presence of Radical Education within the institution from Badiou’s point of view, we can say that, viewed in the sense of the sequences of order defined by the institution, Radical Education was a “vague eventness” – that is to say, the project was vague from the perspective of institutional policy. Every institution tends toward stabilizing and eliminating such “vagueness” by producing conceptual configurations and rules of thought for these and similar “events”. Although Radical Education was conceived as a way to bring about alternative modes of operation, the alternative production of knowledge and the opening of institutional spaces to different and diverse unforeseeable actors, this happened primarily on the theoretical level. The project as such was unable to take shape politically, since through its institutional form it was included in the dominant cultural model and understood from the outside as a kind of participatory practice, or rather as part of the prevailing “multicultural paradigm”.
The aim of several events in the Radical Education project was, indeed, to make a shift to a different level of thinking and operating in the field of the political. The idea of Spaces in Becoming (April–May 2008), for example, was to connect various spaces, individuals and collectives (the Rog Social Centre, Invisible Workers of the World, artists, political philosophers, activists, theoreticians etc.) and to ascertain, on the basis of practical questions, just how important these new network-organized public spaces are in a political sense – in other words, how can joint “possibilities for politics” be created? At the Encounter on Radical Education (November 2008), the emphasis was on the tradition of radical pedagogy and methods of collaborative research, with the aim of learning about media representations of overlooked realities and creating various tools for the production and distribution of resonant counternarratives that originate on the margins of the system – e.g. in self-created and autonomously organized communities.
Can, then, Radical Education’s position on the edge of institutional operability open a way to produce a new space in which, through analogies of meaning, social and cultural differences come together in the same domain of thought, one interlaced with various heterogeneous connections and networks, so as to contribute to the creation of new subjectivities? Does the possibility exist, therefore, of creating, on both the practical and theoretical levels, a critique that is not necessarily already part of the institution and the neoliberal “multicultural” discourse? Or has Radical Education, too, become merely a “brand” of the institution, merely a representation of the “alternative community”? And if not, then where are the points of support on which one can base the possible emergence of a radical subjectivity that would resist becoming merely a sanitized object in a gallery exhibition, merely the neutralized and isolated trace of an event?
A collective was set up last year in response to these questions. The idea was not only to overcome the dichotomy between institutions and movements, but even more to reflect the contentious attitudes that such a relationship inevitably provokes. Suely Rolnik proposes that in such cases it is necessary to engage the institution – the system – in a way that creates a field of support for these subjectivities and at the same time makes it possible for them to resist the “takeover” of their creative forces.
(translated by Rawley Grau)