“Just Building”: Togetherness as Art and Education in a Copenhagen Neighborhood

Abstract

Through a process-oriented analysis of the Copenhagen-based art project The Hill, this article explores the pedagogical potentials of the concept performative experimental community. The aim is to propose ideas and strategies for teacher certification courses and university programs that stimulate students to reconsider the role of art education in the current political, economical, and environmental situation. Central questions addressed by the article are: What is the potential for using art and education to explore alternative ways of living and of being? How can art educators challenge individualist self-understandings through new forms of togetherness? How can we create fissures in neo-liberal educational agendas? In the conclusion, six key notions are presented, followed by a brief discussion of performative experimental community as approach, content, and pedagogy for becoming art teachers.

Uddannelse som social kunstform?

“…I udviklingen af projektet havde Tormod og jeg som naevnt støttet os til Bourriauds (2005) teori om relationel aestetik. Her er idéen, at god kunst har paedagogisk potentiale, fordi den åbner en lille spraekke ind mod 35 kvalitativt bedre livsformer ved at skabe kortvarige, men autentiske oplevelser af faellesskab (Illeris, 2015). I løbet af uddannelsens første semester var der imidlertid, som vi har set, ikke bare tale om et harmonisk faellesskab, men mere om et socialt samvaer praeget af spaendinger og indbyrdes modsaetningsforhold, sådan som det også kom til udtryk på evalueringsmødet.…”

Subjectivation, togetherness, environment. Potentials of participatory art for Art Education for Sustainable Development (AESD)

“…In 2015, I published a study in which I used the same project as my case in order to develop a strategy for teacher certification courses and university programs (Illeris, 2015) 2 . In the present study, my goal is to explore the relevance of participatory art for the development of AESD.…”

Remixing the Released Imagination

“…In particular, we must continue to test the pliability of the concept of "community" itself. Despite progress by art education scholars who are introducing theories to approach the concept in new ways (Holland, 2015;Illeris, 2015), "community" remains a trap for what it "assumes, silences, and reproduces with regards to racial conflict" (Chernoff, 2015, p. 97). To address the racialized tensions that can be silenced in the name of "community," perhaps those who educate community arts practitioners might consider their own absurdist approaches to remixing that brings these racialized tensions to the surface.…”

“…Since then, scholars in art education have drawn on postmodern theory to critique the ways in which collective human agency, through what is often called "community," may suppress the creative forces of individual desire and reduce the countless and specific arrays of identities across factors including race, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and so on (Holland, 2015;Illeris, 2015). From this perspective, "community" exerts its own form of pastoral control, coercing people into White, middle-class subjectivities that value engaging in dialogue and acknowledging individual difference as long as those differences serve broader aims of the community, or society at large (Schutz, 2004).…”