"SCHULINSEL SCHARFENBERG" Sorry but here it’s a mess… Empowerment?

Sat, 12 Nov 14:00-Sun, 13 Nov 2016 18:00

On view
12 Nov 2016

"SCHULINSEL SCHARFENBERG" Sorry but here it’s a mess… Empowerment?

Symposium und Launch der Undisciplinary Learning: Dokumente Publikation
\ Symposium and launch of the Undisciplinary Learning: Documents
publication*

Knowledge politics, transgressive pedagogies, and political imagination in contemporary art and education  A symposium within the framework of  Undisciplinary Learning. Remapping The Aesthetics of Resistance: Knowledges

With Feminist health care research group Berlin, Claudia Firth, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Rajkamal Kahlon, Ferdiansyah Thajib / Kunci Cultural Studies Center, Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor

The day-long symposium on 13 November concludes the program section Undisciplinary Learning: KNOWLEDGES, which focuses on self-empowering pedagogies, especially from feminist, queer, leftist, anti-racist, and decolonial contexts and renegotiates institutional epicenters of western education and science such as schools, research institutions, or museums. “SCHULINSEL SCHARFENBERG” Sorry but here it’s a mess… Empowerment departs from a historical site of progressive education in Berlin: the Scharfenberg school situated on an island in the lake Tegeler See in the northwest of Berlin. This boys’ boarding school, which from 1922 to 1934 represented one of the three major schooling experiments of the time in Berlin, gains peripheral mention in The Aesthetics of Resistance as it is one of the institutions of worker’s education in the early 20th century. Until the national socialists came into power in 1933, Scharfenberg was a progressive school farm based on the collective development of curricula by students and teachers, an economy based on self-subsistence through farming that allowed for inclusive admission politics, flexible class structures comprising different age groups, and exchanges with other alternative education practitioners and institutions in Germany and Europe.

With a desire to re-think and co-investigate the “school” “teaching machine,” based on an understanding of education as a mode of political imagination and a field of experimentation,  the symposium initiates a platform for approaches that might be understood within the context of the so-called “educational turn” (Irit Rogoff) in contemporary art, in which an urgent need for freedom in education, for new forms of collectivism and for alternative learning structures has found its expression. Gathering artists, activists, theorists, and educators to exchange strategies, processes, and methods of anti-hegemonic knowledge transfer and empowerment in art and education, the symposium unfolds in three experimental settings placed within the exhibition at District.

Undisciplinary Learning, SCHULINSEL SCHARFENBERG" Sorry but here it’s a mess… Empowerment?, District Berlin 2016, Foto: Emma Haugh.
Undisciplinary Learning, SCHULINSEL SCHARFENBERG" Sorry but here it’s a mess… Empowerment?, District Berlin 2016, Foto: Emma Haugh.