To come under the shade of this mango tree with such deliberateness and to experience the fulfillment of solitude emphasize my need for communion. While I am physically alone proves that I understand the essentiality of to be with.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart
The structures of formal education systems are increasingly reaching their limits due to their outmoded and inflexible foundations. However, informal and artist-led educational initiatives are taking root. documenta 14’s aneducation and ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) are organizing the gathering of Under the Mango Tree—Sites of Learning, which addresses current educational shifts by inviting different artistic initiatives and schools from multiple geographies to come to Kassel. These different organizations are critically positioned both within and outside the Western canon.
With a special emphasis on historical and contemporary accounts and examples from nonhierarchical models of learning, the gathering presents Indigenous, communal practices of producing and preserving knowledge as well as initiatives that reflect on postcolonial knowledge production in nonhierarchical settings.
The some twenty contributors are each working towards new vantage points for a contemporary and broadened understanding of learning and knowledge production. Their work is presented in forms ranging from lectures to performances and workshops, in which active participation is welcome. Drawing on the model of a communal garden as a place of teaching and learning, the gathering takes place at various sites in Kassel during documenta 14.
Contributing projects, initiatives, and schools: Óscar Andrade Castro and Daniela Salgado Cofré (Ciudad Abierta), Sanchayan Ghosh (Santiniketan), Rangoato Hlasane (Keleketla! Library), Anton Kats (Narrowcast House), Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater and cheyanne turions (Wood Land School), Sofía Olascoaga, Alessandra Pomarico (Free Home University), Marcelo Rezende, Syafiatudina (KUNCI), Jorge I. González Santos (Escuela de Oficio), Marinella Senatore (The School of Narrative Dance), and others
Workshops
aneducation
This workshop discusses the Narrowcast House project, along with the impact of listening, narrative, and voice in learning. Participants are invited to engage in a series of listening exercises and radio experiences that immerse them in practical discussions about listening within the context of education.
Escuela de Oficios
This is an invitation to engage in the processes and web of relationships that have allowed Escuela de Oficios to develop the artisanal techniques that have become fundamental to our platform of practice. Stemming from the craft traditions of Puerto Rico, our interest in learning—as makers—has enabled us to understand the role of the artisan in society as an intersection of various systems of knowledge and disciplines pertaining to the relations between autonomy, design, and communal principles. This workshop draws on different perspectives and approaches to Escuela de Oficios’s platform, which are shared in our meeting at Kerameikos in Athens. For this gathering, we are focusing on correspondences between weaving and pottery. As a central activity we engage in the plaiting of Enea—a natural fiber that is derived from various specimens known with the genus of Typha—as resource on pedagogy and school can be implemented in these issues? How an alternative school deals with inequalities, gaps, and ruptures?
Open City of Amereida
The workshop consists of an approximation of one of the fundamental activities within the school, the “design of celebration.” Using the methodology of observation and a few rules for construction, the participants propose a particular shape for a gathering, while considering the food and the drinks in relationship to the space and the event. Through the commitment of all the participants we aim to develop and fabricate different design proposals that are then manifested at the dinner table at the end of both days.
The School of Narrative Dance
The meaning of our research in our work with Marinella Senatore is based on the encounter between us choreographers and the participants/ dancers of The School of Narrative Dance. We are interested in every dance form and every body; we always set a process in motion that is unique, since the composition of the group is also unique. We view ourselves as the guiding force of a potential that already for transmitting the recounting of past and current conversations and those carried out within the exchanges taking place as part of Under the Mango Tree.
KUNCI School of Improper Education
This workshop is not planned from an existing or even complete body of knowledge, but more from one of the on-going concern in the School of Improper Education. The school has just ended its first experiment. In the School of Improper Education, we are learning Sign Language and none of us are deaf. Therefore our learning process involves not only the attempt to master the language, but also to understand how it works by having close proximity with the life experience of its users in relation to ours. But the attempt to be close doesn’t reduce the distance. Oftentimes more distances emerge on the horizon. These distances can be identified in form of inequalities in gender, class, race, or even positions of privilege. How critical approach exists and that simply needs to unfold. We eagerly look forward to the group showing us their dance and performance skills. We use them. People can create movement regardless of their age, gender, education, or social background. We are interested in sharing space, in the emergence of a temporary com- munity as an artistic and performative approach. This approach enables us to sketch a portrait of society that is revealed to the audience and puts their private assets—their bodies’ memories—on the line.
Visva Bharati
As a continuation of the walk, Sanchayan Ghosh introduces two internal games: the intra-subjective individual tree study with the body–an individual game of exploring memory within a collective through one’s own body and mind–as well as a collective walking, leading, recollecting exercise which continues the exploration of the pilgrimage.
Wood Land School
In Wood Land School’s 2017 project in Montreal, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art has been renamed and operates as Wood Land School. Wood Land School is negotiating structural shifts and limitations while programming Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha/Drawing a Line from January to December, a slow exhibition that unfolds over the course of the year in a series of three gestures that center Indigeneity through art objects, performances, and discursive events. Wood Land School wishes to extend our gesture to documenta 14, bringing artworks from Turtle Island to be installed in the Stellwork Kulturbahnhof in Kassel. This modest exhibition of works is proposed as a condition for Wood Land School to articulate their concerns, questions, ideas, and sense of being within the larger international context.
Contributors
aneducation, documenta 14
Simranpreet Anand is currently working towards her BFA Honors in Visual Arts and Psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In her interdisciplinary artistic practice she engages with cultural and feminist theory as well as psychology and explores how these field interrelate and collide with one another in modern society. She is committed to a socially engaged practice and has worked on community engagement and education projects with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Burrard Arts Foundation, and the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.
Sepake Angiama is Head of Education for documenta 14, where she works to create an integrated approach to education, exhibition making, and public programming. Previously she was the Head of Education for the International Manifesta Foundation and is currently also one of the members of the consortium for the Danish Pavilion project in Venice. As a curator and educator, Sepake Angiama’s interest lies in discursive practices, the social framework, and how we shape and form our experience in understanding the world. This has inspired her to work with artists who disrupt or provoke aspects of the social sphere through action, design, dance, and architecture. During Manifesta 10 she devised a program for a range of audiences, from school-aged children to art professionals. She also developed the training program on how to mediate the biennial and engage a wide audience, thus introducing a discursively guided approach within the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Clare Butcher is an art educator from Zimbabwe, who cooks as part of her practice. She is currently aneducation Coordinator for documenta 14. She has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the Piet Zwart Institute’s Master of Education in Art, and the University of Cape Town. Her own education includes an MFA from the School of Missing Studies, a Masters in Curating the Archive from the University of Cape Town, and participation in the De Appel Curatorial Program. Some collaborative and individual endeavors include Men Are Easier to Manage Than Rivers (2015); The Principles of Packing… on two travelling exhibitions, 2012; and If A Tree… on the Second Johannesburg Biennale, 2012.
Candice Hopkins—a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, Yukon, Canada—is a Curator of documenta 14. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has published extensive writings on art and Indigenous history, most recently for South as a State of Mind and the documenta 14 Reader. She was Co-curator of the 2014 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Unsettled Landscapes, and Managing Curator of SITElines.2016.
Anton Kats is an artist, musician, and dancer. Kats’s practice has its roots in the informal, everyday relationships characterizing a vibrant neighborhood in Kherson, Ukraine; it is complemented by the necessities and pragmatics of self-legalization in Europe via institutions of formal education. After finalizing his studies through a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016, Kats was invited to join the aneducation team of documenta14 as an artist, which led to the initiation and development of the Narrowcast House project in Kassel and the A-Letheia project in Athens. Kats is an editor of Sound Space Downtown: Workbook and User Manual. He is also a lecturer in Contextual Studies at Ravensbourne University in London. His works have been exhibited and performed in venues including the Serpentine Galleries, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Showroom Gallery.
Sabiha Keyif is the convenor of Under the Mango Tree, a gathering of documenta 14 aneducation and ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). Since 2013 she has been a Research Associate and Curator at ZKM | Center for Art und Media, Karlsruhe. After completing her state teaching examinations in Fine Arts and German Language and Literature, she received a Masters degree in Art History and Aesthetics at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) and co-curated the City Gallery of Kunstverein Wolfsburg.
The Bahia Museum of Modern Art
Marcelo Rezende is a researcher, critic, and exhibition-maker. He was director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, 2012–15; artistic director of the 3rd Bahia Bienniale, 2014; and a member of the curatorial group of the 28th Bienal de São Paulo, 2008. Author of the novel Arno Schmidt (2005), he is associate curator of the Museu do Mato (Scrubland Museum) in Bahia. He is currently preparing the exhibition Utopischer Beigeschmack for the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, which opens in August 2017. He is the director of the Archiv der Avantgarden (ADA) in Dresden, Germany.
Cuernavaca
Sofía Olascoaga’s practice focuses on the intersections of art and education: the exploration of encounters, think-tanks, and public programs, and the involvement of artists, theorists, curators, and educators with a wide range of institutional and independent interlocutors. Her ongoing research work, Between Utopia and Disenchantment (Entre utopía y desencanto), critically assesses the collective memory and genealogies stemming from intentional community models developed in Mexico in past decades, addressing the ideas developed by Ivan Illich at the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) and its influential role in the practice of many Mexican and international thinkers. Olascoaga was cocurator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo INCERTEZA VIVA; academic curator at MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo – UNAM) in Mexico City, 2014–15; Research Curatorial Fellow at Independent Curators International, 2011; and Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, 2010. She received her BFA with honors from La Esmeralda National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. In 2012, she was a Workshop Clinics Director for the International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory in Mexico City. From 2007 to 2010, she was Head of Education and Public Programs at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City.
Escuela de Oficios
Jorge González’s practice serves as a platform for the recuperation of marginalized vernacular material culture in an attempt to produce new narratives incorporating the Indigenous and the modern. His ongoing research draws material from the study of botany, ethnology, history, pedagogy, architecture, and design. González received a BFA in Sculpture from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, and was a fellow of San Juan’s postacademic program La Práctica, Beta Local, 2012–14. González lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Free Home University
Alessandra Pomarico
Free Home University (FHU) is a pedagogical and artistic experiment created in 2013 in Southern Italy by a local and international group of artists and thinkers. It focuses on generating new ways of sharing and creating knowledge by experiencing life in common. The Free Home University wishes to be a non-vertical, energy-liberating, insurgent environment (Free), within a protected and intimate space (Home) committed to creating a temporary and autonomous community of learners (University). The full immersion into a collective experience, sharing of different aspects of life, an engagement with the context and struggles of our local communities, and the creation of a coalitional approach in the definition and construction of an inquiry are considered fundamental values in this open–ended, research-based experiment in alternative education. Central to FHU and its pedagogical aims are experiential forms of learning, processes of reflection and dialogue, and the access to different ways of knowing, including the wisdom of the body and intuitive forms of co-creation, community cooking, peer-to-peer learning, explorative derives, collective reading, film screenings, and convivial research. This breadth of approaches holds the delicate balance of autonomy and community living; lines of inquiry and methods of study vary depending on the proposals, desires and perspective of the participants.
Ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)
Elke aus dem Moore has been Head of the Visual Arts Department at ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) in Stuttgart and Berlin since 2008. She is responsible for programs that cultivate international art exchanges through exhibitions, conferences, magazines, and funding programs. She has initiated exhibitions (such as Politics of Sharing – On Collective Wisdom, 2016–17, together with Adnan Yıldız) and gatherings/conferences on contemporary art and biennial cultures (such as Curating Under Pressure, Aotearoa/New Zealand 2015 in cooperation with Goethe-Institut and ILAM and Biennials: Prospects and Perspectives, 2014, in cooperation with ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) and also art education programs (such as Art Education in Migration Societies in partnership with the Zurich University of the Arts and Berlin University of the Arts, 2011). From 2003–07 she was Artistic Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and from 1999–2002 Curator at Shedhalle in Zurich.
Keleketla! Library
Rangoato Hlasane is a cultural worker, writer, DJ, educator, and cofounder of Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg and the annual Molepo Dinaka / Kiba Festival in Polokwane, South Africa. He holds an MA in visual art from the University of Johannesburg and teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he is an active member of the community and a PhD candidate. Hlasane is committed to art/s education with a social justice agenda and has led the publication of two Keleketla! Library books: 56 Years to the Treason Trial: Intergenerational Dialogue as a Tool for Learning published in 2012 and 58 Years to the Treason Trial published in 2014. His research and writing about South African music histories has been published in two books. He has presented sonic talks at events such as the Education and Equality Symposium of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul.
KUNCI School of Improper Education
Syafiatudina Saja, or “Dina” for short, is interested in curatorial work as a frictional interplay between theory and practice. Her practice revolves around the role of art in critical knowledge production and how it shapes political subjects. Dina works as a writer, curator, and member of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (www.kunci.or.id) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her ongoing work with this collective includes the School of Improper Education, which is now in its first session running from 2016 to 2017.
Open City of Amereida
Oscar Andrade holds a degree in architecture and a Masters from the School of Architecture and Design at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (PUCV). As an assistant professor at the School of Valparaiso since 2011, Andrade works, lives, and studies at the Open City of Amereida. He has been involved in nine of the school’s Travesías and has participated in international exhibitions and workshops organized by the school, including: Ville Ouverte Penser en Construisant 2013; Utopia in progress Ciudad Abierta de Amereida Chile, 2015; and documenta 14, 2017. Since 2015 Oscar Andrade has been doing graduate work under the Chair Methods & Analysis at the Department of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology, and he is currently developing his PhD research on architectural design and construction strategies that use improvisation, hands-on techniques, and spur-of-the-moment decision making. At the university in Delft he has also been involved in academic activities such as workshops (Constructing the Commons, 2015), seminars (Probing into Precedents, 2015–17), and studios (Graduation Studio Valparaiso, 2017).
Daniela Salgado studied at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (PUCV), receiving a degree in industrial design and object design. She has been a professor for design and industrial design since 2010 and works with a studio or “taller,” where students develop a personal creative process through a methodology focused on observation (related to different acts and gestures taking place in a space). Daniela Salgado has participated in the Travesías of the School of Valparaíso and the Open City as well as other international exhibitions and workshops including: Utopia in progress Ciudad Abierta de Amereida Chile, 2015, and documenta 14, 2017. As a docotoral student at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Daniela Salgado recently participated in the “Esquisse Commune” project, using her specific pedagogical approach to design and construction developed at PUCV in a collaborative experience.
The School of Narrative Dance
Trained in music, fine arts, and film, Marinella Senatore’s practice is characterized by public participation. She has exhibited at numerous international venues including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Queens Museum, New York; Kunsthaus Zurich; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle, Sankt Gallen; 54th Venice Biennale; MAXXI, Rom; and Whitechapel, London.
Visva Barati
Sanchayan Ghosh received his MFA (1997) and BFA (1995) from Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, where he currently works as an associate professor in the Department of Painting. Ghosh is interested in site-specific art and has done extensive work in spatial design for experimental and contemporary theater. He draws inspiration from his workshop experience with Badal Sarkar, a prominent figure in Third Theater, and from community ritual events in Santiniketan; he used this to create community-based art that engages in specific community situations through multi-layered installations and performances. His pieces incorporate workshops that begin in public spaces and transform into site-specific interdisciplinary activities. Through this process, Ghosh explores the spaces between the institution and pedagogy—having successfully been able to bring art and performance from inside institutional spaces into public situations.
Wood Land School
Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario; he is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. Linklater completed an MFA in film and video at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Bard College, New York. He has exhibited work at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Family Business Gallery, New York; Te Tuhi Centre for Arts, Auckland; City Arts Centre, Edinburgh; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; the SeMa Biennale, Seoul; and at 80WSE Gallery, New York. His collaborative film project with Brian Jungen, Modest Livelihood, was presented at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre as a part of documenta 13, with subsequent presentations at the Logan Center Gallery, University of Chicago and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Linklater received the Sobey Art Award in 2013 and is currently represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.
Tanya Lukin Linklater is compelled by relationships between bodies, histories, poetry, pedagogy, Indigenous conceptual spaces, and Indigenous languages, as well as institutions. Her performance collaborations, videos, and installations have been exhibited and performed at EFA Project Space + Performa, New York; Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile; SBC Gallery, Montreal; Western Front, Vancouver; Images Festival + Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; and Remai Modern, Saskatoon, among others. In 2016, she presented He was a poet and he taught us how to react and become this poetry (Parts 1 and 2), which includes a video installation of Maria Tallchief and a collaborative performance with five dancers (Ceinwen Gobert, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Catherine Dagenais-Savard, and Stacy Desiliér) at La Biennale de Montréal – Le Grand Balcon. Other collaborators in recent years have included Laura Ortman, Peggy Lee, Miqu’el Dangeli, Ziyian Kwan, Ceinwen Gobert, Daina Ashbee, Emily Law, Leanne Simpson, and Duane Linklater. Linklater lives and works in Northern Ontario, Canada.
cheyanne turions is an independent curator and writer with an MA in visual studies from the University of Toronto. From the farmlands of Treaty 8, she is of settler and Indigenous ancestry. Her work positions exhibitions and criticism as social gestures, and she responds to artistic practices by linking aesthetics and politics through discourse. Recent projects include Wood Land School: Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó: wa tánon Iotohrha, 2017, in collaboration with Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Walter Scott; I am the Organizer of My Own Archive, 2017, and contributions to the forthcoming Desire/Change: Contemporary Canadian Feminist Art and Wood Land School: Critical Anthology. Among her distinctions are the award for Innovation in a Collections-based Exhibition by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, 2014; the Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award, 2015; and the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art Award, 2015. turions is the director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) and the artistic director at Trinity Square Video. Her roles include participation in the Education and Community Engagement Committee at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
221A / Pollyanna Library
Vincent Tao works at 221A, Vancouver, where he is responsible for coordinating the organization’s educational programming and administering its permanent collection. Tao’s recent projects at 221A include Notes on Political Ecologies, N.O.P.E. 2016; Rereading Room: the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore, 2016; Parallax Study: The New Romantics, 2017; and Deep Blue Open Archive, 2017. His independent research and organizing work concerns urban displacement and the right to the city. Prior to moving to Vancouver, Tao studied at McGill University in Montreal, where he was the outreach coordinator for a worker-run community kitchen.
Jesse McKee is the Head of Strategy at 221A, Vancouver, responsible for leading the organization’s research-based programming and aligning the organization’s development and sustaining of self-organized cultural infrastructures. Prior to joining 221A, Jesse McKee was the Curator of the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre, and the Exhibitions Curator of Western Front, Vancouver. His curatorial projects include Stopping the Sun in its Course, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, 2015, and the Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016–17. Jesse McKee has been a jury member for the Sobey Art Award, the Canada Council for the Art’s Asia Pacific Delegation, and a nominator for The Aimia | AGO Photography Prize and The Brink Award. His writing has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Fillip, Border Crossings, and Kaleidoscope; he has also written essays for the Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp; VOX Center for the Contemporary Image, Montreal; and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.
Under the Mango Tree is a cooperation between documenta 14 aneducation and the Visual Arts Department of ifa (Institut für Auslandbeziehungen).
The gathering is supported by a partnership with ArtsEverywhere, an online platform by Musagetes, which discusses the arts in relation to all aspects of the world around us.
For more information contact the Under the Mango Tree Coordinator and Producer Sabiha Keyif at underthemangotree@documenta.de.
Photo: Adam Szymczyk