Contributions from: Clara Balaguer, Florian Cramer, Rolf Engelen, Deanna Herst, Aldje van Meer, Vanessa Jane Phaff, Michelle Teran, and Sjoerd Westbroek.
When the Willem de Kooning Academy and Codarts University of the Arts hosted the 15th ELIA Biennial Conference: Resilience and the City: Art, Education, Urbanism in 2018, it was an ideal opportunity to share research and knowledge with over 460 delegates from art academies across Europe and beyond. The WdKA operates from the perspective that art and design research produces new forms of knowledge and practices and is a catalyst for innovation and social transformation. This publication embraces this ethos and offers a selection of conference contributions by teaching staff. Rather than being organized under a single overarching theme, it is a collection of diverse research embedded in the Social, Autonomous, and Commercial Practices, the Stations, and pedagogical projects and explorative trajectories running parallel and at times, parasitic to the curriculum.
Michelle Teran, Strategies of Reclaiming
Abstract: This essay begins in a sweltering hot room during a Madrid summer. A small group gathers together to share stories of their emotional brush with eviction. The intimate conversation is part of pilot research on the psychosocial impacts of eviction carried out by a small team of researchers under the auspices of the PAH, an anti-eviction movement active throughout Spain. I position my role within the space and among the gathering as an embedded artist and researcher. I sit behind the camera, recording.
Throughout the text, I will describe several encounters with approaches instituted by the PAH, which they use to generate a set of audibilities that communicate the effects of an economic crisis and its societal impact on the personal lives of individuals. I will look at how strategies developed within grassroots, horizontal social movements like the PAH point towards situated, embodied forms of knowledge production; knowledge produced through practice. Several artistic works produced during my three-year artistic research project on crisis subjectivities will accompany the text. They are reflections, responses, translations, and remodeling of methodologies by the PAH and their strategies of reclaiming. By giving these examples, I want to consider the experimental practices developed by the movement as social pedagogy and based on principles of commoning, and how knowledge gained from these practices can broaden one’s knowledge and topics present in educational institutions.
https://researchpublicationelia.wdka.nl/StrategiesofReclaiming.html