contributions and links

Rethinking Art Education has already started through sharing and mediating questions in advance of the conference.

You are very welcome to send us your ideas, provocations, suggestions or further contributions.

We would like to recommend you in the same time to put yourself into the following related material:

- «Fugitive Study» (recommended by Irit Rogoff)
http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf
Irit Rogoffs lecture

- publications by Helene Illeris
http://agder.academia.edu/HeleneIlleris

- about Temporary Academy
http://temporary-academy.blogspot.no/p/about-temporary-academy.html
André Tribbensees lecture

- about Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/learning-by-doing-reflections-on-setting-up-a-new-art-academy/

- about Irit Rogoffs lecture

Fugitive Study

Within the rampant economies of Neo Liberalism the idea of an independent gesture such as 'FREE' that opts out of the system has become decreasingly viable. The interlinked and web like connections between institutional and economic planning has meant that it is virtually impossible to find an 'outside' to inhabit with some degree of freedom. This means that we need to think differently about how to find degrees of autonomy and self determination within the systems.

The concept of 'fugitive' developed by Harney and Moten nestles at the interstices of what they call 'the hold' (the cargo section of transportation and shipping, also the place in which human cargo was transported in slavery). It inhabits organisational fault lines in ways different to offcial activity and planning and it diverts resources in unexpected ways. Perhaps it is important to realise that 'the fugitive'cannot be planned for, it always already takes place and thus requires a different reading strategy in order to be recognised and interacted with. Therefor the question is how does a classroom become more than a classroom who is actually teaching, who is actually learning, what is being learned, what relation these have or dont have to a curriculum, what kind of attention is produced by whom and to what ends in the august settings of educational institutions. All of these need to be engaged with if we are to gain a genuine understanding of what happens within the life of education.

Irit Rogoff is a writer, curator, and organizer working at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, and emergent political manifestations. She is Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London University where she heads the PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge program, the MA in Global Arts program and the new Geo-Cultures Research Center. Rogoff has written extensively on geography, globalization, and contemporary participatory practices in the expanded field of art. A collection of recent essays, Unbounded—Limits’ Possibilities, is published in 2015 with e-flux journal/ Sternberg and her new book, Looking Away—Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities is forthcoming. Rogoff is also co-founder of freethought, a loose collaborative platform for research, pedagogy, and production based in London, where she lives and works.

- about Helene Illeris

Helene Illeris (PhD) works as professor of art education in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Agder (UiA), Kristiansand, Norway. Her research focuses on visual culture, contemporary art practices, aesthetic learning processes and art education for sustainable development (AESD). In 2009-13 she was the leader of the Nordic research network CAVIC (Contemporary art and visual culture in education). Helene is now a coordinator of the research platform Arts in context at UiA.

- about Tony Valberg
Tony Valberg is a trained musician from Agder Music Conservatory working at Agder University, Norway. His projects, as his Ph.D thesis, aim to shed light on questions like how aesthetic production interacts with social space and vice versa, and the consequences that such interaction has for the conception of art, its arenas, agendas and the question of non professionals’ legitimacy as participants in the field. Lately he has focused on opportunities to invent and create social interstice suited to produce experiences of togetherness, as well as critique of the non-democratic consequences such a notion has proved to contain.

- about Tormod Wallem Anundesen
Tormod Wallem Anundsen is Associate Professor at the University of Agder (UiA), Faculty of Fine Arts. In 2014 he completed his PhD in musicology on the musical practices of African immigrant performers in Norway, analyzing how artistic practices may on one side work to marginalize the ‘Other’, yet on the other may hold emancipatory potential by creating spaces for individual and intersubjective action.

- about Lisbet Skregelid
Lisbet Skregelid is a teacher, assistant professor and researcher at the Department of Visual Arts and Drama, Faculty of Fine Arts, at University of Agder, in Kristiansand, Norway. In her PhD thesis she explores how art educational events might initiate new beginnings for those involved, and thus have political and democratic potentials. She argues for education informed by dissensus, that implies ruptures, disturbances and spaces of uncertainty. Skregelid has since 2001 collaborated with Anna Svingen-Austestad. A recent project is UFO - et organ for Underlige FOrbindelser, which is an organ for actions involving education, play, poetic practice, art and research. UFO explores burning questions in the zones between theory and practice, and considers art to be an overarching principle in education and life.

- about Åsa Sonjasdotter 
Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist born in Sweden, living in Berlin, Germany. 
Sonjasdotter's artistic engagement often takes place over time, following the conditions of the involved participants and investigated subjects. In the long term project Potatoes’ Perspective Sonjasdotter investigates the relation between humans and plants as manifested in cultivated plants, where Sonjasdotter especially looks into the role of potatoes during the development of European modernity. In Sonjasdotter’s projects the exhibition situation often functions as a site for real exchange of matter and knowledge as well as it functions as a metaphor on living conditions.

Sonjasdotter has studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in Norway. Sonjasdotter holds an MFA from the Department of Theory and Communication at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She has been professor at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in Tromsø, Norway, an institution she took part of establishing in 2007. From 1996 to 2006 Sonjasdotter has been a founding member of Women Down the Pub, a feminist art- and action group that operates within the current debate on gender.

Selected projects and exhibitions include: Tote Wespen fliegen länger: bewegte Natur-Kulturen, Natural History Museum, Berlin, Germany,2015; Native Food and Invasion, Sapporo International Arts Festival, Sapporo, Japan, 2014 ; Haute Diversité, Domaine de Chamarande et Centre Culturel, 104, Paris, France, 2014; Die Kartoffel (Springhornhof Stiftung und Kunstverien, Neuenkirchen, Germany, 2013); The Order of Potatoes (Rooting, Regional Networks, Global Concerns, Sullivan and Betty Rymer Galleries, Chicago, USA, 2013); The Way Potatoes Go (Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, USA, 2012), Hungry City (Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany, 2012), The Order of Potatoes (The Worldly House, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012), The Way Potatoes Go (EATLACMA, LACMA, Los Angeles, USA, 2010), Small Potatoes Make Big Noice (4^th Bucharest Biennale, Bucharest, Romania, 2010); The Way Potatoes Go (The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA, 2008), Tea Pavilion (3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China, 2008), Sharing the Knowledge (Konsthall C, Stockholm Sweden, 2007); Impossible India (Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, 2006); On Mobility (Muscarnok, Budapest, Hungary and De Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2006).
Links on the Internet include: www.potatoperspective.org

- about André Tribbensee
André Tribbensee is working as an artist and curator, based in Kristiansand, Norway.

Since the 90s I have been producing and exhibiting own artwork, as well as contributing with lectures and workshops in different contexts and institutions across Europe.

I have early been influenced by fluxus- and conceptual art, based on an interest in the relation between art and life, arts interactivity and the political potential of artistic activity.

Living in urban Germany yet seeking to connect to nature has resulted in personal research and projects across northern Europe for about 10 years. I have been trying to understand phenomena such as the transformation of thoughts into images and matter (and vice versa), and their migration and reappearance. Questions about how environments influence the way of thinking have resulted in artworks, exhibitions, lectures and my own migration to Norway in 2000. Here I have had the opportunity to continue my projects by incorporating art students, sometimes under extreme conditions in isolated natural environments such as deserted islands and mines. In my independent work I have focused on migration phenomena, understood as communication, and on the creation of social encounters.

During production tours through countries such as China, Japan and Korea I was introduced to the art of contemplation and tea, and its ceremonies and social functions. My interest in the initiation of exchange- and learning processes has led to performative projects like The Tea Ceremony Project and educational projects like Temporary Academy; a community based art academy, initiated in 2014 in Kristiansand. As a succeeding project I was asked to curate RETHINKING ART EDUCATION in collaboration with Lisbet Skregelid and Tormod W. Anundsen (University of Agder).

A motivation behind my projects is the desire to explore, to experiment, and to exchange thoughts in a laboratory of unlimited thinking, and to create, contemplate and communicate what seems to have relevance for life.