Decolonizing Design Education, Decolonizing Education Design
Gudskul, a Jakarta-based public learning space of collective study and contemporary art ecosystem, has been organizing an annual collective study program since 2018. The program is conceived as a sharing platform intended to disseminate a sense of initiative in artistic and cultural endeavors in a society committed to collectivism. Gudskul sincerely believes in sharing and working together as two very vital elements in developing contemporary art, culture, and their ecosystems. The collectives involved in the study program come from various contexts, united by the fact that they come from ex-colonies and see the need for infrastructures that are more supportive of the practice and development of art and design in the realm of discourse, production, presentation, appreciation, education, and conservation. The practices initiated by these arts organizations or collectives are their way of taking on a role in developing these very infrastructures. They organize art projects as part of their contribution to society through various forms: workshops, sharing sessions, discussions, exhibitions, publications, etc.
The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, in turn, is not a learning space per se, but is tasked with preserving the legacy of one such institution. In the European history of culture, design, art, and architecture of the 20th century, the Bauhaus occupies a special role. As one of the first schools of design (Hochschule für Gestaltung), it faced the question of how to seize the dynamics of modernity with the means of design, operating when Western industrial societies were going through a time of crisis. Even though the school was founded in the historical moment when Germany had to cede control of the places it had colonized to other European powers, the Bauhaus and the people affiliated to it benefited from and contributed to perpetuating colonial structures, both during the 14 years of its operation and after its closure in 1933. As a hybrid institution situated at the intersection of archive, world heritage site, and school, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has been striving to rewrite the euro-centric history of art and design education for many years through the research and education programs of its Academy department which focus on transcultural dialogues and the global entanglements of Western modernity. This is exemplified in the relationship between the Bauhaus and Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, India, and between Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Ulm and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India.
DECOLONIZING DESIGN EDUCATION: LOOKING INWARDS, LOOKING BACK
As Regina Bittner has written in her preface, enforcing western educational systems onto the colonized communities was a key instrument of colonial rule. The establishment of educational institutions in the colonies modeled on European schools and universities served a dual purpose: colonial powers imposed particular western forms of knowledge on the colonies by claiming their universal validity, thereby marginalizing and discrediting local epistemologies. They also employed these institutions in order to forge local elites willing to comply with (and/or administer) colonial rule in exchange for limited powers and privileges. Art and design schools played a crucial role in this project, as their curricula transposed the western canon of making and representing onto local traditions of cultural expression with the aim of training a cheap workforce for the manufacturing industries producing goods for the colonizing powers. In spite of this initial mission however, it would be short-sighted to simply declare art and design schools mere instruments of exploitation. It was precisely these institutions that became hotbeds of anti-colonial resistance and testing grounds for a post-independence social order when countries in various regions of the Global South broke away from colonial rule. Furthermore, they became agents of postcolonial identity building as they contributed to a revaluation of local crafting traditions and modes of representation.
The long history of colonization produces mixed values resulting from the process of imitation, adjustment, and equalization of what is absorbed from colonialism and from the exchange of information and knowledge which further widens its horizons on the local values prevailing in it. To realize that educational, social, art and cultural systems from the colonial heritage are a result of imitation and adjustment processes, means realizing they are obsolete and no longer relevant to the vision, ideals and imagination of our contemporary contexts. The western education system with its modernist perspective, tends to see everything through the lens of productivity and universality which is oriented towards capitalistic human development. Looking at the context in which these initiatives are growing, it becomes obvious that they are in the midst of society with all its complex problems.
The obsolescence of colonial educational institutions then leads to the question of what could emerge from these ruins. We are thus exploring the practical conclusions contemporary Western cultural institutions need to draw from their colonial complicity. What does decolonization mean for the mission of a western world heritage site that is used to being considered relevant? How do we as an institution imbued with western tradition and privilege account for the manifold and often conflicting histories of anti-colonial struggle, their contemporary effects, and potential futures? How can we address existing colonial structures with their blurred temporalities and territorialities while at the same time acknowledging our own complicity in them? How can we, with the means at our disposal within our institutional boundaries, make a meaningful contribution to subverting these conditions?
DECOLONIZING EDUCATION DESIGN: LOOKING OUTWARDS, LOOKING AHEAD
One strategy we are exploring with this project is the gesture of de-centering ourselves from the narrative we present. Instead of assuming the “influence” and the Bauhaus as a “center” radiating to the non-European “periphery,” we find it important to acknowledge the many interconnections that linked art and design schools throughout the world and throughout the 20th century and give room to alternative developments in design education. We are drawing from the manifold experiences and encounters that have emerged from previous projects such as School Fundamental, a festival on art and design education, the various editions of the research program “Bauhaus Lab,” a series of hybrid conferences called Bauhaus Study Rooms, or the Open Studios program for experimental teaching. All of these projects fundamentally rely on practices of inviting and listening as well as on de-linking art and design pedagogies from the modernist tradition. They have initiated continuous, mutual learning processes with a wide array of collaborators, thus opening up the historic narrative to include alternative models for collective agency.
It is from this practice that the collaboration with Gudskul emerged. Since 2019, the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and Gudskul have engaged in a continuous dialogue spanning different educational formats and encounters, sometimes in person, oftentimes online. The reciprocal exposure to very different modes of instituting gave way to the realization that rather than a shared set of references in academic decolonial discourse, a steadfast commitment to collaboration can be a route leading to subverting colonial legacies. Asking the right questions and drawing appropriate conclusions falls short of this challenge; the decisive step towards mutual liberation lies in putting these conclusions into practice. By committing to the principle of collaboration, we hope to steer clear of two major epistemic risks: on the one hand, turning this project into a narcissist exercise in introspection by only focusing on criticizing our own privileges, on the other, exoticizing decolonial discourses by deliberately not engaging in the conversation at all.
These meeting points, made possible by continuous engagements between Bauhaus Dessau and Gudskul, represent attempts to converge stories from established histories and on-the-ground practices on equal footings – when theories meet stories. These acts create spaces where decolonization is not only represented or talked about, but directly rehearsed in its messy, imperfect realities. Learning, therefore, does not only consist of cognitive acts, but also of physical actions. Understanding is gained not only in the heads of the actors, but also in their guts. The result, therefore, is porous, multi-directional, and constantly on-going.
BLURRING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
To come back to the introductory question, will we ever arrive at a set of clear-cut definitions for each of the three terms that make up the title of this issue? Probably not. Will this journal convey a multiplicity of fleeting, competing, sometimes incommensurable perspectives on the meaning of decolonization, design, and education? We certainly hope so. The spectrum of contributions selected for this issue reflects the different modes of instituting that Gudskul and the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation have subscribed to. The part commissioned by the Bauhaus consists of two historical case studies on schools that have emerged from decolonization struggles, and two conversations about the discourses around decolonization as they are lead in the field of design studies in and beyond academic institutions situated in the former metropolises of the political geography of colonialism. These contributions are interwoven with in-depth reports about and reflections on education practices in formerly colonized regions, shared by ten art and design collectives based in Southeast and Central Asia as well as in Africa upon the invitation of Gudskul. By demonstrating how each collective seeks to activate local ways of seeing and doing both within and beyond existing institutional landscapes and colonial continuities, these contributions firmly ground the theoretical and historical explorations in empiricism, providing valuable insights into the tactics and strategies employed in decolonial struggles, and how (or rather: if) they are being related to the benchmarks of decolonial discourse.
In her essay on the case studies submitted to the 1979 “Design for Development” conference, organized by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design in Ahmedabad and Bombay (now Mumbai), Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan examines how design discourses and practices in post-independence India were largely animated by ideas revolving around the notion of modernization. The desire to turn art and design schools into agents of change in decolonial struggles is echoed in Ola Uduku’s contribution. Her article sheds light onto the meshwork of political alliances and international solidarity movements involved in the planning, construction, and operation of learning spaces in Africa, and explores both the potentials and perils of these endeavors in utopian place-making.
The epistemological implications of such decolonial practices as presented in both the historical studies and the reports shared by the collectives are the subject of the contributions by Nina Paim and Pedro Oliveira, both reacting to a set of questions by Regina Bittner.
With certain experiments that depart from the reality around them, specific contexts and localities, the organizations and art collectives invited to share their insights create various methods and models that are most appropriate to answer and respond to existing needs. Not infrequently, these methods and models are not something completely new, but a creative response to what is existing and happening in the community. When offered to the community, experimentation with these methods and models changes its form into horizontal learning processes.
These organizations and art collectives have grown and functioned as a receptacle that can continuously sustain the capacity to read, understand, and negotiate with the realities in their community, seeking its relevance and responding to its needs and positions within today’s context. They become a motor, an agency that can adapt to or be inspired by their community and is able to read and respond to the rapid changes in the society.
From an internal perspective, the art organization or art collective space is often seen as a place for learning and experimenting for its members. Of the many organizations and artists who manage spaces like that, many do not come from an arts background but from all kinds of fields. This makes the space a hub where artistic and non-artistic ideas meet. For us, this is important because we believe that art and design require a way of looking at them from various points of view, from a variety of contexts. Working as art organizations and collectives, they often propose ideas related to social issues using various approaches through art and design to interact with the community, learn from them and offer new ideas based on the knowledge they gain from these interactions.
The knowledge of art and design they have experienced so far are the result of a process that they have learned, and learned to believe in, which comes from the West. Thus, what they think is good in principle is in practice the perception that they get from the knowledge that comes from the West. When organizations and art collectives rooted in a locality carry out their practice, they tend to see what is good according to the local perceptions, and often that is outside of what is generally agreed upon. The practice of working with local communities opens up many boundaries, goes beyond what so far has been accepted as “standard” and finds other ways of learning.
The spaces run by art organizations and collectives are also imagined as safe places for people and ideas, where various perspectives meet and transform into a new idea, finding its function and relevance. The nature of these spaces is also to be open to the community. People can come in and learn from each other, sustaining the ideas, imaginations, sensibilities, values, vision, define and distribute things that they consider as important knowledge.
In the spirit of sustaining one’s practice, the contributions made by the following collectives are not specifically made for this journal. We are using this opportunity in a deeper understanding of time, the past as a thing to reflect on in the present, in order to imagine what’s next.
Babau AIR, a collective based in Hanoi, presents and reflects their practices on running a shared space. Through establishing a space, they experiment to explore the possibilities of a mutual learning environment, understood here as a fleeting constellation of humans and the way they obtain ownership of a space both with regards to its physical and spiritual qualities. Appropriately relying on evidence that is explicitly anecdotal, Babau AIR demonstrate that even the shared practice of doing nothing, of inhabiting a space, can help to spark unintentional learning processes. Pangrok Sulap, a printmaking collective from Sabah explores ways of conducting a collaborative practice that is radical both in the sense of its political demands and in the sense of it being firmly rooted in the communities they work with. Their contribution highlights the methods of collaboration they employ: activities that allow participation from diverse communities, making full use of public and open spaces for shared events. The name of Manila-based Salikhain Kolektib stems from the collective’s belief that art is a form of research, and that, in turn, research is also a creative process. “Salikhain” comes from the Filipino words sali, saliksik, likha, and malikhain (“participate,” “research,” “create,” and “creative.” In this issue, Salikhain Kolektib reports and reflects on several programs engaging with local communities, harnessing local knowledge in a broader aspect and creating participatory works through art and design practices. Drawing from methods such as participatory mapping, they seek to deconstruct the colonial imagination imposed on a given place by allowing members of the communities they work with to give shape to their on-the-ground perspective on controversial government policies.
In their contribution, BiSCA (Bishkek School of Contemporary Art) report on forming The School of Methodology of Art Research in 2021 to create a platform for sharing experiences in art practices and methodologies of art research as a process of decolonizing knowledge and thinking. Through this lens BISCA looks back at some of the projects they conducted with state museums in Kyrgyzstan, and identify these sites as bearers of a dormant potential for cultural transformations which has a huge potential for the development of social relations. The following contribution shifts the focus to another region: Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC), is a part of the Another Roadmap School, an international network of practitioners and researchers who are working on establishing art education as an engaged practice in museums, cultural institutions, educational centers, and grassroots organizations in 22 cities on four continents. They develop methodologies as tools to revisit and challenge old theories, welcoming new evolving perspectives on learning in a collaborative process. Lineo Segoete of ARAC’s Maseru working group sheds light on the practicalities of pan-African coordination. Asking “What if the ghosts of our troubled histories have no resting place?”, she reflects on how collective observations and reflections on the colonial infrastructures conditioning ARAC’s practice inform their theoretical work. Based in Jakarta, the UnconditionalDesign collective runs an online platform documenting and archiving unconditional interventions in mass-produced consumer goods as a study of informal design practices and street innovation across Indonesia. This method of participatory documentation and archiving through Instagram has been quite successful. Over the past five years, they have been able to collect hundreds of case samples from all over the archipelago. Using their contribution as an opportunity to take stock of their archiving practice and the design research workshops they have hitherto conducted, UnconditionalDesign proposes to broaden the view to see and document similar phenomena in other cities in Southeast Asia or worldwide. Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive is a hybrid institution dedicated to the production and exchange of knowledge about artistic practices across the continent. Through these practices, they seek to stimulate a critical and artistic dialogue in society. Asia Art Archive report on several programs initiated in the past few years, developing strategies and approaches for their education projects organized in several regions in Asia. Furthermore, they talk about how the concept of “Asia” as a generalizing projection with origins in the West relates to their practice.
Load Na Dito, a collective based in Manila, sketches out the first edition of “Kabit at Sabit,” a 2019 exhibition held across the Philippine archipelago. Repurposing a pre-colonial local tradition to stage works of art in public in the run-up to the general election, they seek to create a shared space to reflect and reimagine society. With the idea of holding future editions, they regard the exhibition as a learning process, an alternative form of school that enables salutary tensions between trial and error, theory and praxis. In a poetic dispatch from Bandung, Omnikolektif contemplate their practice by positioning themselves to (and distancing themselves from) the existing institutional landscape in the field of art education, especially with regards to the dominant and prestigious Institut Teknologi Bandung, which is considered to be one of the oldest higher education institutions in Indonesia, established by the Dutch in early 1920s. In this contribution, they are joined by historian Changkyu Lee, who researches alternative models of art distribution and thus provides additional context to what essentially is a simple gesture: “It may have sounded heroic, but they never considered themselves fighters against injustice. They merely wanted to create a home where people can gather and tell stories after a long day of exploring the world, searching for answers to all of life’s mysteries.” Serrum is an art collective based in Jakarta focusing on education. For this contribution, Serrum summarizes a discussion of PRESISI, a collaborative group consisting of education practitioners to share ideas around contextual educational practices which are a reflection of the post-colonial context in Indonesia. Looking back on the publicly funded PRESISI program, they are exploring the question whether colonial continuities with regards to institutions are bound to entail such continuities with regards to methodologies and epistemologies in art and design education, or if (and how) they can be subverted.
This edition, besides addressing colonial legacies in its content (a theme), intends to put into practice one way to do things differently: through collectivity, a model Gudskul continuously puts forward, experiments with, and believes in (a method). What readers are experiencing, consequently, is a snapshot or a cross-section of this ongoing journey, taking the Bauhaus Dessau as its slicer – an active conspirator in making a particular part of this peregrination public. This collective journey is made out of crossings of many paths going in different directions. These public instances, when we “produce” something to be “reaped” in order to “nourish” ourselves, as well as others, can be understood as “harvests.” These harvests come in different formats: Fridskul (Fridericianum as a school) at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, a large-scale contemporary art exhibition (which most of the collectives and initiatives were part of), also as an edition of an e-journal like this one – enabling reflection on the past in order to have a stake in the future. The collective journey has a life of its own. If it is strong it can become independent from the individual and group that formed it. These harvests are opportunities to be generous, by sharing and trusting that seeds can be planted in others.
We are publishing this issue in a moment when postcolonial theories and practices are being confronted with what Walter Benjamin described as “a moment of danger”: not only are communities in postcolonial societies facing the challenge of organizing collective selfhood in the context of a late global capitalism in constant crisis mode after the utopian calls to national liberation have subsided. In Germany specifically, the emancipatory potential of postcolonial theory and the legitimacy of voices from the Global South has been contested by reactionary forces as of late. Continuing the conversation is our way of positioning ourselves in these debates.