After the educational turn

The texts gathered in this book display a multitude of points of view on the consequences of the “educational turn” and the likely situations emerging on the “post-educational turn” horizon. Charles Esche suggests a detachment from understanding our times from the point of view of modernity compromised by neo-liberal politics and engaging in the common, shared construction of a new contemporaneity. Irit Rogoff speaks from the perspective of her own educational practice of ‘dis-enchanting’ forms of knowledge through ‘undisciplinary’ decisions, asignifying ruptures, engagements with the notion of ‘FREE’, policies of criticality and singularization of knowledge. Dieter Lesage reveals the conditions for manifesting a real syndrome associated with the Black Mountain College, by analyzing the current functioning of the concepts of interdisciplinarity, experiment and self-organization. Nora Sternfeld presents a series of considerations from the perspective of the history of radical pedagogy, as liberating and transforming practices, and emphasizes the relevance of the resistance created through education in art galleries. Barbara Mahlknecht employs the paradigmatic pretext of “Learning Place”, a workshop conceived by Boris Buden as part of the Former West project, to analyze the condition of the educational turn in curating, by referring to concepts such as Shklovsky’s “alienation effect” and “defamiliarization” or “learning play” used by Brecht. Tom Holert dissects the anatomy of the ascension of “artistic research” both from the perspective of the threat of transnational processes of economizing and corporatising higher art education and from the perspective of the “practice of the imagination”, militant resistance, de-colonialism, and even self-criticism. Doreen Mende considers research in relation to the age of turbulence, in a transgenerational time and in the context of the CCC study program at HEAD Geneva.