An artists residency is a place where you live under one roof with colleagues whom maybe you would never have met under other circumstances. Learning from the other is a part of everydays’ life in such a place. Focussing on the own artistic work, the other main focus. I understood this as a first and basic form of collective self-education. Over the years we hosted or conceived several meetings and seminars on various aspects of self education: from Mirene Arsanios’ + 98 weeks symposium on Alternative Readings (2011) or Oh Seminar ! (together with Valerio del Baglivo in 2012) to Juan Pablo’s Histories of Publishing in 2015 to both editions of Scuola Popolare in 2020 and 2021 (in collaboration with the Casa del Popolo del Galluzzo) and other single events or book presentations as Pietro Gagliano’s Libertà, arte, pedagogia e anarchia. Eman, you followed the art academy in Alexandria where you are teaching now. But you also followed MASS, the self-organized space, founded by Wael Shaky in 2010, as an opportunity for independent study and learning for artists in Egypt. Could we talk about who is educating whom and why and how self-education can be a critical practice against self-optimization? Should self-education be a core function of art institutions?
Being an Art student at Alexandria University was my first interaction with Art, I thought Art is what has been taught at the university, drawing, painting, and design, etc., at first I thought it was all about perfecting the depiction of forms and shapes, later I thought it’s more about finding a style. Then it was all shattered when I realize that all my professors are doing and trying to teach me is a sort of depiction even if it’s not a form, it’s a style, not ideas and ways to form it. So it was frustrating, and so I searched for a place where I can find what I didn’t know that I’m searching for. At MASS, I found the environment which encourages you to read and to explore your ideas about yourself and society, I learned a lot every day only by being surrounded by all those artists and different cultures, attending those seminars. I wasn’t forbidden to try anything, to be myself, and to propose my questions. Being at MASS was a breakthrough, by giving me opportunities, possibilities, but most important confidence, but it was also hectic I was racing time to catch in 6 months what I missed for 5 years.
The residency in Villa Romana was following my residency at MASS, I started to finally breathe. I had the time to grow slowly, communicate, learn about the culture, people, life, and most important; myself. I had the time to think and rearrange everything I was collecting in my head and sort it out. Not only that but I was accepted totally and unconditionally for the 1st time in my life in one place. I don’t have to do much to prove anything to anyone. I was given a chance to just be Me, to accept my inconsistencies while accepts others whom I’m meeting from all around the world every day, and that was priceless.
Afterward, I’ve done other residencies and various art education systems in the superior school of Aix en-Province, where ‚Doing‘ is the same importance as ’searching and thinking‘ and it all led me to a conclusion that will contradict my job as an assistant lecturer in Alexandria University; Art is not to be taught. Yes! Art is a journey and all you can do for art students is to open up for them and try to learn from them at substantially the same moment you are trying to teach them, you might have more experience in certain areas, you might have some more knowledge, but it doesn’t make you a better artist in today’s world.
And for how self-education can be a critical practice against self-optimization?
I guess it’s the miss guiding, art students just like any human being need to belong and to feel accepted, self-education leaves you lonely, and some environments are just so hostile, and you have to fight to just keep your right to be different, all while suffering loneliness to deal with your own conjectures. So you end up fighting your ideas, believes, and meanings, furthermore fighting society, Academies, so-called artists, and family in some cases too. This is all resulting torn mind who’d either capitulate trying to coop and belong, taking the easy way, or artists with lots of scars and sacrifices just to be her/his own-self and losing lots of time and energy that could be used way more productively if the Art education system is just different. That is all also answering the question of ‚Should self-education be a core function of art institutions?‘
I completely support it and the results will be surprising I believe; to gather art students and provide them a place they can practice their various practices, to provide them with different kinds of knowledge from all art eras, history, biology, digital media, biology, geography, politics, economics, psychology, and sociology, to provide workshops and collaborations done by professional artists and curators from different societies and different backgrounds, to accept all ideas and encourage their differences. This would be Artist heaven, not Art Institute I guess.
The biggest part of art schools, both public and private, in almost every part of the world continue to apply the principles of transmissive education. After almost 150 years of practical demonstrations on the ineffectiveness of this model, after more than two centuries of specialized literature on libertarian education and after important theoretical revolutions (such as the writings of Herbert Read or John Dewey, in example) and after radical experiences (such as the practices of the Bauhaus, or the teaching of self-empowerment in the 2nd wave of feminism, just to mention two examples between Europe and the US), after all this the teachers and the directors of most of the Art Schools prefer to keep for themselves the centrality of a hegemonic role which has a lot to do with power and little to do with education.
This allows them to preserve, multiply and reinforce the same vertical and top-down dimension which, from the origins of public schools in Europe, replicates all the structures of power and guarantees control over individuals and shapes the productive, obedient members of future communities. This is the main reason that prevents a real renewal of educational and even artistic institutions.
And this explains why some of the most important innovations on self-education were born in revolutionary contexts, in conditions of absence of central power or in periods in which that homogenizing power was severely undermined (there are countless examples in the political history of Central America and South America). The dimension of the pedagogy of art is based like few others on the subjective experience. And as in few other cases, the voluntary act (the will itself) is essential for learning: we can learn by heart, almost passively, chemical formulas and poems from the 19th century, but we cannot be forced to express ourselves creatively.
The question raised by Eman Hamdy is pivotal. And the possible answers concern both the concept of reification of subjectivities and the process of learning. Self-education challenges the idea of knowledge as an exclusive heritage, as something that is conveyed (for money or afteraccepting a kind of subjection). It is in fact based on exchange. The presence of other people is essential for the mind that is eager to learn ours. the learning process runs parallel to social life, to meeting those with similar or completely different knowledge from knowledge. In this sense, self-education also teaches us something about the self-determination of communities and can indicate viable paths for society and for the management of common goods. I like to remenber, as a temporary conclusion of my contribution, a question espressed by Vladimir Mayakovsky in the poem „About that“: What is the point of saving only oneself?