Vol. 17 No. 1 (2021): International Journal of Education Through Art

					View Vol. 17 No. 1 (2021): International Journal of Education Through Art

IJETA 17.1 Table of Contents

 

Editorial

Walking as a radical and critical art of inquiry: Embodiment, place and entanglement

Alexandra Lasczik, Southern Cross University

David Rousell, RMIT University

Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Southern Cross University

 

Visual Essays

Subtle bodies: Corporeal and material becoming in threshold landscapes

Michaela Pegum, RMIT University

This visual essay charts a series of relational, immersive engagements made between myself and the landscape of the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges in South Australia as part of my practice-led Ph.D. titled ‘Subtle bodies: Corporeal and material becoming in threshold landscapes’. Within my research I consider this remote environment as a threshold between the earth and its atmosphere and engage with it as a way of exploring the lesser trodden territories of sensed experience and the ways in which knowing and being may unfold here. In this essay I will discuss these encounters with reference to Elizabeth Grosz’s thinking regarding the concepts of affect, becoming and sensation, alongside photographic images of my performative encounters with material in the landscape.

 

Walking the forest imaginary: A breath between us

Julie Poitras Santos, Maine College of Art

Walking the forest imaginary: a breath between us is a site-specific audio artwork that invites the audience to walk into the forest imaginary populated by things magical and unseen. Crafted uniquely in response to Alingsås Nolhaga Park, and using cues in the landscape as guides to research and poetic inscription, the artwork consists of an approximately one-hour walk with audio listening points throughout the park. Audio is accessed digitally through QR codes posted on pre-existing pathways and listened to with individual headphones. Wandering pathways through the woods, participants listen to a hybrid essay that explores the alternate spaces and time scales of the miniature worlds of moss. Focusing on the ancient and present role of bryophytes in creating oxygen and storing carbon, and helping to keep our ecosystem in balance, the work considers this ancient exchange as a form of dialogue.

 

Visiting, attending and receiving: Making kin with local woods

Zuzana Vasko, Simon Fraser University

In an endeavour to build intimacy with a section of woods as can only be done through visceral and embodied experience, an ongoing drawing project was embarked upon with the forest as co-author. In a practice of sympoesis with the earth, small drawings of selected niches in an unprotected section of established forest bordering a suburban neighbourhood were done on regular and frequent walks through changing seasons. Upon completion, each drawing was hidden or buried at the site, to be retrieved on a subsequent visit. The aim is to inhabit and bond with this particular wild place through art-based dialogue, and through finding and returning to very specific places via animistic sensing and with tacit knowledge rather than the customary reliance on human-made indexical technologies. In this regard, the trees and plants play an active and sometimes storied role as participants in the creative exchange.

 

Articles

Becoming-unhinged: Walking with vulnerability as a methodology of co-creating and reconnecting new forms of knowledge and possibilities

Linda Henderson, Monash University

Geraldine Burke, Monash University

Sharryn Clarke, Monash University

Helen Grimmett, Monash University

Gloria Quinones, Monash University

Ann Slater, Monash University

Claudine Lam, The University of Melbourne

This article explores the act of walking with vulnerability as a methodology of becoming-unhinged. As walking assemblage, we walk as an assemblage, becoming- unhinged through affective points of contact with the more-than-human world. We consider the act of walking-thinking as an act that forces thought to become-unhinged and, in that moment, permitting thought to come into contact with all kinds of affective points. We move through a dreaming-soulful practice of walking-thinking along coastal treks, with cows, with the moon, with vulnerability and with frames. The meeting of land/water, a full moon, a hillside cemetery, a sculpture park and the use of blindfolds and frames challenge perception-apprehension, while a series of written texts, movement, stillness and contemplative practices activate vulnerability. Our emerging texts speak back to twenty-first-century academia, challenging its normative production of knowledge through the co-creation and re-creation of text/images, producing knowledge differently and opening up possibilities.

 

Breaking silences and revealing the disappeared: Walking-with legacies of slave-ownership, Bath (UK)

Richard S. White, Bath Spa University

An emergent walking arts approach is presented as an opening towards social repair. Drawing on an intra-disciplinary project, ‘sense-ing’ legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath (UK), an iteration of walking-with is discussed in the context of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Walkers on the Sweet Waters project, hosted by the author, participated in a research-creation process agitating thought and extending resonances through mark making and social media trails. The article explores strategies of curated juxtaposition and dissonance as provocations to involuntary thought and empathic response. A participatory, performative walking is outlined accessing embodied ways of knowing and the agencies of walkers and heritage. Walkers become story carriers and ‘affect aliens’, unsettling heritage accounts, breaking silences and revealing the disappeared. Reflecting on a creative-critical intervention on ‘authorized’ heritage the article presents a somatic approach to learning, heritage and social justice through walking arts.

 

Walking-sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice

Injeong Yoon-Ramirez, University of Arkansas

How can walking, as a sensate experience and a recollective engagement with our memories, lead us to imagine new ways of knowing, being and sensing otherwise? This article conceptualizes walking-sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice, which offers anti-colonial critiques and activates decolonial imaginations. By combining walking and sensing together, I first highlight how our experience of walking is intrinsically intertwined with our act of sensing that is already oriented and attuned in the contextual relation to things in the world. The notion of walking-sensing is used to describe not only our physical movement and the sensibilities of our bodies, but also as recollective and communal engagements, such as connecting memories with others, (re)collecting personal and local stories, and imagining the ways of living and being otherwise. I further elucidate how walking-sensing can be a form of anti-colonial critiques and decolonial imaginations that valorize multiple knowledges and sensibilities as well as to pave a path towards a new liberatory way of being in solidarity. With pedagogical scenarios, I demonstrate in what ways walking-sensing can be utilized as a critical intervention towards decoloniality. Lastly, introduce two artists’ art-making practice and how they are linked to the concept of walking-sensing. In this way, I elucidate the inextricable relationship between art and pedagogical practice and how walking-sensing can lead to decolonial resistance.

 

A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy

David Haley, University of Technology

This article takes the reader for a stroll through a programme of ecological arts-led, performance-based research. The style is more poetic than scientific, although much ecological science is embedded within the art form. Indeed, Charles Darwin was known for his regular walks, as time and space for his reflections on evolution and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was noted for the poetic form of his scientific treatises. Here also, the author breaks with academic convention to engage with walking and research as creative activities to deal with ecological issues. Of course, other artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have walked as part of their practice, and there are a growing number of artists who consider walking as practice-as-research. In this article, the focus is specifically on walking as a creative form of inquiry, through community participation within urban contexts to create a critical dialogue focused on ecology in action.

 

Walking with and in-between: Interrogating tensions in a public garden space

Patricia Osler, Concordia University

An embodied becoming-with of artist, visitor and curator forms intriguing tensions at the Jardins de Métis (Reford Gardens) in Quebec, Canada. Collecting the resonant material, human, non-human and more-than-human frequencies in both a heritage setting and an international festival of landscape design, my research emerged intuitively. Frequent event-encounters coalesced into two audiowalks,

amplifying psychogeographic tensions within the multiple narratives of the environment. A new project is unfolding in these gardens in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s Innovation Lab, incubating a design for an interactive multisensory interface. Through walking as event-experience, a layered assemblage of site images and agential intra-actions queries the multiple tensions at play.

 

Re-storying place: The pedagogical force of walking in the work of Indigenous artist-activists Émilie Monnet and Cam

Pohanna Pyne Feinberg, Dawson College

Walking plays a generative and pedagogical role in the work of contemporary artists Émilie Monnet (Anishnaabe/French) and Cam (Innu/Québecois), both of whom work and live in the region known as a Tiohtià:ke to the Haudenosaunee, as Mooniyang to the Anishinaabeg, and as Montréal to many others. This article proposes that recent artistic interventions and participatory projects offered by Monnet and Cam infuse the international discourse about walking as a pedagogical force with their distinct perspectives as Indigenous women. They employ walking to reinforce their presence, to learn from place, to contest colonial narratives and exclusions conveyed by visual culture, to honour their ancestors, to indigenize collective memory by amplifying Indigenous voices and contributing to the re-storying of place, a concept inspired by Potawatomi environmental biologist Robin Kimmerer. Monnet is an interdisciplinary artist who combines theatre, performance, image and sound art as a performer, creator and director. She is also the founding director of Onishka, a multimedia Indigenous arts organization. Cam is a street artist and the lead coordinator of Unceded Voices, a street art convergence for artists who are Indigenous women, women of colour, queer, twospirit and gender non-conforming. She is also currently the national coordinator of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. With a shared awareness that the dynamics that comprise place are intrinsically relational and dialogical, the work of Cam and Monnet intervenes in the felt and seen world to reinforce their sense of belonging to this region. Walking is integral to their respective research, creation and collaboration that enables their work to contest dominant colonial narratives while honouring the contributions of those who have been disavowed.

 

Manifesto-ação, Paulínia, Brazil: Activism in walking as a dancing action

Laís Cardoso da Rosa, ÉDHÉA

Ana Maria Rodriguez Costas, UNICAMP

We have been investigating practices of walking as a dancing action since 2017, and experiencing its political and pedagogical potential. In this sense, walking, besides being a strategy for artistic creation, is also a construction of embodied knowledge and incorporated citizenship. In Brazil in 2020, with a presidency that threatens art, culture, education and democracy, occupying the streets and walking through them have never been so necessary. Thus, we present in this article, based on the practices of walking as a dancing action we have been investigating, a Manifesto-ação that proposes local actions for discovering ways to keep going on the street in Brazil today.

 

Book Reviews

Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum, Paul Duncum (2020)

Ya’ara Gil-Glazer, Tel-Hai Academic College

 

Joseph Beuys and the Artistic Education: Theory and Practice of an Artistic Art Education, Carl-Peter Buschkühle (2020)

Raphael Vella, University of Malta

 

Re-imagining the Art School: Paragogy and Artistic Learning, Neil Mullholland (2019)

Christine Pybus, CIT Crawford College of Art and Design

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published: 2021-04-12