In The Vortex of Institutional Lives

Following from a series of conversations that have been taking place sporadically between us1 in the past years, the current contribution serves as another opportunity to address ways of living multiple institutional lives. In our respective contexts, these pertain to different types of institutions, ranging from art school/academy, to university, to art or cultural organization/collective. Here we explore ways of traversing the boundaries and frictions between radical classroom practices and the institutional processes and frameworks that we speak and act within and against in the context of European higher arts education; all these environments are deeply entrenched in coloniality. We are drawn to radical classroom practices that experiment with forms of sociality that go beyond the dominant, modern-colonial model of meritocracy that dictates our lives in the academy and the labor market. We are interested in un/learning from accounts of educational practices in the lineage of pedagogues including Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Ivan Illich, Sandy Grande, Eve Tuck, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Gayatri Spivak, and Fred Moten/Stefano Harney.All these thinkers and practitioners share a perspective on education not as the solution to a problem but as a part of the problem (while still they engage in educational-institutional practices themselves). This is a relevant shift in our understanding of the politics of education, and pedagogy, as we study together (in) learning environments.In terms of format, the conversational piece takes place among three interlocutors: Annette (A), Ferdi (F), and a collective voice (A+F), which acts more as a meta-narrator (and provides the reader with this lead-in). Additionally, this three-way conversation is scaffolded, heckled, and haunted by a constellation of images, metaphors, concepts, or models developed by various thinkers and practitioners whom we consider our epistemic allies. These intellectual contributions have not only been crucial in accompanying our thinking process, working, and living, but they bring about real consequences in what seems an (im)possible task. These intertextual relations are continually rehashed throughout this conversation.Hence, we invite you, the reader, to brace yourself for a form of storytelling that has no clear end or beginning. We present here a narrative device that allows us to move back and forth through scenes of connection and contradiction, commuting along and bridging the artificial boundaries between theory and practice, as well as folding in and out of bodily experiences, differential temporalities, and conceptual insights. Not only is this mode of articulation bound to our approach to writing this highly edited conversational piece, it approximates our critical thinking in the act as a practice of vulnerability deeply informed by our educational practices.Annette Krauss: Drawing from our different work I am interested to discuss with you, Ferdi, how anti-xenophobic practices and discourse are able to enter classrooms but not necessarily the administrational-managerial levels of the art academies I have worked and studied in. I experience these institutions as places that time and again fail to be sites where students and staff can un/learn, and engage in antiracism and anti-xenophobic behavior. Equally important, I try to grapple with my own complicities in this. How could we approach these sites of failure without repeating the obvious? Namely, the institutions that I am part of lack rigorous policies and actions regarding, for example, the employment rates of Black, Indigenous people, and people of color, or the gender pay gap, tokenism, Eurocentric curricula, or ableist and classist agendas, nor do they have strategies to overcome the excuses not to do so. While these are important facets that need to be changed, I see them also as violent symptoms of a centuries-old modern-colonial system that seem impossible to fix.In this vein, I am searching for ways to tackle forms of coloniality entrenched in the institutions we are living with and working in. Part of this is what Gloria Wekker describes as “bringing the history of the colonies and the history of the metropole in conversation with each other.”2 For example, instead of assuming a separation between colonialism and Western institution-building, I try to find ways to think and do them together. The practice of separating or hiding away the coloniality of Western institutional practices and knowledge has been passed on over generations, largely in the form of tacit knowledge. I am in the thick of it, because the modes of control of social life, and of economic and political organization that emerged and have been engineered in(to) the colonies actually directly had and still have an impact on the ways we form institutions, schools, universities, ways of living and learning, and how we relate to each other—hence the term “modern-colonial.” My intuition is that the institutional boundaries and frictions between classroom and the administrational-organizational sphere stem from this separation.Let me explain my work situation for around the last two years. While I accepted 40% employment as the course leader of a Master of Fine Arts program at HKU Utrecht, I also found money for a partial post-doc position at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, through which I navigate, for the time being, my artistic practice and the collaborations that I am involved in. This complicated but privileged constellation provides the economic framework for being able to accept the invitation by Tom Holert and Sven Spieker for this conversational piece with you, Ferdi. And I am very grateful that you are interested in engaging in this experiment.The reason why I accepted the job in Utrecht is very much related to the separation between the classroom and other parts of the institution. Course leadership resides at the nexus between classroom and admin-orga-managerial work within an art educational institution. I am very concerned, on the one hand, with studying the structures, interpellations, and demands from the institution (e.g., back-office, top management) concerning what I am supposed to do and not do, and with my agency within this sphere. There are a lot of institutional energies channeled into keeping the (artificial) boundary between the classroom and the rest of the institution intact. While I am being asked on a daily basis to embody the artificial boundary in this specific job, I also try to find ways of re-politicizing it. This entails, on the other hand, together with a team, trying out the ways that organizing/teaching/learning this nexus can enter the work undertaken with the students without pawning off responsibilities to the students, but including it instead as part of the study of and work within social-political-aesthetic formations.Doing this work, I am always in the middle of a kind of messiness. It's a messiness3 that I don't see as necessarily negative, but it makes me dizzy. It reminds me that I am always already part of certain relations, practicing certain habits of thinking and doing, that I am more or less aware of. It is also not about sorting this mess out and being done with it. I am/we are always already part of a specific (messy) situation, its orientations and power relations, as much as this situation is also made and shaped by me. I believe that to attend to the spatiotemporal, embodied, and inherent material relationalities is crucial for my ability to co-shape this situation. This is a sort of humbling and encouraging mantra that I repeat to myself. Against this backdrop, I wonder how can I be involved in these struggles within and against these institutions, and how can we narrativize our various involvements, implicatedness, and engagements differently?Ferdiansyah Thajib: The messiness that constitutes my lifework can be visualized as a turbulent vortex, formed through a cumulation of entanglements with whatever lies in our surroundings. These accumulated things continue twisting and overlaying on top of each other, without stopping or providing any sense of clear direction.One thread that would quickly pull me into the vortex of structural problems in higher arts education, is what you said about “hiding away” the coloniality of Western institutional practices. This aspect is the freshest in my mind because not long ago I attended an online talk by Peggy Piesche,4 a Black feminist activist in Germany who works for the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb). There she explained how intersectionality is neither an option nor an opinion, it is a personal approach. She invited us to think about what is hiding in plain sight, not as a negative critique but an engagement with those who (or whose voices) are not at the table.Reading what you said about modern-colonial institutions made me think of why in the past I tended to keep such institutions at arm's length. In the first years after moving to Berlin in order to complete my PhD, apart from working on my research focused on the affective lives of Muslim queer people in Indonesia, I spent most of my time focusing on KUNCI's work,5 which is mainly grounded in Yogyakarta.This is despite my various engagements with different European institutions as a member of KUNCI as well as with those related to my university study. While I was fully aware of and affected by the structural exclusions that you mentioned, I had some qualms about trying to change this situation. My priorities then were more about staying afloat and keeping my mental health supported. I kept on telling myself that this is not my fight, I won't be staying here in Europe for good, anyway. There was this pessimism (or was it realism?) that in retrospect appears a form of refusal—not wanting to get sucked into and be burdened by the institutional vortex that should have expired already, but somehow managed to continue.But all of this reluctance actually took me to a very different place. Later on, I started to get invitations to give talks and workshops touching on issues of commoning, listening, and other practices related to unpacking colonial practices within wider institutions. Some of these moments perhaps fit with what you describe as radical classroom practices. I worked with librarians, art school students, and art teachers in art spaces and public gatherings in various places. Again, these invitations mainly came about due to my involvement with KUNCI, especially in the School of Improper Education, which was set up in 2016 as a refuge from hegemonic forms of education.6But as I took on this role, the ambivalence remained. There is something traumatizing in witnessing how the endless amount of critical labor that has been performed by Black and Indigenous people and by people of color, including myself, is continuously being appropriated by modern-colonial institutions to ensure the institutions’ own flourishing. Calling these the “habits” of European arts education is perhaps an understatement, as it evinces more of a prevailing logic. This logic is being rehearsed and refined both within the field of arts education and in broader higher education settings, and has been construed in many guises. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten7 describe how in universities this process occurs through the subsuming of critical education into perfecting professional education. While assuming color blindness and announcing demands for diversity and equality, the hierarchization of differences that is inherent in the teleological functioning of modern institutions ultimately always already dictates whose lives are worth living and whose are not.While perhaps what we have been working on gestures toward more dissenting spaces, how is it possible to sustain these spaces if the colonial conditionings of modern institutions remain unmoveable? But I am getting ahead of myself. For those who have been repeatedly subjected to structural exclusion, the broader concern is: why do we want to inhabit institutions that have refused us to begin with?A+F: The image of institutional lives as a vortex intrigues us both: the feeling of being pushed, sucked into, pulled, thrown out—sometimes gently, at other times not so gently at all—while each of us is individually pushing, sucking, and pulling, but also gliding, drowning, resurfacing. This vortex intermingles with many other vortices, that operate like magnetic fields, constantly reshuffle our understanding of center and peripheries and make us rethink the inside/outside dichotomy, especially when it comes to our own positioning toward modern institutions and, accordingly, what these categories of inclusion and exclusion mean and do. Attending to the force of vortices does not mean simply being overwhelmed by them, it also entails their active shaping and crossing of their elements. In the language of critical pedagogy, the different elements constituting a vortex have been identified as the four i's of oppression: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized oppressions. These are also the major stumbling blocks that have turned up again and again in our exchanges. In the essay “Vistas of Modernity,” decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez evokes as well the image of the vortex by focusing on its double movement: the centrifugal (centering) movement of modernity that enforces an eccentric movement that “expels out of history into oblivion what it devastates.”8 We keep in mind Vazquez's imagery of the vortex of colonial difference here while thinking of the extent to which its repercussions spiral into our ongoing struggles with multiple institutions.In our May 2019 workshop at the HKW Berlin, which was held in the framework of Bauhaus Imaginista, curated by Marion von Osten and Grant Watson, we worked with Andrea Fraser's understanding of the institution as an entry point to discussing multiple institutional lives:It is worth revisiting this statement from our perspective of the messy experiences of the vortex. While Fraser has tried to blur the boundaries between what constitutes the inside/outside of institutions, we embrace and go beyond them by practicing self-positioning that emerges from complex entanglements.F: One of the things that stayed with me after the workshop in Berlin was the moment when we got heckled by the person who was supposed to be our discussion partner. “It's messy, even the workshop initiators [Annette and Ferdi] admitted that!” the man said. On the one hand, perhaps he was just describing what he saw. He might have said this upon viewing the many pieces of paper and thread that we used to map out the workshop participants’ input, scattering them around on the floor. But what I could not avoid is the accusatory tone in his voice. It implicitly suggested that we, as the workshop conveners, didn't know what we were doing—that it was so messy that no clear results would come out of it. The irony here is that this was precisely the situation that we wanted to generate. The “messiness” in this sense becomes a generative tool: rather than asking how to cope with or clean up the mess, we ask, what conditions of doing and living can we find there?A: I believe this situation could teach us something about the unsettling nature of dealing with messiness and uncertainty in educational settings. In the workshop, we studied together with participants where practicing simultaneous institutional lives might lead us, grappling with the local specificities (Utrecht, Berlin, and Yogyakarta) and trying to resist comparison. Not to forget, we introduced a broad understanding of institutions (which is also important for this conversation) ranging from formal, legal organizational entities to customs, routines, and habitual patterns that form the backdrop and fabric of our lives. We searched for ways to expose and bear certain contradictions, implicatedness, and messiness without wanting to solve these conditions too easily. I understood from his response that he was offended by this mode. It reminded me of other educational situations when I had underestimated the affective power of having to deal with uncertainties and implicatedness. I did not succeed in introducing a scaffold when uncertainties, messiness, and contradictions explicitly took center stage. While I myself try to practice on an almost daily basis how to attend to these vortices, I cannot assume the same will be true for collaborators or students. I think we might have gone too fast and too slow at the same time.F: In hindsight, the Berlin episode made me think about the “call to order” that Moten and Harney talk about10—the idea that a certain order needs to be established before knowledge can be produced. Their question, as well as mine, is what happens when we refuse this call to order?This brings us back to refusing what has been refused to us. I am thinking now about the demand for decolonizing art institutions and museums that has gathered force and momentum across Europe. Some of the steps for decolonial transformation have been taken, for example, by inviting non-Western artists to rework museum collections or to become part of strategies for diversifying the art institutions’ representational politics. A few years back, a similar invitation arrived through KUNCI's email address, asking us to join a residency project themed around decolonizing knowledge.One immediate concern was what this politics of invitation represented. Our collective ways of doing have been constructed along a shared desire to find another route of making and disseminating knowledge when all available means to do so have been held hostage by elite institutions for too long. The very existence of the inviting institution has been reinforced by colonial practices, and these enduring legacies have made us wary. Furthermore, although this invitation came with an intention to involve others for a better world, the uneven power and accumulated resources that condition this politics of invitation signaled the risk of making ourselves once again vulnerable to exploitation.All these forewarnings ended up providing us with the impetus to accept the invitation, albeit tentatively. The decision was partly galvanized by the possibility of reclaiming the framework of decolonization that was being introduced by this institution. With this double burden, such an ambivalent “yes” was doomed to be followed by a constant exchange of “no”s between us and the host institution. The entire residency stay has been filled with refusals coming from both sides: “No, we can't do this; no, there is no access to that; no, it is impossible to make it happen; no, we don't have the time or resources to do this,” and so on. The final refusal from KUNCI came at the end of the residency, when we rejected the idea of making the fruits of our labors into something the institution could keep as part of its property/collection.Another possible route of active nonengagement, I think, lies in persisting with the experiential values of knowledge, or as another member of KUNCI, Rifky Akbar Pratama, describes it, “by keeping secret in practice.” This resonates with Édouard Glissant's notion of opacity, which he defines as an alterity that is unquantifiable, a diversity that exceeds categories of identifiable difference.11 In my own practice, I operationalize this idea by insisting on telling stories of becoming rather than being; by emphasizing the necessity of understanding projects of decolonizing, commoning, antipatriarchy, and antiracism as unfinished processes that happen throughout our lifespan, which also go beyond the time we spend within certain institutions, and perhaps even beyond the life course of the institutions themselves.A+F: In doing this conversation piece deep into the COVID-19 pandemic, we've been grimly reminded of the urgency of structural revision. As many others have said, the pandemic has worked like a magnifying glass on the conditions we live in on a global and a local scale, including the art academies in Europe. The levels of distress that most of the students, and especially non-European students and students from socially disadvantaged families, have encountered made this all too clear. The problems that have been simmering in the background, ranging from precarious housing situations and the loss of (side) jobs, to uncertainties about residency permits and struggles to pay tuition fees, have been laid bare. The bigger institutions have offered little help in response, aside from disciplining strategies. The fierce struggle around the redistribution of resources has become more blatant. It is about time for these institutional practices to die.With regard to time, although the vortex metaphor seems to collapse time and space, at its core this metaphor suggests speed, which is often distinguished as the temporal condition of the 21st century. We counter this assumption by invoking a plethora of temporalities that are experienced in the vortex of institutional lives within this conversation. Media theorist Sarah Sharma helps us understand the temporal dimensions of institutional entanglement. In her book In the Meantime, she focuses on how inequalities increase “when the dominant way of apprehending time is guided by the discourses of speedup… . [W]hat most populations encounter is not the fast pace of life but the structural demand that they must recalibrate in order to fit into the temporal expectations demanded by various institutions, social relationships, and labor arrangements.”12Yet, still, what does it mean to say that it is time for certain institutional practices to die, and what is the temporality of this institutional death? Once more, we come up with divergent understandings of the roles taken and responses made when it comes to dealing with institutional death.As a conceptual ground, we've looked at the ideas conceived by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and her colleagues, who later founded the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective.13 Their collective work explores the notion of decolonization and how the term is taken up and (mis)used in the institutional practices playing out in soft-reform, radical-reform, and beyond-reform institutional settings of higher education. As a radical form of decolonial practice, they refer to the practice of “hospicing” modern-colonial institutions, working toward the “necessity of enabling a ‘good’ death through which important lessons are learned through the mistakes of the dying system.”14 Attending to the already collapsing modern global capitalist system will take more than accelerating its death before it is ready to go: “Hospicing enacts a willingness to learn enough from the (re)current mistakes of the current system in order to make different mistakes in caring for the arrival of something new.”15 The vortex image is also brought up by the collective when they describe hospicing as “the imperative to walk steadily with the eye of the storm without knowing where it is headed: move either too fast or too slow and one gets swept up and up thrown around in the vortex of change.”16F: The connotation of hospicing is perhaps still too romantic, as it invokes forms of care and support that are provided for those with terminal conditions, so their quality of life can be maintained before arriving at a “good” death. In my experience, the idea of institutional death has taken form in a far less pastoral manner. One of my closest encounters with institutional death occurred in a workshop that I co-organized with the Visual Art Network in South Africa (VANSA) in Johannesburg in 2018 as a part of our collaboration as members of Arts Collaboratory, a self-organized network of twenty-five arts and cultural organizations in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Netherlands.During the workshop, in which artists and cultural producers from southern Africa participated, the term “aiming to die” came up often. It points to a complex layer of experiences that were shared by some of the workshop participants with regard to the call to sustain one's artistic practice and sociopolitical engagement amidst an art funding system that only pays heed to measurements of success and growth, while ignoring exhaustion, failure, and its own exploitative orientation.17These stories are also all too familiar in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. As a collective that has been in existence for around two decades, KUNCI has witnessed how other collectives and arts and cultural organizations in our local environment have struggled with these challenges. Some of them did not make it. In a way, it is a privilege for us to have remained existing and to be able to share these stories now. But being able to survive for almost two decades as a collective has also brought to light questions about a possible end to our life course.This question emerged around five years ago. Some of the KUNCI members were growing older, moving to new places, embarking on new fields of work or study, and building families. We asked, after working for a relatively long time against the status quo of past generations, how were we positioned among the current generation? Did the fact that we still existed after so much time implicate us in the status quo of the present time? The initial response to this existential anxiety was the usual push forward: We should transform ourselves again (as this had been our common approach in life). But then came follow-up questions: Why did we want to transform ourselves? Out of fear of being associated with the status quo? So that we could stay relevant? What would a “good” death look like for our collective life?This preoccupation inadvertently led us to delay the collective's termination, a decision marked by the founding of the School of Improper Education. Through the school, we learned with others (the school participants, mainly) about how to let go of our educational habits without having to rush to come up with new ones. Fast forward to now, when the unfolding dynamics in the school have further nurtured KUNCI's ideas of dying. They have taught us about the need to continue our practice with care, although without knowing what could be gained or produced at the end of it. This is the antithesis of modern-colonial institutions’ avoidance of dying at any cost. How to hospice something that just won't accept dying?A: I recognize what you describe so well above. I have had the opportunity to be a part (without being a team member) of certain life circles (e.g., the midscale art organization Casco Art Institute in Utrecht) or long-term, self-organized collaborative practices, though in a European context. I witnessed precarious conditions, at the limits of physical and mental exhaustion brought on by an immense pressure to perform and by austerity measures, including endless and ever-shortening funding cycles. The desire and strenuous effort to survive is, I believe, also supported by the conviction of carving out a space, however small or entangled, that starts building other forms of working together against and within the neoliberal (or late capitalist-colonial) system. The system is ruthless if you don't conform to the cost-versus-benefit market logic that is so directly opposed to the time-intensive activities we are involved in.Ferdi, the way you connect decolonial work and hospicing brings up the question of a “good” death, for whom? And who avoids dying at any cost—can we unpack this also for bigger institutions in Europe?I find it very difficult to find people, allies, who would allow for starting such a conversation about hospicing institutions. Is it too provocative? And don't get me wrong, this has nothing to do with any kind of accelerationist programs and their grand, patriarchal gestures. Some of the first reactions I would get when trying to initiate an (admittedly clumsy) conversation were “So you want to abandon and kill the institution? Are you not afraid of losing your job?” Or the comment, “What a privileged discussion! I have a family to feed.” And very often, the conversation would then be over.18Hospicing is another kind of work, I believe. It is neither abandoning nor killing the institution. So my question is, how can I—myself a descendant of Western institutions—play a role in letting a system die that I am part of? And by “being part of,” I mean not only that I am working within such an institution, but that these institutions are in me.How can I push myself to see how I am implicated in that which is dying? It certainly frightens me; the scope is unimaginable. And yet, who benefits from not having this discussion? My hope is that I am brave enough (despite and because of the privileges that I inhabit) to practice “hospicing,” in the words of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, because I don't really believe in a reform of this institutional system I am part of, nor do I believe in the possibility of exiting the system. For me, hospicing entails careful palliative attention, a care that needs to recognize that this dying structure is inhabited by and inhabiting many of us, so we cannot not wish for it to continue.Part of this is then also hospicing a modern conception of the “self” that has molded itself to a merit-based, self-determined or self-directed learning that inhabits classrooms and school policy reports alike. The emphasis on the individual as a self-organizing, self-responsible, self-invested learner is presented as an end in itself, while at the same time it “pedagogizes” the individual into a form of capital. This constitutes an intricate web between the learning individual, labor, and capital, or, respectively, between education, enterprise society, and the growth model of the knowledge economy.19F: Much of our work is aimed at going against the dominant model, which characterizes both learning and unlearn